The Times goes behind the scenes of the 148,000-object archive, from the 40-degree vault for color prints to the typewriter still used to catalog work.
share wall space with unknown talent, as is the case with the remarkable salt prints featured in the London boy’s home album or a grisly series of forensic crime photos made by the police in Paris in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Like the journey of 19th century portraits of orphans in England to a storage vault in a Los Angeles museum, the much shorter journey of a photo from that vault to museum gallery wall involves intricate interventions that are not be obvious to the casual observer. The main vault pairs the look of a library with the chilly, no-frills ambiance of a walk-in cooler. The room is kept at 68 degrees to protect the prints. The vault for color photographs is kept at 40 degrees to slow the inevitable changes with the dyes.
Freeman and her fellow conservators, who work in the lab next-door to the main vault, are also responsible for determining whether or not an object needs treatment. The many options include repairing tears, stabilizing emulsion and the edges of prints, as well as structural work on bindings and book covers. The lab is clean, white and brightly lighted — a quiet place where science is obviously happening.
Every object in the Getty’s collection of photography has a back story that is often difficult to suss out. This is where the museum’s collection manager and curatorial assistants get their chance to shine. This group is in the process of cataloging and uploading the entire collection online. “To my mind this is the most essential curatorial work there is,” Ganz says, “because if you don’t know what you have, you don’t have anything.”The curatorial assistants work at long, polished wood tables in the museum’s study room, which is open to the public. A print or album is laid on soft, white cloth. The staffers use a loop to magnify the image, a tape measure to record its dimensions and a pocket microscope to help identify the process used to create the image.
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