Alumnus Update: Rahul Sharma
Rahul Sharma is a 2018 scholar who pursued an MA in Conservation and Restoration Photograph Specialization at the University of Amsterdam.
In this week’s post he writes about his time as a research scholar at the Centre for Creative Photography (CCP), in the University of Arizona, Tucson.
In my previous update for the INLAKS blog in 2019, I talked about developing a deeper understanding of material interactions, and how that relates to the photographic objects. I’m still on the same journey, although the settings have changed, and horizons have broadened. I am currently a research scholar at the Centre for Creative Photography (CCP), in the University of Arizona, Tucson, and this is the final part of my conservation training from the University of Amsterdam.
In 2020, I was researching Hand Coloured photos from Japan in the 19th century for my thesis. Working out of the Rijksmuseum labs, I had expected to use extensive analytical testing to identify the colourants. Instead, the week prior to the start of the technical analysis, the Rijksmuseum, and all of the Netherlands shut down due to COVID-19. All I had were multispectral images of the hand painted photos. The actual photographs themselves were still in the studio, inaccessible.
My thesis supervisor, Dr Bas van Velzen advised me to think as a 19th century scientist would. In hindsight, this has been the best piece of advice I have gotten so far, but more on this later. With nothing ion hand except the multispectral photographs, I started. Confined at home, I read everything I could find online remotely related to 19th century pigments and dyes. Oral histories of dyers, customs documents, advertisements in magazines, letters to editors. Simultaneously, I started exploring image analysis. Knowing nothing about computer programming, I found an open source machine learning program to classify images.
Working iteratively, I pieced together the picture, and finished my thesis. This was followed up with a paper that used my findings as a spring board to explore mobility of paper and dyes from Europe to Asia in the 19th century, revealing how slavery in the American South, the colonization of Egypt, chicken farming in Saxony, and Coal-Tar derivatives played a role in making the photographs from Japan possible. The paper is due for publication in the journal Trans Asia Photography in July 2022.
From all this, I think the important take away for me was the advice to think like a 19th century scientist; to be flexible and make do, to use empirical evidence based on simple and accessible tests, and finally, apply rigorous reasoning. This philosophy will be useful when I move back to India in November, and start my conservation practice. Prior to coming to Amsterdam, when I read conservation journals, I was always impressed by the technical analyses, the graphs, and the spectra. It seemed to me the way to do conservation was to throw the full might of a university chemistry department on an object, probe it inside-out, and then treat the object; otherwise, it was just guesswork.
But the more I think as a 19th century scientist, the more I realise that the way forward is actually having a deep understanding of the materials, and a willingness to display adaptability. In other words, jugaad.
This approach is of course not innovative in itself. Last winter, I worked on a three month project of microfading, where a high powered light source is focused onto a sub mm spot, for accelerated age testing on actual art objects. This is a cutting-edge technique, and I was working with PhD scholar Gauthier Patin (University of Amsterdam), who developed his own microfader. The machine was made up of off-the-shelf components, 3D printed parts, and computer code that Gauthier wrote. The machine is more flexible than commercial products, and is already being used on objects in museum collections.
To display adaptability, and improvise is something we all learn in conservation in India. I had a colleague who made a steam cleaner for sculpture using a coffee steamer in under 20,000 rupees, because imported steam cleaners cost lakhs. Another colleague made exhibition mounts using Whatman filter paper, because acid free mounting materials were just not available at the time in India.
So why was it that I imagined that conservation in the west was more advanced, even though we in India were coming up with innovative and low cost solutions for problems? Maybe it was because my colleagues in the west published more?, Maybe it was because conservation came to India from Europe in the 70’s and 80’s, and we just thought that techniques would come from the west to us in the east. Or maybe it was just an internalized notion that folks in the West did things better than the rest, or for that matter, were just plain better.
Having spent the past four years, both at the University of Amsterdam, and the Centre for Creative Photography; I have come to realize that is not the case. My time at both these institutes has been a tremendous learning experience. And, my biggest realization from it all was that it is possible to do world class conservation in India, without the veneer of hi-tech science I had previously read about in all the journals. This is not to say there is no place for science in conservation. There absolutely is. But science happened even when people did not have synchrotrons, and supercomputers, which are some of the things used in conservation science now.
Today at the CCP, I am working on photographs by photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, Bruce Davidson, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, and William Mortensen. I never thought I would get a chance to handle their photos, let alone conserve them. Materials have changed, but conservation approaches and philosophies have remained the same over three continents that I have worked in.
In my previous post, I thanked the INLAKS foundation for the gift of time which allowed me to engage with the materials and techniques of photography to a depth that just wouldn’t be possible otherwise. My gratitude not only abides, but has doubled, because I have learned that I can come back to India and work to the level as I did in the west, and share what I have learned with colleagues all around the world. If not for broadening the scope of conservation in India, then at least to know that the only thing holding us back is ourselves.
Cover Image: Photograph while operating Microfade apparatus; photograph: Edith Steen
