Rocket City!

Work has been busy lately, with much traveling.  Cordelia Cat isn't too happy about it either, which means petulant little meows for me all night long.  At the beginning of the month I was in Maryland for multiple days.  Last week I was in Huntsville, Alabama.

During my layover, in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Unsurprisingly, there are no direct flights from Philadelphia to Huntsville.

View from my hotel window.  The large building to the right is yet another hotel.  The shorter building on the left is a Hooters.

So I arrived in Huntsville, got the rental car, made it to the hotel without problem, and went up to my room.  It was kind of weird, really wide, and everything was low.  Whatever, I'll just clean up and head out into Huntsville.  I open the bathroom door - surprise!  It is now clear that the hotel gave me a handicapped room.  (Have you ever seen a handicap hotel bathroom?  Terrifying.  Big enough to wash a car in, and equipped with what appeared to be multiple hoses.)

I'm not sure you can assign handicapped rooms to clearly non-physically handicapped people, who, during the reservation, requested no such special facilities.  What if somebody in a wheelchair showed up and needed a room?  Do they turn them away?  (Sorry folks, no room at the inn.)  Or does the handicapped person have to bumble around a non-handicapped room?  Or do they kick me out?

Whatever their hotel policy was, the only think I knew for certain was that I was not getting anywhere near that shower/car-wash.  So I called down to the desk to get a new room.  If they didn't have one, there was another hotel on the other side of the parking lot...

All was resolved without difficulty, and I hopped into the rental car and sped off to the Space and Rocket Center!

 The entrance to Space Camp!

Huntsville is nicknamed Rocket City for a reason.  Some chunk of NASA is there, Boeing (sponsored some lovely escalators in the airport - then covered the whole area with photos of the night sky and the word "Boeing"), and there is some sort of arsenal/testing range outside the city.  I was amused by the advertisements all over the waiting area of the Huntsville airport: uniformly defense contractors.  The graphic design was poorly executed but delightfully propaganda-laden: eagles carrying missiles in their talons, men in camouflage, tanks, explosions, American flags.

I arrived too late in the day to see the interior exhibits at the Space and Rocket Center - there is a big temporary one about Werner Von Braun up right now.  But that didn't even matter, because guess what the museum grounds are covered in?  That's right.  Rockets!

 Moon lander!  In a faux moon landscape!  I was a little disappointed that it wasn't shiny like the actual moon lander, but I suppose that you can't just go around wrapping things in copper foil (or whatever they use) because kids will get it all fingerprinty and gross, and unhappy Huntsvillians might try to steal it for scrap metal, and our environment would make it all green and patina-covered.

I appreciate that it's a polite request.

This was a chunk of the Skylab satellite, which I assume was used for the astronauts to practice Skylab things.  It had a pretend astronaut outside, upside-down, tending to a dish of some sort.

I'm not sure why they had the Yellow Submarine parked on a wagon next to a bunch of rockets and weapons.  Maybe the British left it here, during their Invasion?

More Skylab.

You'll need to know where this is.

The best subtitle ever.  I bet everyone on the creative team for this had kids under 8 year old.

Space Shuttle!

This was the test rocket booster.  Apparently they fired this one off five or six times, in some sort of giant fireproof test hangar.  I'm guessing the firery-end pointed down into the earth, not out into the open.

In Which I'm on (Internet) TV

Ages ago, before it was a thousand degrees and 150% relative humidity outside, a film crew came to the Conservation Centre. They were from the online arts and culture Ovation network, filming an episode of the travel show "The Scenic Route" in southeast Pennsylvania. And the show's theme was basically "fixing old stuff." Somehow, they found us - the CCAHA.

So, we know the tv crew is coming, and that they're going to profile one treatment project, probably in the paper section. I'm one of like twelve people in that section.

Projects are being doled out.

Supervisor Mary says, "Jess K. You're assigned Converse Accession Number Whatever."

I say, "Cool."

Supervisor Mary says, "PS. Hope you don't mind being on TV."

It ended up being a ridiculously long day in which I was asked the craziest conservation questions since my grad school interview. At certain times, I don't exactly know when, you'll be able to watch the show. Follow this link, it will tell you. I kind of never want to see it. Unless, of course, I'm totally awesome.

Host David took a number of casual snapshots after the filming. Keep in mind that this was at like 4:30 in the afternoon. We had all arrived early, and had all been told what colors we should not wear (white, black, red, patterns). We all ended up wearing green and purple. Like all forty of us.

