Fixing and Fading: Preservation Anxieties and Material Histories in Photographic Science

• In Event: The Matter of Photography: Decay, Conservation, Afterlives

Abstract

This paper explores anxieties about preservation and decay in in the Victorian specialist photographic press, alongside related but reconfigured anxieties about the maintenance and treatment of photographs in the 21st-century museum. All silver-based photographic processes of the nineteenth-century had a volatile and inherently unstable photochemistry with which photographers had to grapple in order to make and preserve images that were nonetheless often described in their writings as effortlessly "fixing" ephemerality on the page. This tendency to decay via chemical, physical, or other processes was an essential element of the science and the aesthetics of the early photographic surface, and it remains a central concern in the care, display, and preservation of historical photographs today. The richly documented concern about the impossibility of permanence that animates the earliest journals of photographic science as well as contemporary photography conservation practice articulate an understanding of the photographic surface as active, heterogeneous matter in profound tension with the preservation paradigm of the modern museum, which insists upon maintaining the stability of singular objects. This paper proposes a scholarly and curatorial approach to early photographs and their power (both social and epistemic) that take seriously the role of photographic materials and their histories: emphasizing the active qualities and properties of photographic materials, exploring the corresponding histories of their manufacture and use, and reactivating the historical meaning attached not only to those materials but to photographs themselves.

Author

• Chitra Ramalingam, Yale University