The Passion of Former Days: Photographs in Terrible Condition

05 January, 2014

Photographs in Terrible Condition

Most old photographs haven't lasted that well.If you have old family photographs, you don't have to go very far back to see colours changing, black and white photos fading and getting silver, scratches and creases and fingerprints. We get used to our older photos looking like this, even if they didn't look like that originally. However, most of the photographs we see from institutional collections are the ones in better condition, the ones where the deterioration has a lesser impact on the image. This is something of a mis-representation-- a lot of the ones in the collection do have deterioration that impacts the image. While it's totally understandable that large collections have to prioritize what to digitize and share online, it's also refreshing to see collections (usually archival ones) where the bad ones are digitized and shared just like the rest. The changing appearance of a photograph, even if it's negative, bears testament to the chemical and societal aspects of that photograph.

On a less academic level-- sometimes deterioration looks just really cool. A pristine daguerreotype is wonderful, but a bit of rainbow tarnish around the edges can be quite beautiful. Between the silver and the binding and the base material, all kinds of weird stuff can happen. I encountered a box of unexposed dry glass negative plates from the late 19th century that had gone into these bizarre magenta patterns (I will try to remember to photograph this one day!). Emulsions peel off, negatives break, mould patterns grow. Sometimes the result is beautiful, sometimes intriguing, sometimes bizarre.

All that said-- here is a selection of badly deteriorated photographs that I find visually fascinating!

A lot of these are digitally inverted negatives (digital technology is amazing for this-- giving access to an image you'd never be able to print!), accounting for some of the bizarre deterioration. The emulsion on a glass plate negative can lift, flake, crack, and shrink; nitrate negatives curl and crinkle and do all kinds of weird things as they disintegrate. I don't know specifically what's going on with a lot of these, but definitely those tendencies are factors in many. Mould seems to be a factor in quite a few as well (mould can grow on any kind of photograph with organic material, which is most of them except daguerreotypes). Some of them I don't have the faintest idea. I've included the material/process when it's noted, but I'm not even going to try to guess.