Channeling

The second life of archival negatives from an insurance company

by Andrew R. Mancuso

This is a story about a photographic negative. Well, rather, many boxes of negatives. Many boxes of negatives that were housed as part of the Litterst archival collection at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, where I worked as the Photography Archive Supervisor for a brief period of time. 

One aspect of asserting intellectual control of an archival collection, thus making it accessible and usable to researchers, is that of assessment. This entails making judgment calls as to just what in the collection will be useful for individuals and their research topics of interest. There are many factors at play when evaluating collections such as the collecting scope of the institution as it relates to the content of a collection (e.g., an art museum would not typically collect natural history specimens because it is outside of its scope), processing time and labor involved with describing the collection for finding aids, and the state of preservation of the objects or documents in the collection. The question that arises when an institution agrees to be the stewards of cultural heritage objects is, “Are we reasonably able to care for and make accessible this collection both physically and intellectually in perpetuity?” This is something that collection managers and archivists have to make a concerted effort to determine and, even if it is agreed that the collection will be accessioned (added to the institution’s permanent holdings), there always remains the possibility that the ever-uncertain support and funding for libraries, archives, and museums could vanish, thus leaving those collections uncared for. As well, the slow, deleterious gnaw of time coupled with less-than-ideal environmental conditions for storage and exhibition are unavoidable and can contribute to our inability to care for and deliver requested content from a collection.

This was the case for the Litterst collection, which had belonged to a commercial photography agency operating out of Houston, Texas, since the early 1900s, and which consisted of primarily 8x10-inch cellulose acetate negatives. It had been decided that specific items from this collection had undergone enough deterioration to render them not only unusable in their current physical state but also deem them a threat to other collection items. Cellulose acetate is the younger, less combustible sister of cellulose nitrate. Also known as Safety Film, it is a film base that undergoes a very specific form of autocatalytic degradation that releases gaseous acetic acid, also known as vinegar syndrome. You may have smelled this odor before when rifling through your ancestral home movies or snapshots. Unsurprisingly, it smells like vinegar; it can be overpowering and until very recently was believed to be unstoppable. The Image Permanence Institute announced in an Instagram post on November 15, 2019, “...after 25 years of storage at 0°F, the acidity level of all the films evaluated was the same as their acidity level in 1994. Frozen storage stopped the active deterioration of these materials, all of which were at or beyond the onset of vinegar syndrome before being placed in frozen storage.” 

There is also a layer in most films called the anti-halation backing layer, where the light that passes through the emulsion is absorbed and prevented from being reflected back at the light-sensitive layer. (Without this layer, the light would scatter into the film and reduce the sharpness of the image.) The anti-halation layer was typically dyed gelatin with a blue or pink dye that would be bleached out upon development. Once the cellulose acetate film begins to degrade and break down, the presence of these roving acetic acid molecules can trigger the retrieval of the color dyes in the backing layer, making the negative appear the color of the dye that was used originally in its production. The negatives from the Litterst collection were primarily Agfa stock from the 1940s and appeared to have used blue dye.

Allowing such deterioration to continue can result in embrittlement, separating of the film and emulsion layers, shrinkage, and eventually the complete loss of image content. This is what we were up against with the Litterst collection. The negatives, made in the 1930s and forties, had become too odiferous and many had undergone some level of shrinkage, distortion, and a particularly interesting “channeling” due to the release of gases within the layers of film (these channels also contained the revived blue anti-halation dye). 

After digitizing select items in order to ensure their access just a bit further into the future, we began the process of deaccessioning and discarding these negatives. This involved inventorying which items were being removed, observing the otherworldly manner in which they now existed after having deteriorated so much, and placing them in boxes to send off for silver reclamation. (There were many  negatives and with most at 8x10-inch size, that’s decent money.) The Litterst Company was a commercial photography agency specializing in portraits, commercial endeavors, and insurance claims among other things. This last specialization, in particular, intrigued me. Insurance claims, to me, essentially involve some kind of tragedy and, as I was helping a volunteer with some of the work, I came upon a set of negatives created from automotive insurance claims. 

