A friend’s basement flooded last night. The creek that previously meandered behind his house is now meandering through his basement. I helped with the salvage of THOUSANDS of photographs, mostly still in the envelopes from the processing place.
I hauled the pics by the garbage bag load to my friends bar, where we laid out the pics to dry. I turned the AC on, and worked through the night. I have no idea what the final outcome will be, when I left there was still a ton more to do. That was with many volunteers helping.
So, what is the “right” thing to do in a case like this? What is the expected outcome?
Public service announcement #1…Reconsider storing valuables in the basement, especially on the floor, especially if a meandering creek is nearby.
PSA #2…Reconsider hanging on to those “naughty” pics of your wife.
Worry more about the negatives than the photos, if they are available and you need to do triage. Maybe just hanging the negatives is enough, but see below…
Call a place that specializes in photo restoration and storage. They might be able to give you free advice on the phone about drying photos and saving negatives that are wet. They might want to know the consistency (sp?) of the negatives and photos, and how long they were in water. You might try the people at LightImpressions. Search for their online site and numbers, they sell foto archive stuff so might have ideas. Maybe google photo archive or something to find other ideas and places to call.
See if the Library of Congress has advice on this. They have some photo archiving ideas online I think. Call them.
Try Kodak company. They might have a help line that would have a chemist, etc. call you back. Try all the other photo film makers. Try your local photoshops that have professional photographers running them.
The photos that are wrinkled might need to be pressed and then scanned (if you don’t have the negatives) to be reprinted. That’s for latter, but may be the only way to save the photo for reprinting.
Let us know what you find. Good luck. Sounds like my worst nightmare.
The biggest concern is preventing the photos from drying out while in contact with each other. If this occurs, they generally will stick to each other resulting in the image being damaged when you pull them apart. If you can, lay them all out individually to dry. If you don’t have the space or time to do them all at the same time, don’t worry about them staying wet (as in really wet, not just damp, so you may want to ADD water to them) for a few days. Don’t forget, most photographic paper is made to stand up to wet chemical processing and extended washing times.
UPDATE…Thanks for the info. Just talked with my friend. Water is being pumped out, and a new washer/dryer/hot water heater will be delivered in a few days. Sounds like our common sense approach to photo conservation was pretty close. He says things look way better than he imagined (he was leaning toward throwing every pic away).
On a funy side note, there really was a pic of his wfe in the buff. At 4 am I happened across that pic, and stared at it trying to figure out what it was. I was looking at it upside down, thinking that her spread legs were arms…
You did the right things, pretty much - separated them, kept them out of the light. The big danger is that they stick together, as somebody mentioned.
For future reference, many people aren’t aware of the expertise and mission of their state archives. I’m not sure if this goes for all states, but here at least part of what the state archives do is help the state’s people with their own archival problems; in other words, they can give you some suggestions on what to do with your photo disaster or your grandmother’s scrapbook. They can really be a great resource sometimes, especially with older photographs or the dreaded scrapbooks.
Somebody mentioned the Library of Congress; they have an excellent preservation section on their site as well:
In addition to advice on the care and feeding of any wax cylinders you may have hanging around, they offer some information on finding and choosing a local archivist and such.
Oh, and for anybody else reading this thread who has pictures in those “magnetic” photo albums, the ones where you peel off the plastic, put your pictures down, and smooth the plastic over them?
Take your pictures out, now. Today. Go home and do it. Put them in an archival-safe storage format. Now! Those things will ruin your pictures. Without fail.