On Thursday, Oct. 21st, the SIA held a Facebook preservation Q&A session. Here's a question that I've gotten in the past which the true preservation experts at SIA answered. You may find this information quite helpful when working with your own family photographs.
Please note: I don't consider myself an expert in preservation. I'm just a county employee in the Library system who tries her best to glean the most she can from the reliable resources available and to act upon that information in order to become a better steward of the historical materials entrusted into her care.
Linda Sue Fischer: Does anyone know how to separate pictures that are stuck together? I have several pictures, that unfortunately do [sic] to neglect, are stuck together. I can't just pull them apart without ruining them. Any suggestions?
Tuesday at 9:13am
Alex Mendoza @ Linda: depends on how they're processed. Was it processed by a lab, if yes, then get distilled water, make sure it is distilled. If you want add some Kodak Photo Flo to the water. But check the batch on a test photo and see if there is any change. They will have to get wet and then gently separate it. Stop if you can't pull them apart, continue to soak. Good Luck.
Tuesday at 9:30am
Please note: It has to be distilled water. Tap water won't do. Well water won't do. It has to be distilled water!
Celeste Wiley, the Photographs Archivist we had because of a SC SHRAB grant to work on the Lucille Hasell Culp Collection, used this technique often. Because of neglect, many of the negatives and prints in the Lucille Hasell Culp Collection were damaged. There is still much of this separation work left to do (and being on the 2nd floor with a workroom, we can now do these types of preservation tasks when we just couldn't do them before in the cramped old BDC room. Hurray!). The extent of the damage has definitely impacted the speed at which we have been able to process her collection. (Scroll down to "Finding Aids to Archival Collections, click on "Lucille Hasell Culp Collection partially processed" for the guide).
Now comes the teaser: We have big plans for making parts of the Lucille Hasell Culp Collection available online in collaboration with the SC Digital Library. (These are the same folks who helped us launch "Phosphate, Farms and Family: The Donner Collection"). As soon as the Technical Services staff finishes their cataloging work with our large format maps, we can use the workroom for our next really big, high priority project: doing the selection, metadata, and preparation work necessary to digitize "300 [images from the Lucille Hasell Culp Collection] for the 300th [anniversary of Beaufort]" digital project AKA "300 for the 300th." Details later.
3 comments:
Hello! We're humbled that you thought to mention the Smithsonian Institution Archives--thanks for the call-out!
However, I did want to point out that our SIA experts didn't actually agree with Alex Mendoza's (a member of the public who chimed in) advice about blocked photographs. Our paper conservator, Nora Lockshin, actually suggested the following: "Unfortunately, depending on what kind and how they became stuck together (a condition we call “blocked”), they may be very difficult to get apart without further damage. We would not suggest using water to separate images that are stuck together because the pictures probably became stuck together due to high humidity or contact with water. We don’t know what type of photos you have – the very many different processes of photographs through the centuries can react very differently to water. Water will soften the image coatings and image itself, and the dyes if there are any, or writing inks that may be on the backs of pictures. These could easily fade or change in water and spread into the other pictures, and also photos become very vulnerable when wet – you could end up separating layers within each photograph. If you don’t have negatives for these anywhere, and the images are unique and precious to you, you should consider contacting a photograph conservator through the professional organization the American Institute for Conservation, and click on Find and How to Select a Conservator in your geographic area. A professional photo conservator can tell you if it might be worth testing or not. If very little surface area is stuck, and not in the area of importance (for instance, at the very edges – not in the central area of interest like someone’s face in a portrait), you might be able to do something. Don’t give up hope though, we have our own problems with this, so we try to research and study it. In fact, we have an Intern experimenting with some of our own blocked photographs and negatives here too. Do try and keep your negatives safe, dry and in clean envelopes & boxes to avoid this in future!"
Hope you've been enjoying Archives Month--I enjoyed reading through some of your Archives Month posts just now!
Best,
Catherine Shteynberg
Smithsonian Institution Archives
See, folks, I told you I wasn't an expert. I mistook a response on a Facebook offered by a member of the public as expert advice. I am grateful that Catherine Shteynberg called me out before I did any true harm. -- a very humbled Grace Cordial
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