In 1999, Paul Messier analyzed two prints by the renowned photographer Lewis Hine that were suspected of being forgeries. A photo conservator in private practice at the time, Messier wrote a report laying out the evidence he had gathered, which strongly suggested that the prints, purportedly created in Hine’s lifetime and bearing the late artist’s signature, were fakes. (For example, the prints appeared to contain brightening agents that were thought to be used many years after Hine’s death.) But Messier found it difficult to draw hard conclusions.
“I was anxious,” he said. “How do you assess whether you have an authentic connection to the artist, the moment of creation, or not? I thought this was going to be straightforward, but it was so layered and so nuanced and so hard. In the end, when I wrote this report, I had a lot of good data, but I’m not sure it would have held up in court.”
The experience led Messier, now the Pritzker Director of the Lens Media Lab (LML) at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, to search for more effective methods to identify and measure the material properties of photographic papers. “I needed to ground the assertions I was making in material fact,” he said, speaking during “From Darkroom to Data: New Insights into the Material History of Photography,” a recent symposium LML hosted at the O.C. Marsh Lecture Hall at the Yale Science Building.
Established in 2015, LML is a research facility at Yale’s West Campus that melds science with the arts and humanities, developing innovative tools and methods for understanding the history of black-and-white photography. The symposium showcased the ways that LML’s staff uses data to help curators, conservators, and art historians better understand photography collections and the methods of artists who make photographs.
After his experience with the questionable Hine prints, Messier began collecting photographic papers — the base materials used to produce photographic prints — eventually amassing a reference collection of about 7,500 samples produced from 1890 through 2012, the largest known assemblage of its kind. He brought his collection to Yale after he was appointed LML’s founding director. Composed of the packaged papers and sample books that manufacturers published to market their products, the reference collection provides a baseline for materials-focused research. It enables researchers to identify patterns in and across photography collections, informing their care, and supports scholarly and scientific inquiry.
Now, researchers can easily explore and analyze the collection using Paperbase, an interactive visual platform, which LML unveiled at the symposium. Designed and built by Damon Crockett, LML’s lead scientist, the web application provides access to data — their base color, gloss, thickness, and texture — from about 7,000 objects in the reference collection.
The symposium also highlighted several research partnerships LML has forged with important cultural institutions to better understand the material history of photography collections and the artistic processes of celebrated photographers, including Robert Mapplethorpe and Man Ray.
Nora Kennedy and Katherine Sanderson, conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, discussed a collaboration with LML that began as an effort, in preparation for an exhibition opening at the museum in October 2025, to better understand Man Ray’s process for creating his “Rayograph” photograms — images made by placing objects directly onto the surface of photographic paper and then exposing it to light.
The project soon expanded to include non-Rayograph photographs by Man Ray from three private collections and four other institutions, including the Yale University Art Gallery. The researchers measured 55 Rayographs and 63 photographs for color, gloss, thickness, and texture.
“This is where the importance of the Lens Media Lab becomes very, very clear, both for their paper sample collection and for their data-processing and digitalization ability,” said Kennedy, the Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of the Department of Photograph Conservation at the Met.
LML developed a “Rayograph app” — heavily influenced by Paperbase’s computational and methodological design — to analyze the data they gathered from the Man Ray photograms and photographs. Among their findings, they discovered that nearly all the Rayograph prints they studied were made using matte, not glossy, papers, which was consistent with his photograph prints.
“From the data we’ve collected thus far, it looks like Man Ray did not have strong aesthetic preference towards his Rayographs versus other photographic works,” Kennedy said.
In his closing remarks, Messier emphasized that LML’s efforts to quantify and understand the materiality of photographic prints enriches our understanding of artists, like Man Ray, who used photography as a medium for creative expression.
“This is not about data for data’s sake,” he said. “It’s about understanding the creative process. I think that’s fundamental.”
Read the full piece here: https://news.yale.edu/2024/08/28/analyzing-photographic-process-darkroom-data
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