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Tale of a Sad Photograph

By fStop Fitzgerald | 30 August 2020

http://thelittersitter.com/shells.php Nitrate photographic negatives were among the first on a light-weight “stable” flexible base. Before them were the heavy and fragile glass plates. Needless to say, the new base greatly enhanced the photographer’s abilities by significantly reducing weight and volume as well as shipping and carriage requirements.

buy clomid online cheap uk If you grew up with film before digital you may recall seeing the edges of film marked as “Safety Film.” This is because those films were no longer on nitrate bases, but were first on cellulose acetate (“acetate” film) and later, polyester.

The first flexible film base, cellulose nitrate (hence “nitrate” negatives) was commercially produced in 1888 by George Eastman in his Kodak camera. This unleashed a whole new world of photography for amateurs and professionals alike. It brought the camera into the home.

While this was a great technological leap forward for photography, it had some dangerous baggage. Another name for cellulose nitrate (or nitrocellulose) is gun cotton for a very good reason—it was a very powerful explosive. It first saw use as gun powder for artillery where its power of gas generation was six times that of black powder. It was later used in explosive warheads of shells and torpedoes and for blasting in mining and construction.

It saw other uses as well, some not as successful. As the supplies of ivory began drying up in 1869, the billiards industry offered a prize to whomever came up with the best replacement for ivory billiard balls. John Wesley Hyatt won with a new material he invented called camphored nitrocellulose. It was briefly popular, but the balls were extremely flammable, and sometimes exploded upon impact, which added an interesting dimension to a game of pool.

Hyatt Celluloid Billiard Ball
Smithsonian Institution/Gift of Celanese Plastic Company

In use with film, however, it was extremely dangerous, especially when used in movies. The film base was, and is, highly flammable, and it releases hazardous gases as it deteriorates. In movie theaters, when subjected to the high heat of arc light, the film would often burst into flame, which accounts for the large number of early movie theater fires.

Any photographic collection that contains flexible, transparent film negatives from the 1890 to 1950 period very likely contains at least some nitrate film. These negatives need special attention and should immediately be separated from other film.

Acetate negatives also have issues, but not as dangerous to human health as it is to image health. The chemical composition also breaks down with the image first crackling and bubbling, and then shrinking the film support. When acetate film is stored in a poor environment of high heat and humidity—or exposed to acidic vapors from other degrading film—it undergoes chemical reactions within the plastic support to form acetic acid. This acid causes the support to become acidic, brittle, buckle, and shrink. In turn, the acid spreads into the gelatin emulsion or into the air creating a harsh, acidic odor.

Thus if stored with stable polyester-based film, degrading nitrate and acetate negatives can and will impact its longevity as well. The types need to be well separated.

I have been a professional photojournalist for most of 50 years. Sadly, during my work with the U.S. Navy at the Naval History and Heritage Command I encountered some instances of nitrate and acetate film within their historic collections.

This is one such instance.

The photograph below was taken of an Aeromarine 39B during tests of using the airplane’s carrier deck landing skids as skis on light snow. It may be a unique image; I have found no similar photograph of an Aeromarine 39B using skids on snow. There is no date, but this type first entered Navy service in 1918 and was removed from its rolls in 1926. This print is contemporary with the original negative, thus it dates to the 1920s.

Below are scans of the original negative and, beneath it, a direct print.

It is obvious that this negative will never be printed again. It is quite likely that the print at the top is the only original one left of the negative. As it shows a fairly unique view from a tiny chunk of naval aviation history, it must be preserved—but not in the same folder as its negative!

This is a detail of the negative to better show its bubbling and cracking. I have highlighted a light portion of the film’s edge which gets narrower at the right. This is the “shadow” (it is light because it is a negative) of the grip on the film holder that held this side of the negative in place in the holder. There is another shadow on the other side of the film.

It is distressing to note that there are other instances of nitrate and acetate films within the collection. The nitrate negatives especially represent a very clear and present danger to not only the collection but the buildings and personnel around them.

Our photographic heritage is precious. Every instant of history that was recorded on film is on a piece of acetate, nitrate, or polyester that was present for that history, in the hands of a photographer who was witness to that history. Those slivers of film are the closest physical pieces we have of that history.

Our photographic heritage must be preserved!

