Picture perfect
Picture perfect
Sep 14, 2005: His work has helped to aid the preservation of some of most captivating photographic and cinematic moments of the last century. It has seen him work with the most recognised figure in IT (who also happens to be the world's wealthiest man) and has also led him to working as a consultant to one of the finest movie directors of his-or any-generation. Henry Wilhelm, co-founder and president of Wilhelm Imaging Research, talks to Stuart Finlayson about his fascinating career
For nigh on forty years, Henry Wilhelm has dedicated his time to conducting research on the stability and preservation of traditional and digital colour photographs and motion pictures.
His company-Wilhelm Imaging Research (www.wilhelm-research.com)-publishes brand name-specific permanence data for desktop and large-format inkjet printers and other digital printing devices. Wilhelm Imaging Research also provides consulting services to museums, archives, and commercial collections on sub-zero cold storage for the very long term preservation of still photographs and motion pictures.
Wilhelm also appears frequently as a speaker on inkjet printing technologies and print permanence at industry conferences, trade shows, and museum conservation meetings.He was a founding member of the Photographic Materials Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, is a member of the Electronic Materials Group of AIC, and was a founding member of American National Standards Institute/ISO subcommittee IT9-3 (now called ISO WEG-5 Task Group 4), which is responsible for developing standardised accelerated test methods for the stability of colour photographs and digital print materials. He has served as Secretary of that group since 1984 and is an active member of the ANSI/ISO subcommittees responsible for storage standards for black-and-white films and prints.
He has also served as a consultant to many collecting institutions, including the world renowned Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, on various issues related to the display and preservation of both traditional photographic prints and digital print media.
Fitting the Bill
Since 1995, Wilhelm has been an advisor to Corbis on the long-term preservation of the Corbis Bettmann photography collections in a high-security underground storage facility maintained at minus 20 degrees C (minus 4 degrees F). With more than 11 million images, it is one of the world's largest privately held photography collections.
It was through his work with Corbis that Wilhelm came into contact with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Gates owns Corbis as a private concern, outside of Microsoft.
The Bettmann collection gets its name from Dr Otto Bettmann, founder of one of the most renowned collections of 20th century historical imagery, the Bettmann Archive. According to Corbis' promotional literature, Dr Bettmann virtually invented the image resource business. He emigrated to the United States from Nazi-occupied Germany in 1935, arriving with a few personal effects and two trunks bursting with photographs, line drawings, engravings, and art reproductions. Recognising the historical, emotional, and storytelling power of pictures, he spent the next five decades adding to his collection, resulting in an archive that today boasts over 11 million images and covers every topic imaginable.
Wilhelm recalls that it wasn't long into his association with Corbis when he created something of a stir.
"One of our recommendations was to move the [Bettmann] collection out of New York into a secure, underground cold storage facility. This was rather controversial at the time, as the collection had always resided in New York."
While the decision to move the collection from New York caused some disquiet among the city's populous, Wilhelm was similarly perturbed upon hearing of the collection's new owner when the news was first made public.
"When the New York Times published that Gates had purchased this, my instant reaction was to be horrified because I thought that because he is the ultimate digital guy, he will want to just scan the originals and toss them or let them languish. But it turned out to be one of my most satisfying professional experiences because quite the opposite was true."What Wilhelm didn't realise at the time is that Gates has a great interest in old items that are of historical importance. He has an extensive rare book collection, and is interested in important historical characters and how they operated at the time. Therefore, the staff he had at Corbis had a great sensitivity to the collection as artefacts and viewed the digitisation as a method of delivery rather than a substitute.
"What the Corbis staff also really tuned into was that the original materials had a real value in their own right, and that the original cataloguing system should also be preserved, even though the catalogue had all been published online. Photography has changed so much that the decision was taken to preserve the collection in a similar way to that of a museum so people could see how a stock agency operated back then. It was felt that all the labelling - which is very much of the time-should alsobe retained."
The state-of-the-art, sub-zero temperature 10,000 square foot underground facility where the collection is now housed - in western Pennsylvania - is also home to record label BMG's archives, with studio tapes and master copies of albums stored there, as are the film archives of many of the leading Hollywood studios.
Moving the collection to cold storage has tremendously increased the life of the original materials in the collection.
In the beginning
"I had my first dark room when I was 12 years old, but there are several things that are probably more pivotal," says Wilhelm of what drew him into his chosen profession. "For example, my first job in high school was for a company that made colour measuring instruments. I was also a very active participant in science fairs and it was at one such fair that a system I built and designed to measure the time it takes for sound to travel through the air that I was approached by one of the judges and offered a job on the spot." Wilhelm duly accepted.
One of the projects that the company was involved with was for domestic cleaning products giant Procter & Gamble. They wanted to numerically quantify the discolouration of white clothing when washed repeatedly.
"I was involved in this project and learned a great deal about "yellowing" things and how you measure it. Then between high school and college I joined a government volunteer organisation known as the Peace Corps, and I found myself in the rainforests of Bolivia."It was at this point when Wilhelm-who is a keen photographer-noticed how atmospheric conditions such as heat and humidity accelerated the "yellowing" or deterioration of photographic prints considerably.
"Most of the people in the village where I lived were very poor in the economic sense, although they didn't behave as though they were poor and were mostly very happy. A consequence of this was that most of them did not have a camera, but they all still had photos, as travellers would come and take photos of them and their family and leave them prints."
Seeing for himself how quickly these photographs-which were capturing that period in history-were deteriorating, helped steer Wilhelm into dedicating his life into researching what makes images deteriorate and how to arrest the decline.
