Returning to the old family photos after a few months, because the box labels have finally been ordered.1 Some photos were waiting under the pile of books that patiently press the curls out of them. Plenty more photos are ready to start the uncurling process.
Uncurling old photos is not a complicated process and plenty of advice floats around on the interwebs.2 Yet I nonetheless wish to share how I go about it, in case some good can come out of it.
A plastic tub that seals very well, a couple of wire trays from Yeti, and a little bit of water make up my humidifier. I have two wire trays, so I can stack them on top of each other. I have the annoying tendency to use the resources I have rather than acquire new special ones. Advice from the interwebs suggests using a cookie cooling rack, but such a rack is typically fairly low to the ground and with water at the bottom of the tub, I like these taller wire racks. Plus they’re plastic-coated.
The photos uncurl patiently in the humidifier for an hour or two. I set a timer.
When they emerge from the humidifier, they fly straight into an archival folder. The kind archivist behind the link I provide in the footnote recommends putting the photos between two pieces of freezer paper, which I have not been doing until now, but I’ll give it a try. I’m a little nervous since freezer paper has plastic on it. The photos lay between the freezer paper and into an archival folder, which may be overkill, but why not?
The folders are stacked and the pile of books is returned to its place of pressure. The heaviest books I have to place on top of the photos of my Czech relatives are as follows: two German dictionaries, a two-volume set about the Martin Luther exhibit that came to the Minneapolis Institute of Art a few years ago, and sometimes an old American history textbook. If you don’t know Central European history, you may not understand how accurate and correct and proper this stack happens to be.
These photos will sit patiently for a week as they are squashed and oppressed, er, flattened into better shape. The ones I had left for a few months have been transferred to their own photo sleeves and put into a different archival folder for more permanent storage.
Photos of people, even of those people I barely knew, are oddly grounding. I find all historical artifacts grounding, as proof of existence. There she was. There it was. Except that questions arise. Photos were taken for different reasons in different time periods. Photos memorialize events, but for whom? When photography was new and rare, major public events, I’m guessing, were the more likely object of a photo. When photography became available to more and more people, the events memorialized became more personal. In today’s world, when I have a powerful camera/computer in my pocket, photographing the mundane becomes easy. The mundane is more likely to be anonymous. Luckily I know the names of most of the people, even the dogs, in the photos I’m handling. If the name of the person in a photo is unknown, is the photo proof of existence?
I went with the “labeling system” from University Products. It should be more than enough for me to get started on the family archive. https://www.universityproducts.com/document-box-labeling-system-for-archives.html
https://libguides.umflint.edu/blog/Preserving-Your-Family-Photos