Conservator Gary Albright will present “The Intensification of Photographs: Observations from Recent Research and Practice,” a lecture and seminar in the Brodsky Series for the Advancement of Library Conservation focusing on the preservation of historical black and white photographic prints.
Gary Albright
The lecture will be held on Thursday, March 26, at 5 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, Bird Library, with a reception to follow. The workshop will take place on Friday, March 27, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Lemke Seminar Room, Special Collections Research Center, on the sixth floor of Bird Library. Both events are free and open to the public; however the workshop requires advance registration. To register, contact Barbara Brooker at 315-443-9763 or bbbrooke@syr.edu.
As cultural objects, photographs require special care. They react aggressively to the climate and can suffer from inherent problems as a result of their chemical composition. Albright’s program will familiarize participants with the construction and unique problems of photographs and offer practical advice on their preservation. He will also cover current storage standards and factors to consider when preparing a photographic exhibition. The focus of the sessions will be on black and white; however other aspects of photography will be addressed as time permits.
Albright is a conservator of paper and photographs in private practice. During his career, he has treated a diverse array of objects, including the Emancipation Proclamation, a Honus Wagner baseball card, Ansel Adams’ photographs and working drafts of the U.S. Constitution. He is a graduate of the Winterthur Museum/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. He has served as conservator at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., where he taught in the advanced residency program for photograph conservators, and as senior paper and photograph conservator at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, Andover, Mass. Albright has been a visiting professor at the State University of Buffalo, the University of Delaware and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
