Nano-Scientists Attempt to Save Disintegrating Artworks (preview)

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As priceless images from the earliest days of photography were dissolving in front of museumgoers' eyes, an unlikely team set out to save them

By Daniel Grushkin

Disappearing Sitter: The daguerreotype of this unnamed woman represents one of the earliest forms of photography. Within a month of its 2005 exhibition, a haze began to obscure the image.

Image: COURTESY OF GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE

In Brief

• Curators monitoring an exhibition of 150-year-old daguerreotypes noticed the images clouding before their eyes. The exhibition's lights appeared to be bleaching them out, and no one knew why.
• The conservator in charge of the images teamed up with a physicist who typically works with Bose-Einstein condensates to investigate the nanoscale chemistry at the heart of the destruction.
• The results of their investigations affect not just the storage and display of priceless art, they also illuminate fundamental physical processes that could be used in nanoscale engineering.

In the theaterlike darkness of the international Center of Photography in New York City, black-and-white ghosts of New England's mid-19th-century Boston Brahmins stared out from behind the glass-and-rosewood frames. These were the works of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, the Rembrandts of daguerreotypy?the first practical form of photography. A demure bride in white silk crepe fingered her ribbons; the stern and haughty statesman Daniel Webster glared from behind his brow. When the ?Young America? exhibit opened in 2005, its 150-year-old images captured American icons at a time when the nation was transitioning from adolescence into a world power. ?Each picture glows on the wall like a stone in a mood ring,? the New York Times raved in its review.

Yet after a month on exhibit, the silver plate?bound images began to degrade. White spots overtook half the portrait of a woman in a curtain-length skirt. Iridescent halos formed on abolitionist Henry Ingersoll Bowditch. Other images blistered. By the end of the two-and-a-half-month show, 25 daguerreotypes had been damaged, five of them critically.

This article was originally published with the title The Case of the Disappearing Daguerreotypes.

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