"When you are immersed in a completely different culture, almost everything is interesting because it is different. Photography is similar in that sense. For example, if you take a photo of downtown Sydney then wait fifty years, everything will be different-the clothes people are wearing; the cars; buildings will be gone and new ones erected in their place. So photography is a record of a point in history, and ultimately, because of my experience in Bolivia and because of my love of photography, I decided to make it my life's work to help preserve images."
The nuts and bolts
"Our main business now is the testing of prototype products that may be commercialised in the future," reveals Wilhelm. "We have to use prototype products because vendors want to have the permanence data available for release when the product is launched. We no longer allow visitors to our facility because of the prototype systems we have there, which need to be kept under wraps.
"We also do confirmation tests with the market product because we want to make sure that everybody knows in advance that when they send us a prototype it is going to be compared with what is eventually released to the market. We are extremely careful about that because if it emerged elsewhere that the market product was very different from the prototype, our whole business model would be shot."
And because Wilhelm Imaging Research works with the vast majority of printer manufacturers and insists on testing all equipment and peripherals using exactly the same technique in the same conditions, it allows customers to make direct comparisons.
"What we have brought to the industry is a unified test method. In terms of what we do, the web is a perfect vehicle. We don't charge for any information published on our website, nor do we accept any advertising.
"Also, when people ask how long their prints will last, they are thinking about it in terms of years, so to be able to answer that question you have to standardise your testing methods to get those comparative results."
A worrying trend
One of the most concerning aspects of the imaging market for Wilhelm at the moment is the decision by some manufacturers of printer inks and photo paper to avoid the issue of permanence altogether. This is especially prevalent among the makers of consumables at the lower end of the price spectrum.
So how do you go about determining that an image will last for, say, 76 years before showing visible signs of deterioration, when you only have a limited amount of time to produce results?
The answer is accelerated testing, but as Wilhelm explains, the technique is not without its drawbacks.
"Say you've got an egg-if you keep it nice and warm and next to the chicken, a chick will eventually pop out, but if you put it in a frying pan you'll end up with a fried egg. It's a totally different result which is based on the temperature.
"With photography, that's the real problem with all accelerated tests-ideally we wouldn't accelerate it at all; we would just hang it on the wall and wait, but you can't do that. So what we do instead is use the lowest level acceleration possible that produces data in a reasonable amount of time.
Wilhelm says the quality of some of the inks these days makes the task that bit harder. "When inks faded fast, that was not such a problem, but now we have higher stability inks, the tests take longer and longer. Now our colour tests take almost a year and the black and white ones take even longer.
"We've resisted changing our tests to even higher lighting levels, as some of our customers would like us to do because they want faster results. The reason being is that we know that the faster the acceleration, the more problematic the testing becomes and the less reliable the results become.
"Basically the idea of any accelerated test is that if you double the light you should double the fading rate, and continue that to multiple degrees. It's not perfect science, but it's the best we can do right now and it's an awful lot better than no information."
A little bit of movie history
As mentioned earlier in the piece, Corbis shares its underground cold storage facility with some of the major Hollywood studios.
The movie studios have not always regarded their film stock as a precious commodity, but the development of TV and video changed all that, as Wilhelm explains.
"What was missing in the early days of Hollywood is that when a film's theatre run ended, that was it. It was not until cable TV and video rental came about that the films became valuable again as new markets were created. That has helped the preservation."New formats also present the studios with the opportunity to generate revenue by re-releasing movies, but this can only be achieved cost-effectively by maintaining the original film.
"To move films into HDTV format you have to go back to the original. If it has been fading over this period, the colour correction and scene restoration can be done digitally, but this is a very labour intensive task and costs a lot of money. It is much cheaper to preserve the film properly," says Wilhelm.
"Films are worth a fortune-their collection is valued at well over a billion dollars and the insurance they pay reflects that," notes Wilhelm.
"With cold storage, the emphasis has returned to preserving the original in a highly secure place, which does not happen to be Los Angeles - what with its earthquakes, riots, etc, it can be a pretty precarious place for something as valuable as this. There are also very real security concerns, particularly with new films that haven't been released yet, that a member of staff will borrow the negative overnight and scan the whole thing at high resolution-and there are plenty of places where you can do that. Therefore, security is really tight.
In the early 1980's, Wilhelm served as a technical adviser to film director Martin Scorsese. It was during this time that Wilhelm helped the renowned director succeed in his campaign in to persuade Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. to increase the stability of their motion picture colour negative and colour print films.
"Throughout the 1970's, the companies making motion picture print stock - which is what you see in the cinema - considered its permanence to be unimportant, the reason being that they considered it to be expendable once the movie completed its cinematic run.
"Scorcese was the first to protest against this and he started a petition because he realised that these still had real value.
"I had a number of meetings with him in New York, which was a very interesting experience. I remember he was a very intense guy, so much so that I felt he was ready to explode at any moment, because he never stopped for a second."
He realised that his place in history as a director depended on the survival of his films in good condition so he got all his film star friends together to sign a petition demanding that manufacturers made more stable film.
Scorcese succeeded by shaming them into it, as it was a front page story in Variety magazine and was picked up by many newspapers across the US and overseas.
"That's what really swung things, as the publicity was terrible for the manufacturers because it got a tremendous amount of coverage. It made me realise what a tremendous influence the media can have for a worthwhile cause."
The media and the famous faces such as Scorcese make get all the credit, but the efforts of unsung figures such as Wilhelm in preserving the rich fabric of our cultural heritage cannot be overstated.
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