Over many decades, Paul Messier assembled the most extensive collection of historic photographic papers in the world. In 2015, this collection was foundational to creating the Lens Media Lab (LML) at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH). As founding Director of the LML, Paul leads a collaborative research team dedicated to developing methodologies that characterize and interpret the material history of the printed photograph. Approaching cultural heritage collections as datasets, the LML collaborates with communities across Yale and partners with many of the world’s leading collecting institutions.
Helen Trompeteler spoke with Paul about the origins and continuing aims of the collection. They discussed recent projects from his extensive career in conservation and current challenges in the field.
To begin with, please can you tell me about what prompted you to start your collection? For a long time, such material was often considered ephemeral by museum collecting. So, it seems that you identified a unique focus at the right time.
I'm not an antiquarian at all. I was really after data. I would be lying if I said I knew what I was doing from the first minute. But after a few months of earnest collecting, I realized all this material was out there. It was ultimately Ebay aggregating all of that material. I was always interested in it as a kind of a genome of black and white photography.
I had this notion that a black and white silver gelatin print — we give it that name in conservation or media identification — but this huge amount of diversity and material history was wrapped up in that material. The stories hadn't been told.
And that was also coming out of my Lewis Hine research. Such a collection would have been extraordinarily useful.
Thinking about those major authenticity cases that happened in the art market during the 1990s — surrounding Lewis Hine and Man Ray, for example — please can you briefly summarize how they advanced the field of photography conservation?
Authentication can spur these projects that turn up from the market. Sometimes we think they are isolated incidents, but they represent a lot of gaps. And if you take it seriously, you look at those gaps, and try to build them and then go beyond them. That's really what we tried to do.
Just looking at the collection itself, it's about 7000 examples of papers, from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. It’s now preserved at Yale, where it’s accessible and can be studied, like a seed bank. That speaks to preservation, artistic intention, and authenticity. It has a lot of different resonances. When you think of it as a scholarly asset, the sky's the limit in terms of what scholars and people are interested in.
Book of specimen prints on different papers, produced by the Gevaert company circa 1935, showing a wide range of paper texture, gloss, and base color. Image credit: Paul Messier
A recent project at Yale focuses on William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature. [The first photographically illustrated commercial publication was issued in six volumes between 1844 and April 1846, with prints made by Nicolaas Henneman]
What are the aims of this project and some of its key findings?
That’s an ongoing study. We have a partial Pencil of Nature at the Yale Center for British Art. We wanted to basically throw some analytical capacity at the Pencil of Nature and think of it as a primary source. Let it speak to us through our experience, our eyes, but also our instruments. And let it tell us its story.
I’m not discounting any of the scholarship that’s been invested in Talbot at all. But what happens when you cut that out and just let the objects speak?
Since the beginning of photography, questions around fading and image permanence have been of great concern. Accordingly, the research team investigated the light sensitivity of this material:
One of the things that we saw was really interesting. We were checking on light sensitivity with a tool that has its home here at the IPCH, a microfade testing device, to determine whether these can be displayed responsibility. And for the most part, the answer is yes. Not all, as there are many variations across the prints and the Pencil of Nature, but for the most part, they’re surprisingly light stable.
A microfade tester is used to determine the lightfastness of a salted paper print from Henry Fox Talbot’s, The Pencil of Nature held by The Yale Center for British Art. This unit was modified to help determine the sensitivity of the photographs to near ultraviolet radiation. Image credit: Colette Hardman-Peavy
Other analyses included using methods from data science, scraping the Bodleian’s online catalogue raisonné to group prints bound in the Pencil of Nature, and comparing these with prints that were never bound. The LML compiled more than 30,000 images and developed an algorithm that led to identifying causes for deterioration:
We definitely saw a ‘Pencil of Nature’ effect. They tended to be in worse condition overall. We couldn’t tie it back to Henneman’s practice. But there did seem to be traces of organic oxidizing gases coming out of bound volume. And we can only imagine that those concentrations would have been higher when the Pencil of Nature was first made. And so maybe that’s a clue — the inks, papers, and adhesives were creating an adverse microclimate for the prints.
Now we've got our data, our baseline; we’d love partners that have the Pencil of Nature to join. So, we can compare results and build a material database of existing Pencils of Nature.
Front cover of Bill Brandt - Henry Moore, editors Paul Messier and Martina Droth, Yale Center for British Art / Yale University Press (2020). Book Design: Miko McGinty. Image credit: Paul Messier
Last year’s exhibition and publication on Henry Moore and Bill Brandt explored how the historical narrative of both artists completely intertwined with material histories. Brandt’s annotations on the reverse of his prints provide a wealth of information about his intentions when reproducing his work for various media. Please can you give an overview of your work on this project and how your reference collection can inform such studies on one photographer’s lifelong practice?
Brandt is not unique in terms of 20th-century photographers of that generation. He started printing for the printed page when he made a photograph. It wasn't with the art market in mind. The market in mind was the mass media through the vehicle of the printed page.
Occasionally exhibitions would happen, and he would make substantially different kinds of prints. An example most people would be familiar with would be right at the end of his life, working with the Marlborough Gallery. His Marlborough prints were very much made as fine art objects. He probably would have been amazed at that concept as a working photographer during the 30s and 40s. These embody all of the contextual material-based clues of what a 1970s exhibition print was supposed to do. They have a more grained surface, which reduces gloss so that when you put the print upright, you are not getting a glare. It also breaks down detail. At that point of his life, aesthetically and functionally, he is thinking about broad masses, abstract and contrast forms, almost two dimensions. Double weight papers are a much more substantial object, and he’s got a more flamboyant and expressive signature.
