A New Partnership with the Accademia di Brera for the Restoration of Our Photographic Collection
Ever since it was first set up, one of the most important missions of our Foundation has been to protect and preserve the company’s heritage, also by working with other cultural and academic institutions. This has led to our collaboration with the Accademia di Brera, an institution with which the Foundation has already worked in the past, to protect our collection of historical photographs, which includes hundreds of thousands of shots (negatives on plate and film, prints, and slides), made to advertise products, to illustrate company magazines and to record and communicate the company’s activities from the 1910s to the 1990s. A week of intense work has just come to an end for the students on the academy’s course in photograph restoration. During a five-day on-site course, the students, led by their teacher Alice Laudisa, were able to practice cleaning and restoring about a thousand negatives from the Archive.
The activity focused on the collection of transparencies: about 18,000 negatives and colour transparencies on film and glass plate mostly made between the 1950s and 1970s and preserved in parchment envelopes kept in small cardboard boxes. The collection presented some critical issues regarding the conservation and quality of the images. On the one hand, the original materials are not suitable for permanent conservation, while on the other, the images fixed on fragile and delicate supports such as plates can be difficult to make out. The students thus worked on cleaning and reconditioning the materials, and on recomposing the damaged plates by placing them in passe-partouts. A descriptive sheet was compiled for each transparency and a photograph was taken of each one on a light box, to make sure it could be viewed properly and to facilitate the cataloguing and digitisation processes that will come after this initial risk-prevention phase. The students were able to put into practice the restoration techniques they had learnt during the course and practice on different types of original materials, thanks to the variety and richness of the items preserved by our Foundation in its archive.
Ever since it was first set up, one of the most important missions of our Foundation has been to protect and preserve the company’s heritage, also by working with other cultural and academic institutions. This has led to our collaboration with the Accademia di Brera, an institution with which the Foundation has already worked in the past, to protect our collection of historical photographs, which includes hundreds of thousands of shots (negatives on plate and film, prints, and slides), made to advertise products, to illustrate company magazines and to record and communicate the company’s activities from the 1910s to the 1990s. A week of intense work has just come to an end for the students on the academy’s course in photograph restoration. During a five-day on-site course, the students, led by their teacher Alice Laudisa, were able to practice cleaning and restoring about a thousand negatives from the Archive.
The activity focused on the collection of transparencies: about 18,000 negatives and colour transparencies on film and glass plate mostly made between the 1950s and 1970s and preserved in parchment envelopes kept in small cardboard boxes. The collection presented some critical issues regarding the conservation and quality of the images. On the one hand, the original materials are not suitable for permanent conservation, while on the other, the images fixed on fragile and delicate supports such as plates can be difficult to make out. The students thus worked on cleaning and reconditioning the materials, and on recomposing the damaged plates by placing them in passe-partouts. A descriptive sheet was compiled for each transparency and a photograph was taken of each one on a light box, to make sure it could be viewed properly and to facilitate the cataloguing and digitisation processes that will come after this initial risk-prevention phase. The students were able to put into practice the restoration techniques they had learnt during the course and practice on different types of original materials, thanks to the variety and richness of the items preserved by our Foundation in its archive.