Conserving the Everyday

What role do photographs play in everyday life? This question lies at the heart of Visual Vernaculars, a presentation that draws from MoMA’s expansive collection of what are often called vernacular photographs, due to their relationship to forms of expression beyond the formal context of fine art. In developing this gallery, curators from the Department of Photography worked closely with members of MoMA’s Conservation Department—including photo conservators, paper conservators, and conservation scientists—who studied and tested the ink signatures present on many of the photographs. Their invaluable research tells us which works could be displayed safely, and demonstrates the crucial collaborations that take place at the Museum everyday. In the fall of 2023, Oluremi C. Onabanjo and I sat down with members of the Conservation Department to discuss the work they do here at the Museum, and their favorite photographs from Visual Vernaculars.
—Antoinette D. Roberts

Installation view of Visual Vernaculars

Antoinette D. Roberts: Visual Vernaculars lives on our fifth floor, as part of our earliest collection galleries. It looks at the role of vernacular photographs after the rise of the Kodak camera in 1888 and the role of personal photographs in everyday people’s lives. It was a way to construct a self-image, community image, and an individual’s image in that community as well.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo: Yes, we worked on this gallery together over the course of a year in collaboration with the American poet Robin Coste Lewis, who was a Ford Scholar in Residence in the Department of Photography. During this process, Robin brought her own perspective and passion for the photographic medium and its ability to tell stories. We’re really fortunate to have not only her eyes making the selection, but also her words as the extended labels that accompany the installation.

Lee Ann Daffner and Annie Wilker with microfade tester (MFT)

Lee Ann Daffner: This particular project is emblematic of our approach to the care of vernacular photographs in the Museum. As conservators, early in our professional training and then throughout our work, we strive to treat all materials with the same level of care. With photography, that can be an interesting and sometimes challenging conundrum because photographic collections can be so vast.

Vernacular photography collections include images that we’re familiar with and that we’ve all grown up with. This intimacy speaks to a whole other experience of photography separate from fine art photography.

Annie Wilker: One thing I really liked about this project is that it let me collaborate with Lee Ann. Most of the time, I work solely on paper objects (like drawings or documents), while Lee Ann focuses on photographic materials. But with Visual Vernaculars, you were including photographs with handwritten ink inscriptions on them, so that brought together our two specialties.

Lee Ann Daffner: When I noticed the colored inks on many of these great pictures, it became clear that the color of the ink was critical to understanding what these objects were. Knowing that inks are light-sensitive, I suggested to the curators that we talk to Annie because she is a paper conservator, and she is more familiar with inks than I am. As soon as Annie had a look, she suggested we carry out microfading. So, that’s the path to which science was brought in.

Annie Wilker: When you asked me to look at these photographs, it was the purple ink that jumped out at me first. Traditionally, in my mind, purple is one of those colors that will be more likely to be light-sensitive. As soon as I saw that, I got in touch with Abed and Kyna.

Microfade tester (MFT)

Kyna Biggs: For this process, we used an MFT (microfade tester)—essentially an instrument where we expose the ink to a tiny beam of light. The data gives us an idea of the ink’s fading behavior and its color change. Will they fade really quickly over time? Will they fade pretty slowly over time? There are two kinds of standards or measurements that we compare our data to. The first one is what’s known as the Blue Wool Standards. These are essentially textile swatches that are dyed with different blue dyes. Each swatch has a different light sensitivity in a range from one to eight, from pretty stable (8) to incredibly unstable and fugitive (1). By using the MFT instrument and measuring how those different blue wool standards react with light, we can then compare the ink data to them and say, “Oh, it’s similar to this blue wool standard, which is much more stable, or it’s similar to another blue wool standard, which is quite light sensitive.” That gives us the first sort of idea of the behavior of these inks.