I'm really very professional, I promise.

J-man and Tamara roll their eyes at David's skillz.

He was entranced by how we use dental tools for non-dental purposes.

These images and a brief blurb are from David's show-centric blog.

The Chemical Heritage Foundation

So perhaps the Founding Fathers did not meet up at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. But it made the Timmy's day. So we took his picture outside of the building a few times.

Apparently they have a really fantastic alchemy collection.

Ruby Ambrotypes

An ordinary ambrotype is a photograph made using a collodion (cellulose nitrate) binder on a glass support. The resulting image is actually white, so it looks like a negative. In order for the image to look like a positive, the back of the glass is coated with a dark paint or lacquer or a piece of dark paper or fabric is put behind it.

I knew the one ambrotype that I purchased was a typical ambrotype, since I could see where some of the lacquer was chipped off. The other ambrotype, I really liked the image, and I had a feeling that maybe it was a ruby ambrotype. A ruby ambrotype doesn't need black lacquer or black paper or anything because it was made on a sheet of dark glass.











I dismantled everything once I returned home, to my mini-suction cup. Somebody had attached dark fragments from 35mm film rolls on the back with like medical tape. On September 22, 2006. Which was interesting. I decided to remove it (for a couple reasons, one on which is that it is my object now - ha!). It didn't need anything black behind it anyway, because it was a ruby ambrotype. I could tell as soon as I removed the brass frame - I could see the edge of the glass.


















Sweet! (The circle in the middle is my camera lense reflecting off the glass). My classmate Lisa analyzed a bunch of these during our second year in school, and it turns out that the compound used to make this color is manganese.














You were so worth that $30 Creepy-Eyed Dude.

The St. Catharines Standard: Some TLC for Standard Photo Negatives

Don Fraser, Standard Staff (with slight modifications by me) link here.

The negatives are priceless vignettes of local life from the late 1950s.  One standout shows then Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson grinning at a St. Catharines Legion hall reception.  It's also one of the more damaged of the 600,000 negatives in The Standard collection donated to the St. Catharines Museum in 2007.  The image is crinkly and bubbly, the features of Pearson barely recognizable.

On Thursday, the Canadian Conservation Institute began working on about 200 of the images in need of major restoration.  For the federal government institute, it's the first Ontario site visit doing this kind of work on photo collections.

"This particular batch is an important part of The Standard collection for the museum," said Supervisor Greg, a conservator for the institute. "And it's starting to deteriorate in a significant way.  "It could have been storage conditions, it could have been the manufacturer or a combination of issues. But they're in serious need of work."

Inside a museum basement room, Supervisor Greg and Intern Jessica showed how it's done: a delicate process of separating the negative's silver gelatin emulsion (or image layer) from a deteriorating plastic film base.  After the negative is put in water, a solvent bath dissolves the glue holding the layers together and the gelatin emulsion sloughs off.  That remaining image layer is then scanned, put in a special archival sleeve and stored.  One person can do about three or four images in an hour.  With the help of a $4,000 Niagara Community Foundation grant, private conservator Dorothy McC- will also be helping with the negative treatments.

Museum curator Arden P- described this work as "critical."  "We don't have the financial resources and expertise to be able to do all this in-house," P- said. "These things are dying as we speak and it's so critical to get them treated and scanned.  "It's a long, involved process that can only be done by hand."  The museum and its volunteers have already completed two years of what is anticipated to be a 25-year project of preserving and archiving The Standard's photo collection.

And the accompanying photograph.  This was really nerve-wracking: photographer and reporter and me doing this (which is, like all things, way more difficult that it sounds).  And, to top it off, the negative reacted totally differently than the one Supervisor Greg did the day before.  And in a totally unexpected way too.  But it was okay.

Second Year Flashback: Historic Processes Class

Cyanotype: WUDPAC 2009 Class Portrait

One of the Winterthur photographers took our class portrait.  We then turned it into a digital negative and made cyanotypes with it.  This was an excellent gift for the head of our program, Debbie, as she loves photography, conservation, the program, and the color blue.  And, happily, there were enough proofs that each class member also received a print!

The following are from the elective course Lisa and I did on historic photographic processes: this is a good way to gain a greater understanding of the materials making up photographs.  The course involved mixing the chemicals and coating the papers, which is why there are brush marks and other wacky splotches.  There are several repeats of the same image in different processes - I'm sure I don't need to spell out how this is educational.  I've identified the process of each at the top, and if you have further questions, I guess let me know?  Either way, these suckers are why my lab coat looks like I wore it to a paintball match.

