Physics Meets Photo Preservation

Researchers at the University of Rochester and the George Eastman House bring their expertise in nanotechnology and photography to bear on preserving 19th-century daguerreotypes.

Daguerreotypes are the first photographic images, formed by a process Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented in 1839. The predominant mode of photography in the United States until the Civil War, daguerreotypes are unique, nonreproducible images of almost confounding clarity—and they may be deteriorating before our eyes. No one knows exactly why, or how to save them.

Ralph Wiegandt—senior project conservator at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film—together with Nicholas Bigelow, the Lee A. Dubridge Professor of Physics, are racing for answers. Using 21st-century technology, they’re trying to learn more about the science of daguerreotypes, the nanotechnology created by 19th-century inventors that makes them possible, and the activities of nanoparticles that may be their undoing.

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