Losing It: The Question of Color in the Digitization of Gisele Freund’s Archives
Parsons Paris Faculty member Lorraine Audric presented her research at the 2020 CAA conference in Chicago.
Panel Discussion: “Fading and Fixing: the Material Photograph over Time”
When German-born French author Gisele Freund used the latest technological development in photography to take color portraits of intellectuals and artists in the Paris of the 1930s, she had no other means, in order to share them, than organizing slide projections. In the process, so often repeated as it became her specialty, she actually damaged her photographs, which lost a lot of their original colors. It greatly concerned her as she was alive, and it inevitably became one of our main issues as we undertook the digitization of her archives.
How to embrace their contemporary decayed form without hurting their reputation? In other words: how would a Virginia Woolf fan feel if we chose to disseminate, for her only color portrait ever done, the original slide as is, which presents a washed out version of what it might have looked like, intead of a restored version seeking “authenticity”? What does it mean to use digital technology to retouch these images, in order to have them look “the way they used to”? Are we even capable of recreating them: it appears that no one can really tell what the colors of early Kodachrome and Agfacolor films actually were, since all vintage material preserved today has deteriorated…so why even try? This project brought up many questions relating to conventions of viewing photography today, especially historical material for which time is an inherent component, yet still visually rejected by most audiences. My presentation aims to discuss these broader questions, in the context of an exceptional collection of early color photographs being revived and made public.
Fading & Fixing: The Material Photograph Over Time
What kind of object is a faded photograph? When what was pictured in it has become unrecognizable, is it actually a photograph anymore, or does it operate within a different regime of meaning? This panel invites conceptual explorations of the role of fading in a medium known for fixing. The tendency of images to decay was an essential element of the science and the aesthetics of the early photographic surface, and it remains a central concern in the care, display, and preservation of photographs in museums and archives today. Yet our most prominent photographic histories implicitly center upon the “display worthy” print—or in some famous cases, carefully manipulated reproductions of a faded relic—rather than upon the much broader archive of faded, decayed, damaged, and illegible photographs that remain in storage in collections across the world.
What kind of histories can be told from the faded photograph, its trajectory of change and transformation, or the decaying photographic archive? What, and whom, are we saving such objects for? What would it look like to cultivate a curatorial or scholarly approach to photography that accepts and embraces the ongoing decay of the image as an essential part of its chemical nature, its aesthetics, and its cultural life as an object? This panel invites submissions from those working on photography from multi-disciplinary perspectives, including history of art, social and cultural history, history of science, anthropology, conservation, or critical heritage studies.