Salted paper print

Cyanotype

Platinum print

Albumen print

Platinum print

Cyanotype

Platinum print

Saturday Busyness

So I painted my room yesterday.  I had been meaning to do it for quite some time, and had purchased the paint far in advance.  However, since I wanted to keep the window open to aid the paint in its off-gassing process, the Canadian Winter was not the optimal time.  Yesterday the day was beautiful, so I flung open the window and cracked open the paint can.

Don't judge - everyone should have a Saint Jude candle.  Good for lost causes and power outages.

The painting required lots of furniture-shifting and subsequent stool-standing and wriggling-through the resultant furniture maze.  But, it was totally worth it (my landlord paid for the supplies - awesome).  My painting is all that Flatmate Andrea has talked of since I began.  It seems to be a mixture of amazement (since I did it by myself, and seemingly randomly) and admiration (since I did a good job).

The day was so beautiful I also took a mid-afternoon painting pause to mess around with the 'sun paper' I bought in Rochester.  This is the same stuff the boy/girl scouts would use to make photogenic drawings of leave and stuff at summer camp.  I remember lying in the grass outside the nature center at Camp Curry Creek with Beth and Gina, waiting for the blue paper to turn white, so that we could make our sun pictures.  The mint-tin is full of thumbtacks and is vintage my undergrad drawing courses.  Not mints.

Since there aren't really any real leaves out yet in Ottawa, I used some awesome negatives from my digital negative stash.  Lisa and I made loads of digital negatives last year as part of our historic photographic processes elective course.

In progress.

Conclusions: sun paper is good for photogenic drawings but not so hot for actual negatives.  Yesterday's results, though not pictured, were not as good as the prints Lisa and I made in our elective course.

Photogenic 'Drawrings'

Completely randomly, on Friday, Supervisor Greg was like, "Hey!  You guys want to make a photogenic drawing?"  Hye-Sung and I responded, "Yeah!"  Photogenic drawings are one-of-a-kind objects because there is no intermediary negative.  I have some really awesome platinum chemistry photogenic drawings I made of leaves last spring.

Supervisor Greg had some old photographer's proofing paper, so we cut out paper shapes and put little translucent objects on top of the paper to block the light.  Then, after sandwiching the photo paper and the light-blockers between a piece of glass and a piece of cardboard, we put our little make-shift printing frames in a window for about an hour.

The Surrealist artist Man Ray used to make photogenic drawings which he egotistically termed Ray-o-grams.  Despite what Man Ray's dubbing of the photogenic drawing may lead you to believe, it is actually one of the oldest photographic techniques.

William Henry Fox Talbot, an early photograph mover/shaker (think 1840-ish), made loads of photogenic drawings.  One of those gentlemen of leisure puttering in the sciences, Talbot worked out of his family's estate, Lacock Abbey, in England.  (Lacock Abbey is also known as being one of the locations where Hogwarts-scenes from the Harry Potter movies are filmed.)

Anna Atkins (working around 1850-ish) used the cyanotype process to create the first photographically illustrated book.  Cyanotypes are some of my favorites.  So blue!

Post-light exposure.  You can see how the photo paper has turned dark.

Hye-Sung wanted hers to be Canada-themed.  So she cut out snowflakes.  I merely hacked at an old page of the Daily Stephen Colbert Desk Calendar, making asymmetrical stars for mine.  And the recycled paper of the calendar was translucent enough that you can read what the Daily Dose of Stephen is in my photogenic drawing, in which he compares children to body-snatchers.  (Thanks Mary Ann!)

Supervisor Greg mixed up some fixer and we put our little prints in the solution, so now they are delightfully permanent.  

(Fun but somewhat science-y fact: though we used a photographic paper relatively similar to what Man Ray would have used, our prints are brown because we left the paper in a window for an extended amount of time.  The silver that formed that way is in the shape of small spheres.  These spheres are small (nm small) and scatter and absorb light in such ways that they appear colored.  Man Ray would use an enlarger to create his Ray-o-grams, developing the print in a chemical solution.  That way the silver that formed in Man Ray's prints looked more like clumps of steel wool.  These wooly bundles are much larger than the sun-made-spheres and absorb the light, appearing black.)