I recently discovered some photographs bundled with a quantity of letters written by my Great Uncle during his service in Egypt and France during WW1.

A number of these photographs are quite dark as a possible result of insufficient fixation. All these pictures were taken and developed by him in the field. When he was in Egypt he obtained chemicals from Alexandria and made contact prints of the negatives using any light source he had available at the time.

Many of these photographs are historically significant and require copying before they completely fade into oblivion. We have no negatives... just prints.

I require advice on the best way to refix these pictures and then lighten them enough to make copies

Any assistance would be most appreciated.

Cheers Rowan Matthews Melbourne AUSTRALIA

-- Rowan Matthews (toothache86@hotmail.com), June 02, 2001

Answers

Rowan, It's quite risky trying any chemical procedure with old prints. And refixing might not be the case. Usually, prints wich suffers from bad fixing or washing will fade and stain due to chemical reactions that lead to by-products that will no longer stand bleaching, toning and other silver related treatments. Not without a great risk of ruining part or the whole print. So, duplicating may still be the first thing to do. If some prints look too dark, you may try to light them also from behind. Much details on shadows show clear this way. Some reading on photo conservation and restoring would be highly recommended. Kodak and Rochester Institute of Photography might help with some literature. Good luck.

Cesar B.

-- Cesar Barreto (cesarb@infolink.com.br), June 02, 2001.

Rowan, Contact the Image Preservation Institute at RIT. Their web site is http://www.rit.edu/~661www1/

-- Jim Megargee (jmegargee@nyc.rr.com), June 03, 2001.

Before attempting any treatment to the prints, make the best possible copy negatives. This is SOP (standard operating procedure) for handling any one-of-a-kind important photographs.

You may, in fact, be able to manipulate the copy negatives to get good prints so that no treatment of the originals would be required.

-- Charlie Strack (charlie_strack@sti.com), June 05, 2001.

Last year a professional photographer friend of mine contracted to reproduce a photo album from the 19th century. Many of his copies showed better detail than the warm tone originals. If you wish me to pursue it, I can ask him if he used any filtration. I do know that he used a Polaroid MP4 copy camera to make 4x5 negatives.

-- Ed Buffaloe (edb@unblinkingeye.com), June 08, 2001.