Compare that to something that would have been made for Lilliput magazine in the 1940s — typically, these ferrotypes with very glossy papers are about increasing tonal range. So, your blacks are much more saturated, and the tonal scale is now longer. And that's important when you go to press because press tends to compress that tonal range.
The way that ties back to the reference collection is if you look at the diversity of materials available until the late 60s-mid 70s, photographers had to be literate in that diversity and use those materials and that universe of options. Almost every package of paper in the reference collection expresses these four dimensions — gloss, base color, base thickness, and texture. These are the variables, and each photographer has their own approach that can tell you a lot about what they’re trying to do — are they trying to generalize form? Is this an interpretive exercise, or are they just trying to reflect reality?
Packages of photographic papers dating from the 1960s-80s. Image credit: Paul Messier
You have participated in various collaborative student-led initiatives such as a Yale and Princeton project on Clarence H. White and your work with students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. How do you see the role of such collaborations in encouraging greater diversity in the field of photography conservation and changing perceptions of scientific work?
I frame these very much as about building literacy for the reader. If you're my age, we have seen a completely analog media where you have no choice but to master manipulating materials if you want to make an image. And we've seen that completely change. I'm not sentimental about that change, but it is historic. Because of my interest in material history, and because of the opportunities that I have been given, I'm really fortunate to be able to educate people, that may be digital natives for example, who would not intuitively understand what making an image with those materials would actually entail. What can we learn when we encounter a print and a collection?
Going back to the Fox Talbot example, what can it tell us as a primary source directly? Maximizing that encounter with that physical object is a form of literacy. And I think given what's going on in visual culture, this is a time when we should make an effort to prolong that, again not from some perspective of sentimentality, but because this is shared culture.
Smaller arts institutions often face social-economic barriers to borrowing artworks or enabling physical access to collections, especially early photography. We discussed these challenges and the relationships between physical and digital access:
It’s a tremendous challenge, but I think every institution with a photography collection can do something within reach to enhance the preservation of your collection. In other words, there are often some relatively inexpensive, fairly minimal efforts that can buy you a greater percentage of preservation before getting into really specialized environmental techniques.
I do have a problem with the notion, which I'm surprised still exists, that once you have the image, you have preserved the object, which is completely not the case at all. I mean, the object is this unique package of materiality and temporality. That is one of a kind and unique, and that cannot be digitized.
One of the things that we've tried to do at the Lens Media Lab is develop simple tools to get at these four dimensions — tools that can be deployed widely that can be comparable.
For example, if I am looking at a László Moholy-Nagy photogram — we did a project at the Art Institute of Chicago not too long ago — we could see clusters form around where he was working at certain time periods. So, if you want to know where your prints fit within this baseline — we can send you these tools and give you a bit of training, and they’re easy to use. Now you've got a data set that you can compare to a larger Moholy material-based catalogue raisonné.
That’s one way that smaller institutions can connect meaningfully with this ongoing research is to tease out meaning from materials by sharing their data sets. At the Yale Institute, we think a lot about pushing our research out the door and making things inexpensive and practical. So, for example, we’re looking very hard at the microfade testing technique from an engineering standpoint to make that technique as widely available as possible.
The Lens Media Lab also harnesses some AI and machine-driven techniques. For example, the lab uses computation to take a two-dimensional image and essentially make it a three-dimensional model. However, the future role of AI models and methodologies in photography conservation still requires further consideration:
I feel like people can sometimes get lulled into this understanding that since the methodology is science - AI, neural net — it’s more valid. It might be in some instances, but not necessarily, at the end, there is no baseline of truth.
I would love to see these techniques applied in blind studies where we actually know the result, but the algorithms don't know the result. And let’s compare, then we have a scientific basis and some sort of understanding of the reliability of the technique
Packages of paper from the Messier Reference Collection of Photographic Paper. Image credit: Paul Messier
You previously described your paper collection as the genome of black and white photography. Now, contemporary photographers work across hugely diverse mediums — including film, video, sculpture, and textile, for example. Do you think your collecting activities will evolve to incorporate such broader contemporary material histories? Or do you have other pioneering current material collections to recommend to our audience?
I have a lot of color material, but that was never really my focus — and certainly very little inkjet or digital printing media.
My friend and colleague Henry Wilhelm has a collection of this material that’s still in private hands. There are others, Mark McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Jürgens; both have a lot of this material.
One of the things I was fortunate enough to do was take a private, individual obsession and turn it into a scholarly asset. So that needs to happen to some of these private collections, if at all possible. Part of that is the recognition that this material is not just ephemera. It is material that has a vital role in ideas of authenticity, preservation, and material history.
That’s a knowledge gap in a way, and that’s maybe the biggest hurdle right now is that these collections don't fit neatly into any sort of museum or archive catalogue.
The cultural sector has been drastically impacted by the Covid pandemic, with cutbacks to many areas of practice, including conservation. It is often difficult for organizations to fund long-term preventive work on collections unrelated to an exhibition or publication. We discussed these risks, with Paul suggesting that ultimately, communication is key to ensuring the future stewardship of collections:
As conservators and people in the cultural heritage preservation sector, I worry that we don't do enough to communicate. We take it almost as a given that society and culture value the work we do and are willing to invest in that work. We don't do enough to proclaim what the value is and what we're bringing back to the equation.
What's the relevance of our work? And that’s on us. I feel like we could do a lot more about that, especially at this moment when material-based visual culture is pivoting to a completely disembodied visual culture. We really need to start making this case very clearly. And that, again, ties back to this building of literacy. If we're going to convince future generations that this preservation obligation is something that they should meet and not neglect, we have to work on that literacy. What experience do you have with an object that you can't have anywhere else and that you can't have with a digital surrogate? What does that mean to you?
To find out more about Paul Messier and the work of Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH), visit their website or follow them on Instagram @yaleipch @paulmessier.