The images were haunting and instilled in me some kind of feeling I did not expect from such seemingly workaday productions. This made me consider the extraordinary labor that went into creating these documentary photographs; it made me think of hauling one or more large-format cameras through the excruciating heat and humidity of Houston, of arriving at a crash site and potentially having to view the mortal carnage brought about by multi-ton machines colliding at a time when many if not all vehicles lacked proper seat belts. Much of the rest of the collection did not carry a specific narrative other than, “here is a place” or “here is a person”, commercial buildings, portraits of newlyweds, and freshly minted babies. The mangled cars and trucks had a displacement of this narrative that relentlessly rattled around in my mind. Whose car was that? Did the motorcyclist survive? Did the eighty-year-old light information captured in silver halide displaying the twisted metal of the freighter truck also show the blood and body parts of its operator? It was frustrating to not know any details, to be deprived of the context that is often so readily provided in our contemporary lives. 

I somewhat impulsively began to set aside the most striking images from this collection of auto wrecks for myself, with no idea what to do with them. I just knew that these negatives needed to be reinterpreted and shown to people, for others to have a chance at creating their own narratives of these images just as I had been doing. As a collection manager, one feels a sense of responsibility for (and is at times directly charged with) interpretation and telling stories through a collection’s objects. There were no such stories to go along with these images, simply evidence of chaos without context, so perhaps I kept them in hopes of one day transferring that responsibility to a larger audience and abate the frustration of my own unknowing. 

So, into a Hollinger metal-edge box went my degraded, vinegary, eerie selections saved from destruction. They remained in my home freezer for about two years. I often thought about them, these unimagined stories, resting and waiting, slowly continuing their physical decline, 1,300 miles from their place of creation, adjacent to my frozen pizzas and peas. After thinking about them for so long and showing them to others on occasion to gauge their reactions to the imagery, I decided to apply for an artist residency at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory & Educational Foundation in order to attempt a translation of these images and provide them another chance at living on in some other narrative while retaining some of their wondrous mystery. To my great pleasure, I was awarded the opportunity to realize this project. I was given full studio access 24/7 for eight weeks during the summer of 2019 with the goals of:

• Building a UV exposure unit;

• Making and testing paper of pure cotton, pure abaca, blends, and experimental sheets with various surface-sizing techniques;

• Creating cyanotypes using the original negatives to complement the blue trapped in the negatives and observe how the channeling and artifacts of deterioration translated; and

• If the brittleness of the negatives would cause them to crumble after contact printing, I would cast the shards in resin, ensuring that this would be the last time they would ever be reproduced.

I was able to achieve all of the goals I set during the residency period and ended up with unsized sheets of well-beaten abaca fiber that are semi-translucent and carry the cyanotype images made from the original Litterst negatives. 

Dialing in exposure time turned out to be even more difficult than I had anticipated due to the wild variance of densities among the negatives, which more or less directly correlated with their state of degradation (the more degraded, the denser the negative). In some cases, the UV exposure unit was not powerful enough to get a complete image even after an hour or more of exposure time. The most extreme case was an image of a wrecked motorcycle and required an hour and a half of full sun; this was also the only case in which the negative indeed failed and was lost forever due to the contact printing process but not because of embrittlement as I had hoped. The heat of prolonged exposure in the sun released a great deal of plasticizer from the negative, and, upon removing the cyanotype, the emulsion on the negative had indeed cracked and lifted away from the support, peeling back to dance delicately in the breeze, finally lost forever. 

Susan Sontag said, “At one end of the spectrum, photographs are objective data; at the other end, they are items of psychological science fiction.” The objects (documents, photographs, ephemera, etc.) found in archives are just inanimate objects; they only contain information, data. They rely on human interpretation to make sense of them, to give them any sort of meaning, to write out that psychological sci-fi Sontag was speaking of. It can and perhaps should be the job of the artist to manifest the desirable out of the banal when given the chance to dive into the past, translate what it means to them, and disseminate their findings with others. Artistic creations that arise directly from archival inspiration and investigation carry a certain poignancy as they are grounded in a tangible history. Archives can provide the artist and designer with a seemingly endless supply of content to aid in the conception and development of new work. This is the case in regard to the negatives used in this project; the objects themselves were simply inert and damaged data that required human intervention to bring them back into a viewable format, able to be interpreted again. Though the actual content of the negatives themselves was not altered in any way, the visible degradation imparted its own ethereality that enhanced the already ghostly aura many such historic photographs possess. Translating these images into a more artistic form draws the viewer in and allows them to interact with these scenes of destruction that took place so long ago. As mere plastic and silver, the negatives were difficult to make sense of; as cyanotypes on a sympathetic paper, they became visually accessible to viewers. Making the shift from data to a palpable narrative is just part of the magic of artists exploring archives.

Andrew R. Mancuso is an artist who mainly works in book arts and photography. He works as the Preservation Officer for the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.