Photography at a crossroads: in this digital era, the future of historical photos is at stake

Science News, Nov 23, 2002 by Jessica Gorman

One summer day in 1826, Joseph Nicephore Niepce placed a metal plate inside a black box in a sunny window at Le Gras, his country estate in the south of France. After 8 hours, Niepce found that with his primitive camera, he'd achieved a goal that he'd been striving after for years: He'd produced a permanent image recorded onto a photosensitive medium. It was the first successful example of "fixing permanently the image from Nature," Niepce told members of the Royal Society when he traveled to England in 1827. However, when Niepce presented his invention, he wouldn't fully divulge his process, and the society failed to confirm his discovery.

Today, it's known that Niepce coated his plate with an asphalt called bitumen of Judea, which hardened under long exposure to the sun's rays. He then washed the unhardened material from the plate with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum, leaving the faint image of his courtyard in relief. Nonetheless, the fine details of this process died with Niepce in 1833.

Such murkiness is rampant in the history of photography. In the almost 180 years since Niepce made the world's first photograph, inventors, artists, and photographers have used 150 or so chemical processes to create prints, says Dusan Stulik of the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. For many of these processes, no detailed technical account is available.

This problem is more than just a headache for historians interested in technological minutiae. Such knowledge is critical to the care and display of culturally, artistically, and historically important photographs.

That's why Stulik and his colleagues have taken up the mission of unveiling the chemical mysteries of the first photograph, as well as those that followed it. With the accelerating pace of digital photography (see "On the digital edge: making quick prints as good as the old-fashioned ones", page 332), documenting the obsolete processes used to make these photos has taken on a new urgency. This information could soon be gone, as those who still understand photographic processes die off along with the industry that supported them.

"This is the tremendous pivot point in the history of imaging," says Jim Reilly of the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) in Rochester, N.Y.

New information that researchers have just revealed about Niepce's "View from the Window at Le Gras" bodes well for their uncovering the secrets behind other early photographs.

A PHOTO'S JOURNEY Niepce's famous photo has been on quite an adventure. On leaving England in 1828, Niepce placed the framed 16-by-20-centimeter image--or heliograph, as he called it--in the care of a friend, Francis Bauer, a botanical illustrator at London's Kew Gardens. After Bauer's death in 1841, the heliograph passed from one person to another.

More than a century later, photo historian and collector Helmut Gernsheim began a quest to find the photo. After 2 years of sleuthing, he traced its most recent purchase, in 1884, to the Pritchard family in London. Unfortunately, none of the Pritchard family members seemed to know exactly what had happened to the framed metal plate. Then, in 1952, Gernsheim received a letter from a Pritchard family member who had cleaned out a trunk that had been sealed since 1918. She had found what looked like a framed, tarnished mirror. It might be the lost photograph, she wrote, but unfortunately, the image of Le Gras appeared to have faded away.

Gernsheim rushed to London, where he discovered that the tarnished mirror indeed was Niepce's heliograph. Even better, the image had not faded away. It had always been faint. To make it stand out, Gernsheim just needed to turn the plate this way and that in the light.

The woman gave Gernsheim the silver-gray plate, along with a document detailing Niepce's presentation to the Royal Society. A decade later, Gernsheim donated the priceless photo to the University of Texas in Austin. Niepce's heliograph went on display at the university's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, which now houses about 5 million photographic prints and negatives.

The museum staff this year turned its attention again to Niepce's heliograph. "We were sitting here with this marvelous, unique picture," says Ransom Center curator Roy Flukinger.

The center, which was renovating its lower two floors, planned to build a special new display for the heliograph. But since Flukinger and his staff didn't know the chemical makeup of the heliograph, they weren't sure what kinds of lighting, environments, and cases might be appropriate. No one even knew whether the current Plexiglas ease, which had been filled with an inert gas in the 1960s, remained sealed or the heliograph had already been exposed to air and had undergone changes, says Ransom Center conservator Barbara Brown.

At the same time in Los Angeles, Stulik and his colleagues were considering the myriad photographs in a monumental project he'd begun in July 2001. In collaboration, the Getty, IPI, and the Research Center for the Conservation of Graphic Documents (CRCDG) in Paris aim to identify the defining characteristics of all major photographic techniques ever used, as well as variations on those methods.