THE CLASSIC #12
Our magazine has featured quite a few museums over the years, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Musée du Quai Branly.
In this issue, we talk to Malcolm Daniel at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Ettore Molinario, due to open Casa Museo in Milan next spring. It’s the first time we have featured a completely new museum, in this case, a live-in museum, shared by Molinario and his wife Rossella Colombari.
There are also lengthy interviews with Michael W. Sonnenfeldt and Richard Grosbard of MUUS Collection and Robert Muir, Rachel Wetzel, Michael Greisman and Sasha Belgrave each discuss one of their research projects.
On the subject of research. In issue 5, I interviewed conservator Paul Messier and one of the topics we discussed was the monumental effort he put in to get to grips with the Lewis Hine scandal that shook the photography world at the end of the 1990s. Messier’s scientific analysis proved that a large number of vintage Hine prints were in fact recent prints.
His work also provided a useful tool for trade and aficionados alike, for determining the age of prints, that is, if they were printed before or after 1950 when manufacturers of photographic papers began adding optical brightening agents, causing prints to fluoresce when exposed to a blacklight.
Messier had assembled a vast collection of over 7 000 photographic papers to carry out his analysis, dubbed The Paper Reference Collection, since acquired by Lens Media Lab at Yale. On 12 August this year, Messier and the Lens Media Lab held a symposium in New Haven, entitled From Darkroom to Data: New Insights into the Material History of Photography, and unveiled Paperbase, an interactive visual platform making it easy to explore and analyse the collection.
You will find an article about Paperbase on The Classic Platform, our online resource, as well as the first three interviews in a new series, The Next Generation in Classic Photography and Heat and Dust – Captain Linnaeus Tripe’s views of Burma, an article about the prints held by Hulton | Archive, written by the archive’s Vice President Matthew Butson.