Throughout millennia mankind has sought ways to fix that which was observed in the three dimension in a two-dimensional form so that others in the future might share in the observation. From the time of the Pharaohs when encaustic sealed the likeness of royalty on their sarcophagus to Joseph Niépce's first photograph on a crude pewter plate coated in bitumen of Judea and developed in the oil of lavender and turpentine man has strived fruitlessly to make the image permanent.
In photography the word "archival" has had many interpretations and definitions. Some "archival" methods fix the photographic image well past the photographer's life span and others not so much. One example of the least permanent and most volatile media ever used is the cellulose nitrate film base produced by Eastman Kodak from 1889 to 1952. This film was widely used by the motion picture industry during this time period as well as by still photographers of the day. While this material had the advantage of being the first transparent flexible plasticized base commercially available it unfortunately has virtually the same chemical make up as guncotton; a highly explosive material.
Left to decompose over just a couple of decades this material becomes extremely unstable and has been known to auto-ignite. In fact in 1978 both the United States National Archives and Records Administration and George Eastman House had their nitrate film vaults auto-ignite. Eastman House lost the original camera negatives for 329 films, while the National Archives lost 12.6 million feet of newsreel footage. The world loses priceless imagery and cinema footage every second of everyday to the instability of this media.
Now, thanks to the advent of digital imaging, photo and cinema archives worldwide are frantically setting about committing the content contained on nitrate negative material to digital storage before it is gone forever. Once the original film is scanned and "digitized" it is then placed into cold storage to slow degradation and prevent combustion. This worthwhile endeavor is a race against time.
As luck would have it one of these priceless archives is right out my back door in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Santa Fe Palace of the Governors Photo Archives is one of the oldest photo archives in the country and many of the negatives (glass, nitrate etc.) date back almost 200 years and document the history of the West.
I have been lucky enough to have a front row seat as a participant in helping preserve this history. Once a week I volunteer to descend the basement steps and join the team in digitizing the over 800,000 (and growing) negatives in the collection. I freely admit that I have always had the tendency to lean towards geekness but this experience has been one of the most rewarding applications of this character quirk so far. Everyday I spend with these unique documents brings the excitement of what history I might uncover and what mystery might be solved before punching out at 5pm.