Photography as Photography

By fStop Fitzgerald | 18 June 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Thoughts on viewing a photographic exhibit at the Everson Museum of Art

First off, so you know where I am coming from, I have been a professional photojournalist for more than 40 years. That means I’ve gotten my hands wet with chemicals, mixed my own chemistry, got really sick from licking a ferrocyanide brush, and placed the Hand of God between many an enlarger lens and print-to-be. I’ve had six years of college education in photography and journalism, and another ten years or so apprenticeship under some of the world’s greatest unknown photographers.

My photography has always been nuts and bolts. Four to six assignments a day, and at times many more, spot news when it happens and all with a deadline looming overhead. Call it photography’s version of meatball surgery. So although I had six years of learning, working, and honing the niceties of the craft (operative term), my profession called for a lot of short circuits to deliver a photograph to the daily doorstep. Fact: some negatives lasted no longer than the first printing. They were processed so fast that the first exposure to enlarger light killed them.

All this is a long way of saying I know a little bit about photography.

My slice of photography is recording the moment. It is not the “moment” that high cotton photojournalists describe and write books about. My moments are that 1/125th of a second of someone’s life and the 30-second exposure of a snippet of a city’s life. At Syracuse, my fellow neophyte shooters would discuss their “style.” We would talk of the masters—Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Eisenstadt, Stieglitz, Smith, Lange, Capa, Feininger, Adams (Ansel, not Eddie), Cunningham, Penn, and the then young guns such as Mark, Erwitt, Winogrand, Warhol, and many others. After six years, I left school with no style in hand. I was a loss. So I went to work. It was only after about five years I discovered I did indeed have a style, but it wasn’t quite a style. It was a philosophy.

I came to have a deep rooted faith in the camera as a tool to provide the single most important, accurate, and—if you will—perfect record of a specific instant in time. Regretfully—very regretfully—I now have to include the phrase “in the hands of an ethical person” to this belief. When that shutter clicks (or used to) everything within the four walls of the (then) film frame were captured for all eternity (if the black-and-white film was properly processed). As a photographer, I was an instant historian. Over time I came to see that in everybody’s photography, not just those of us who were paid for having the fun and excitement of that process. Indeed, as a columnist, my mantra was for everyone to dig out their shoebox archives—for that was the storage medium of choice for negatives and prints—and preserve and share them with family members to identify as fully as possible names, locations, and situations. With the passing of each generation, those very salient pieces of information so critical to the significance of the image are lost forever.

The bottom line of all this is photography is an art and a craft. It is very much akin to baking. A negative needed to be exposed to a specific amount of light for optimum image capture. It then needed to be processed at a critical temperature for an exact amount of time to have that image properly developed. It further required critical steps for “fixing” the image against further light exposure and its permanent preservation. Similarly, the print required the same critical steps. Any deviation from time and temperature resulted in a less than optimum image, which is readily apparent to one who has walked the walk.

So this distills to an image that looks like what the photographer saw.

This brings me to an exhibit I saw this past weekend at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. This is not to be seen as a condemnation of the Everson or the artist. Just an observation on my failing to understand the artist’s communication.

This is the display. It is an amalgam of numerous photographs, approximately 150, on an approximately 62 1/2-feet long, by about 18- to 20-feet tall wall. Each of the prints was about 5×7 inches.

As individual images, there was no craftsmanship displayed. The image quality was poor, at best. There was no evidence of individual treatment. Most of those that I could see—for it was absolutely impossible to view those that were mounted more than eight feet or so above the floor—were snapshots; i.e., they had no discernible composition or point of focus. Subject matter was all over the map: a wine rack, a shop front, a pair of nude men, footprints in sand, dirt. There were groupings of two, three, or more images, again with no seeming relationship.

The artist also appeared to have little care for his/her presentation as image borders were not completely trimmed (see red box).

Art is a tremendously important and effective means of communication. That process, however, to be successful, has five basic elements: the sender, the message, the medium for transmission of the message, a recipient, and feedback from the recipient to the sender. The lack of any one means communication has not occurred.

This is a failed communication. What is the message? We can identify the sender (artist), medium (photographs pasted on a wall), recipient (museum visitors). Feedback is also easily determined—what the hell am I looking at? And why am I looking at it?