Preserving the 175,000 FSA photographs, one at a time

Cover Photo Caption: About 1,500 of the FSA photographs were shot in color, then a new medium, including this shot of Faro and Doris Caudill,homesteaders in Pie Town, New Mexico, in the fall of 1940. Photo: Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library of Congress declared simply: “Here we are in the digital darkroom of the Prints and Photographs Division, where a 16-year-long effort to digitize in high resolution the 175,000 or so Farm Security Administration photographs of the country in the 1930s and ’40s is coming to an end, perhaps by the end of this year.”

It’s kind of a big deal.

Helen McNamara, a digital library technician, prepares a Farm Security Administration negative for scanning. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The FSA’s work (also carried out under the names of the Resettlement Administration and the Office of War Information) was intended to be daily publicity and propaganda for New Deal-era social programs that ran from 1935 to 1944. But over time, the images became some of the most iconic documentary photographs in American history, and the photographers some of the most revered.

There is Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” Arthur Rothstein’s Dust Bowl-defining images, Russell Lee’s Southside Chicago photo of “Negro Boys on Easter Morning,” and dozens of others, including work by Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee and Jack Delano.

This 1936 Dorothea Lange photo at a farm camp in Nipomo, California, became known as “Migrant Mother” and the most famous photo of the Depression. It is printed full frame here to show FSA identification markings. The woman in the photo was not identified until the 1980s. She was Florence Owens Thompson. Prints and Photographs Division.

They have been used for decades in books, documentaries, feature films, photography retrospectives, museum collections and endless newspaper, magazine and online stories. The Library issued its “Fields of Vision” photobook series in 2008, chronicling the work of several of these photographers.

Still, the chemical-laden images are eight decades old and deterioration has begun to set in on some due to their age. Making digital copies is essential both for their long-term survival and for ongoing historical study.

“For researchers … digital images are obviously a gazillion times better than looking at the original negative,” says Taren Ouellette, a digital library specialist who has worked on the project since its inception and now manages it. “You’re not having to pore over a negative with a loupe (a small magnifier), saying ‘What is this in the background?’ You can zoom in on your screen, and the image resolution is so high that you can read remote street signs and pick up other details.”

The FSA negatives were entrusted to the Library in 1944. For decades, they could only be accessed on-site, through prints or copies of prints. Meanwhile, other photographs went virtually unseen for years; Wolcott’s work was not widely appreciated until the 1970s and ’80s.

(Left) Few images defined the Dust Bowl better than this April 1936 photo from Cimarron County, Oklahoma, of a father and his two sons caught in a dust storm. Photo: Arthur Rothstein. (Upper-Right) Southside of Chicago on Easter Sunday, 1941 became one of the iconic photos of the Farm Security Administration’s photo program. (Lower-Right) Walker Evans took this photograph of a general store in Moundville, Alabama, in the summer of 1936. All Photos Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division.

In the 1990s, the Library used newly available technology to make a first pass at digitizing the negatives, but the tools of the time could not create high-resolution images.

That was problematic because the film had been roughly treated when it was first produced – it was seen as journalism, not art – and dust specs or small scratches on the original negatives were not uncommon. Also, heavy usage in the intervening decades had taken a toll. (The Library has long since moved the negatives into its off-site storage at Fort Meade; patrons can no longer handle them.)

Even after a new digitization project began in 2010, the task was still daunting. Cameras required four photographs of a negative to produce one high-resolution file. Each image had to be carefully stitched together.

The acquisition of two 150-megapixel cameras greatly sped up the process – just one photo per negative required – but it’s still a small lab and with no more than one or two technicians at a time.

Further complicating the process, the FSA photo stock is varied, made by different manufacturers at different sizes for different cameras. They all are aging differently. Some negatives are on nitrate (preserved in fire-proof rooms at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia), some are on 35 mm film strips, a few even on old-fashioned glass. Mostly they are 3-by-4-inch or 4-by-5-inch single negatives, which gives them their great depth of field and clarity.

Digitizing each image is a study in patience.

Technicians call up several boxes of negatives at a time, each with about 275 negatives, from cold storage to the digital lab in the James Madison Building. A technician opens the box, pulls a negative from its sleeve and places it on a custom-made photo table. Each item is cleaned and inspected, then placed in front of a camera on the table. The image is photographed, then the digital image is inspected again.

Let’s check in to see how this works.

In the dim light of the lab, Helen McNamara, a digital library technician, zooms in to look at a tiny, squiggly white line on a full-size image she’s just made of a negative. It’s a 1941 photo of a man in an office, but McNamara is staring at the squiggly line.

“A hair,” she murmurs.

She turns to the original negative and gets a small air bulb. She gently squeezes the bulb and a puff of air flows across the negative. Poof — the offending hair floats away.

She then replaces the negative on a stand with a stabilized camera and takes a new image. She then checks it again for focus, clarity, any remaining specs of dust or other flaws that can be corrected.

“We don’t retouch anything and we shoot everything full frame,” Ouellette says. “The idea is to preserve it as it is. If we can’t get something tiny off with the air bulb or some other minimal work, we’re not doing anything to it.”

Once the image is complete, McNamara saves the digitized image, which will be checked again and eventually uploaded to the Library’s website. She then removes the negative from the camera set-up, refiles it in a small envelope, and places that envelope back in its rectangular gray filing box.

Working in this manner, the staff gets about 1,000 images done each month — about 50 every working day, or about six an hour, one every 10 minutes or so. That’s somewhere around 12,000 per year out of catalogue of 175,000.

More than 160,000 have been digitized. The project is now in the home stretch.

Ouellette, who processes negatives herself each day, is excited about the collection’s importance but is straightforward about the slow pace of digitizing each image carefully.

“This gets tedious,” she says. “I tell the staff, ‘Please don’t shoot all day. I don’t want you to go insane. You’ve got to keep a fresh eye.’ ”