A Visit With the Conservator of Photographs at the Art Institute & the Timothy O'Sullivan Exhibit

This past week we took our second trip as a class to the Art Institute to talk with the Conservator of Photographs, Douglas Severson. Doug told us that he has held his position at the Art Institute for over 30 years. He then began to walk us through the types of photography that he comes across working with in his position. Starting with an example of a daguerreotype, Doug went through other examples he had pulled from the Art Institute's photo vaults of salt prints, albumen prints, platinum prints, silver gelatin, Type C or chromogenic color prints, and cibachrome prints. A few of the examples he had pulled for us had minor damages or signs of aging. Some types of photography processes are more sensitive to damage from aging than others, but Doug noted that, from his personal experience, chromogenic prints has been the least stable photo process and most difficult to preserve. Doug made a point to tell us that, although there are some techniques that photo conservationists can use to repair damages, they typically try to focus on stopping any aging of their photographs where it's currently at instead of trying to restore it. This is also because many of the restorative processes that try to restore the original look of photographs are not guaranteed to work and risk damaging the photo even further, such as the silver intensification process that was experimented on albumen prints.

The current photographic exhibit on display at the Art Institute is made of mostly albumen prints of the surveyed land between the eastern border of California and Cheyenne, Wyoming photographed by Timothy O'Sullivan between 1867 and 1872. The survey that O'Sullivan took part in surrounded the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. During this period, Americans were fascinated by the possibilities that the West held for the future of the country but few had seen it. The survey that O'Sullivan documented satisfied some of the scientific, political, and financial curiosities that Americans had at the time. While the majority of O'Sullivan's photographs were landscapes, he also had a collection of underground mining photos that he took using magnesium flares as the flash. The commonality between most of O'Sullivan's photos and what makes them particularly distinct from other landscapes from the same time period is that they each hold a lot of complexity within, what you think would be, a simple photo. For example, many of O'Sullivan's pictures include people. While some landscape photographers might do this to show the scale of the scene they are capturing, the poses of the people in O'Sullivan's photos (laying down, unnatural postural positions, etc.) suggest that he had a vision for the how the men featured in his photos would be portrayed. In addition to these photographs, there were other collections of photos of rocks and mountains that seemed to take on an other worldly feeling. With foggy surroundings and geometric compositions, these series of photos further suggest that O'Sullivan had an artistic vision for his photographs past what a typical landscape photographer would.

Touring a Bank's Collection of Photographs

When most people go into a bank, the last thing they are usually thinking about is the art or photographs displayed on the walls. But the curator of this artwork thinks about this all day. Last week we took a tour of the photo collection of one of the most prominent banks in America. Although the display of an Ansel Adams print behind the tellers at the bank was awesome, it was what we saw behind the scenes in the bank's main offices in downtown Chicago that was really something to see. We met with the collection's curator, Whitney, upstairs in onfe of the banks' conference rooms (at an impressively large table) to discuss the history of the collection. She told us that Beaumont Newhall, a highly influential curator and historian, bought the initial 350 photographs to start the bank's collection. Since then, the bank has accumulated around 5500 photos in its collection. And while only a few landscape photos are on public display in the actual bank, each office in the downtown building gets its own photo from the collection and each office resident gets a say in the choosing of the photo they get in their work space. In addition to this service within the bank, Whitney is in charge of over 50 touring exhibitions internationally of the bank's collection. These exhibitions are free of charge to any museum that houses them and come completely ready to hang in their space. The purpose of these exhibitions is to restore some sense of "humanity" to the bank and help out arts organizations, especially in such hard economic times.

Currently, the theme of the majority of the photos in the hallways of the bank's offices are street photography themed, with photographs by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, and William Eggleston, just to name a few. Whitney told us that the purpose of putting all this effort into displaying photos in the offices and work spaces is to excite the business environment and help people think more creatively. I thought this was interesting, especially in a place like a bank, because people don't typically think of bank employees needing to surrounded by art or needing inspiration. But, after being surrounded by so many amazing photographs, its easy to see how their display makes coming to work more enjoyable and gives a sense of comfort to an office-filled work place. I couldn't find my favorite picture that was on display, but here is a portion of it. It's a photo by Robert Frank titled Man With Striped Pants and Tulips. Here are the tulips: