on photographic restoration

I have become a digital archivist of family images. My own fear of losing touch with the visual evidence of my history has compelled me to scan and store photographs from family collections. When you reproduce an image digitally there are a wide range of alterations you can make. In an instant, specks of dust from the surface of the photograph can be removed. This initial ‘correction’ opens up a vast range of possible actions. Damage, age spots and discolorations, cracks in the emulsion and foxing of the paper: what do you do with these?

I saw an advertisement recently for a photographic restoration service. The restorer warned that their clients sometimes wept when they saw the mended family photo. I do not doubt that customers sometimes get emotional when confronted by a family restoration. I am almost certain that a perfect restoration of the past is exactly what many people would love to see. In actual fact a digital restoration is capable of an improvement on the original print. Clumsy hand tinting can be smoothed over, a badly exposed image made rich and velvety. What is actually being restored here therefore is not entirely clear. Hubert Damisch’s observation on photography’s initial project seems appropriate: “the capturing and restoration of an image already worn beyond repair”. The image of children playing with their Christmas presents is certainly a time-worn one. I am tempted to restore some happy perfection to the physical image, but I am reminded that the taking of the photograph in the first place was an attempt at restoration. Children posed with party hats and presents, shirts partly tucked in as per instruction, toys not yet broken, dress not yet dirty: an image intended to convey familial perfection.

So I am leaving most of the surface damage. It is not my job to correct the passing of time. Here are the Pedersen children on a Christmas morning sometime in the late 1940s. My father’s hands place the tin train on its circular tracks with curious solemnity.

Reference: Damisch, H. (1978) “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image”, October, Vol. 5, Summer, pp70-72