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.