Lorin remembers the day he found the photograph in the early 1990s. After lunch with his parents - "at the new version of the Belden Deli" - they made their way to a garage sale in the gymnasium at Francis Parker School in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. Lorin recalls, "We walked into the gymnasium, and I saw this photo of a ballet dancer in a ratty wooden frame. It had a $5 tag on it."
Digitalization is a relatively new way of preserving heritage. Whether family heirlooms or documents of cultural significance, digitizing allows us to keep history safe and share it with others as facsimiles or electronic images. While some items can be safely digitized at home, here at The Center we often see items of extreme delicacy, brittleness, or constructed in such a way that makes do-it-yourself scanning a risky prospect.
One hundred twenty years of dust, grime, soot, and age - the early twentieth-century membership photographs from the Chicago chapter of the Scottish Rite showed their years. The photographs were taken and developed by the Gibson, Sykes & Fowler studio, one of Chicago's earliest photography studios that opened circa 1860.
Antique photography presents a challenging set of condition issues for any conservator. They are inherently delicate and often have significant inherent vices. Inherent vice - also known as an inherent fault - is the object's likelihood of deterioration because of the qualities of the materials initially used, not because of anything that happened to the artwork during its lifetime.
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