Abed Haddad: I’ll add each step is twice less sensitive than the one that comes after it, so blue wool one is twice as sensitive as blue wool two. We’re not only looking at a known quantity in terms of how we are comparing, but we’re also exposing the ink to an irradiation source that has a similar “spectral distribution,” as we would call it, to the lights we use in the galleries. That’s very helpful for us to elucidate the fading behavior. If you put something in the sun, it’s going to react very differently than if you put it under gallery lighting. That’s another aspect of the control that we’re exerting over the experiment to get the most nuanced understanding of how these colorants might change over time.

Kyna Biggs: Another standard we look at is a numerical value, which is called the Just Noticeable Difference (JND). That means things are always changing, and there will be a point in time where that level of change that the ink has undergone will become perceivable to the human eye, and that’s given a numerical value. We can compare the fading behavior of these inks to that numerical value to see how close they might get to it to give us an understanding that, okay, they might be fading, but it’s actually not going to be noticeable to the human eye, or they faded quite a lot, and it’s going to be extremely noticeable to us. So, those are the two different standards that we use when we’re interpreting the data.

Microfade tester (MFT)

Oluremi C. Onabanjo: Thank you all for laying out this important collaboration between different kinds of conservation practice and science. Now that Visual Vernaculars is on view, could you share your favorite photographs in the installation?

Unidentified photographer. Untitled. c. 1948–68

Annie Wilker: There’s one that’s on display right now that really spoke to me. It’s the smallest one. It’s of a woman; she’s got this pleated skirt on that she’s holding out to the sides, and she’s wearing a fur shawl with this wide-brimmed hat. Her head is tipped down, so you can’t really see her face at all. But I loved that you can just see this tiny bit of a smile peeking out from the bottom edge of the hat. All of the pictures in this section of the gallery have the word “me” written on them in ink, but in this case, no one can even tell who this person is. She’s completely anonymous in the way her outfit covers her identity, but she still felt compelled to write “ME.” M-E, with these big capital letters right in the center of the bottom edge. I really liked that contrast…she seems so mysterious, but I felt I could still get a good sense of her personality—not just from the way she was holding herself but also from the style of her penmanship.

Abed Haddad: I love the picture of the woman who’s holding a drawing of herself, and it says, “Double me.” She looks very glamorous. I love that she’s having a good time. There’s a glass of wine on the table, there’s some cash. She’s made up, the red lipstick is on, and a cigarette is in her hand. She reminds me of my grandmother. I grew up between Jordan and Syria, and my grandmother in Syria, in Aleppo, was quite the socialite. Her hair was always done, she never left the house without a full face, she always had a cigarette and a drink. But there's also this essence of understanding the self by saying, “Oh, here’s a drawing of me, and then here is me, and I’m this glamorous woman.” And I just see so much of my own grandmother in that, her love for herself and knowing how to take care of yourself and to know yourself.

Unidentified photographer. Untitled. 1960–70s

Unidentified photographer. Untitled. c. 1960

Lee Ann Daffner: My favorite image is this one of this young Black woman who’s holding a camera, and it’s a little bit bigger than the other photographs. She is everything: she’s young and beautiful, wearing a shirt that she can move her arms around, for her photographic work. She’s wearing jewelry, a necklace, and glasses. She seems so serious, professionally dressed to do the task at hand. You can see her arms are strong and she’s holding what I think is a double reflex camera. A serious piece of equipment. There’s no messing around. I just love that—she’s just ready to go. It’s really a good picture.

Kyna Biggs: The inscriptions are what truly drew me in. Some of my favorite photographs were the ones that had loopy cursive script on them because it looked so similar to the handwriting of my mother and grandmother. The writing hit me so much because I remember our own family photographs, when we still developed them to keep in albums, having similar styles of writing on the back. Never on the face of the photograph, I remember that was a rule! My grandmother was also a seamstress and I remember seeing her handwriting on patterns when I was younger while I was in her studio as she taught me to sew. My grandmother is no longer with us, but seeing similar penmanship on these photographs really stayed with me. It brought me closer to both of them in a way, because it reminded me so much of people in my life that have a similar hand.

Unidentified photographer. Untitled. 1945