On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Mike Johnston wrote:
> The standard work is Henry Wilhelm's _The Permanence and Care of Color
> Photographs_, Preservation Publishing Co., 1993. It's a monumental work that
> was rumored about in the photography field for 20 years before it appeared.
> Wilhelm the great gadfly of color permanence and essentially invented the
> field. He's now serving as a consultant for Epson, among other things. It's
> one of those truly essential technical photographic reference works that
> should be in any library that encompasses technique.
Thanks, Mike. I'll see if I can find a copy, as it sounds interesting.
> The permanence of black-and-white negatives is limited by the life of the
> substrate. If properly made and stored, certain black-and-white negative
> materials (polyester as opposed to triacetate base, which is marginally less
> stable) and certain black-and-white prints (if protected from atmospheric
> pollutants) can last virtually forever. Other researchers have placed
> various values on this permanence, such as 300 years and 500 years. The
> silver image itself is tremendously stable.
I understand that b&w negs are quite stable, but how do colour ones hold
up? (Or do I have to buy the book to find out?) <g>
> The great advantage of a permanent process that is also the common or
> ubiquitous technique is that it gives everything a much better chance of
> survival. We don't have to decide if posterity will prize what picture,
> since all of them have good capability to endure.
If we're talking 500 years+ for b&w negs, that's not too bad. There's
still the risk associated with having only one original, but to be fair
most shooters are probably not going to be making back-up copies of
snapshots. I suspect that the realistic life of a colour negative is much
shorter than b&w, and that digital storage might be preferable in that
case. I recall hearing before that there is at least one place that
maintains a lot of older equipment in working condition, so if you ever
skip a few generations in digital storage, chances are that *someone* will
be able to retrieve the files or write some quick software to read them.
Of course, it's still better to transfer your files, so you can try for
the theoretical indefinite life span. If you're looking for a
low-maintenance storage method, negs sound more efficient.
> There's a fascinating story on Dirk Halstead's website. When the Lewinsky
> scandal broke, he had a nagging feeling that he had seen Monica's face
> before. So he hired a researcher to go through his own archives, and after
> three days of searching the researcher discovered the famous picture of
> Clinton and Lewinsky embracing at a routine function for interns that became
> a TIME magazine cover and is arguably the defining image of the entire
> political scandal. Halstead admits the he was shooting slides and digital
> about equally at the time, and he admits that if he had happened to shoot
> that function on digital, a selection of "useful" images would have been
> made the next day and the rest would have been erased.
That's interesting. I would expect that as the size of storage media
increases, *more* pictures (as digital files) would be saved than with
negatives, since search tools and good software can simplify this process
enormously.
> That is my point in a nutshell. We will be really lucky if the "standard"
> process for making digital prints, as it evolves in the next few years,
> produces prints with good life expectancy.
Well, they're definitely stumbling on it now. Should be interesting to
see how fast they can pump up inkjet quality or bring down the cost of
dye-sub.
chris
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