INTERVIEW WITH MELITTE BUCHMAN -
7 February 2013
Joe and I got the privilege of meeting with Melitte Buchman at NYU's Fales Library to speak about her part in the show, scanning some of the original posters and restoring them to look new. In addition to learning some of the more technical aspects of her work and the process, we spoke about larger concerns of digital restoration versus digital preservation, copyright and Cesare Brandi's treatise on restoration, which plays a large role in definition how archivists and historians operate today within their fields.
Here are a few sections from our conversation:
Could you give a general description of how you got involved in the process, who contacted you specifically - was it Edward or Hugh, or was it Michael Cohan?
It came to me through Edward Holland. He and I went to grad
school together. He's a panoramic
photographer, and he's with our staff here. They needed some high-res pictures
for the exhibit that they were putting out. So, I went over to them at the
gallery, and I said thank you for showing me the archival material. They were
too fragile to be through a scanner.
Anyway, I'm the digital content manager here, so it would've come
to me one way or the other. It's just came through a personal route. So when
people need things digitized for preservation, they talk to me because I'm part
of the preservation department and part of the Digital Library.
And how long have you worked here?
Nine years. Do you know
what a digital library is? Digital
libraries were initially invented because it was felt that students didn't want
to go to physical buildings anymore, that they wanted to go to the web and you
had to sort the truth out on the web as opposed to ‑‑ I can do this in
Photoshop and then make it look really neat. If you go through a trusted
portal, which NYU is, and you look one of our projects like this one,
you're going to see the truth of the object.
I think what we're actually talking about is what Cesare Brandi talked
about - the authenticity of the original artifact. Do you know Cesare
Brandi? It’s totally worth reading his stuff. It's about 45 pages. I don't
remember what it was from, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. He was
talking about paintings and historical artifacts. The entire course of
preservation and restoration changed course with that treatise that he wrote
because he was talking about not making things nice, not putting the aesthetic of the present or the
materials of the present into ancient artifacts; so, the idea is that it's a
painting and everything has to be reversible. If it's something that needs to
be stabilized, then you need to respect the historical nature of the thing.
He's really the grandfather of that idea. I was saying that in digital
libraries we take that very seriously, so if we see something that's ripped and
dirty and all of that stuff, we don't try to make it better. We try sort of
this weird exercise where we're using really expensive high‑end equipment where
we could fix these things, but we know it's the wrong thing to do. When you see
a picture that we've made here, it looks within 1 or 2 percent, like the
original artifact, except for the fact that it's completely denatured. It's no
longer in the physical world. For example, part of the reason that we
photograph all of the physical pages with black around them, black surround, is
so you can see that it's a physical page. I find that's the biggest part of my
job is worrying about what is the end‑user going to need to know about the
context of this object to render it mentally correctly.
The thing with Gran Fury was that the posters were how old -
twenty years? And colors had shifted.
There was staining. There were broken edges. There were fingerprints. There
were all kinds of things, and I was about to do what I always do, which is
preserve exactly the look and feel of the historical nature of the thing. And
then I said, “This is what I am doing. Is this what is wanted.” They said, “No,
this isn’t what's wanted. What's really wanted is the way it looked back then.”
So, you get to go into Photoshop and change the white point and clean up the paper. Our equipment is really high end here, so the
result looked great. It looked new. It was huge, and we got rid of the moiré,
which is intrinsic to the printing.
(Referencing her computer screen) Here, this is the perfect
example. It's this kind of thing where if you're photographing something,
especially from a newspaper that has a core screen of about 80 or 85, that when
you digitize it at 300, 400, or 600, it adds this other patterning on top of it
that's not intrinsic to the original. There's a bunch of digital tricks that
you employ to get rid of it, so I did some of that with the Gran Fury things,
too. I don't know if you saw the installation, but it really looks
spectacular.
Yeah, that's what really inspired me to do this because it was
beautifully done.
My problem is it's the wrong thing to do. The only reason I did
it is because curatorial always stands on top of the service provider. I'm the
service provider but the gentlemen that I met ‑‑ it was only with their
approval that I would take this other approach. And part of that is sort of a
philosophical, anti‑colonial thing, like who are we to make decisions about
what your content is?
I have an example that may be helpful of this where we have in our
archives a collection called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade photos. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was part of the Spaniard
Civil War era; communists go over to fight against Franco Luce, but they have a
core of photographers. Two-thirds of their negatives came to us and one‑third
went to Moscow. The two‑thirds that are ours are what photographers call “bulletproof”.
They're super, super dense, which really blows out the value. So it sort of
looks like a snowman in the snow. They look very high contrast and very light.
When I saw the collection, I knew that it was going to be a problem. We [had]
the negatives to process out, but the photographer was still alive, and his
name was Harry Randall. I did an interview, and I said, “You know, when you
were photographing this, how did you see this collection?” He said, “Oh,
they're supposed to look like a good, snappy black‑and‑white that you would see
in a newspaper.” I said, “That's not what they are. They're bulletproof negatives that are very
high contrast.” He said, “You know, we never knew where our chemistry was
coming from. We would be developing a stream in the middle of the night, trying
to avoid dying. What we did was we overdeveloped everything with the hope of
getting anything,” which means, first of all, he's an amateur photographer.
That's not how you handle that. But second of all, it allowed me the
flexibility of being able to say since he is the creator and he is telling me
what he thinks this thing can look like ‑ should look like - then I can take my
digital tools and make it so. I didn't make it so in the master file. I made it
so in the file that we called the derivative making file. So, the master file
actually is a 16‑bit negative of an incredibly low contrast. But the D file, which is what you would see
small JPEGs minted from on the web, looks as close as I could get to a good,
snappy black and white because that's what he had asked me for. That's how he
had defined the collection himself.
So normally I would never, ever do this. I want to make this
really clear - it's bad archival practice to go in there mucking about and
making decisions about bettering something; it was only because the curator
said, “I am Gran Fury, and this is the way I see it” that it let me do that. One
should never be doing that normally.
You provide an answer that I was partially expecting. But, for
example, I spoke with two Gran Fury members, and they each had a different
attitude toward it. Originally as a collective, they had said, you know, “The
art isn't the point. The posters aren't the point. They're not meant to last. It's the message
that's the point.”
Okay, you have to read Cesare Brandi now because what the
collective is doing, they’re making a new object. They’re not making the same
object. In other words, if somebody else did that, it would be infringing on
copyright. Because they have their own copyright, they may do it because it's
their intellectual property. But Cesare Brandi also talks about the fact that
if you are doing a restoration or preservation, you can never have the artist
involved because the artist will always remake the object.
Gran Fury, from my point of view, sees their pieces as content,
and if they're not content, they are content and container. And with content
and container, they have sort of a unique balance. Here we call that kind of
thing “essence and wrapper” - you have the essential message, but it’s mitigated
by what the wrapper is. So, if you see a letter written by George Washington
and the paper is faded, that tells you a great deal not only about the content,
but about all these other sort of characteristics. The object is old, you know.
It's been around a long time. It should be venerated, whereas if it's on a
pristine white sheet of paper, it's no longer the thing, itself. I think people
who are creators or artists tend not to see that, and people who are archivists
and historians tend to see that.
***
You can't talk about digital without talking about copyright, and
we are not able to serve up many things after 1924 because of the copyright
legislation that was passed. You know the story: Ronald Reagan was president,
Mickey Mouse was about to fall out of copyright, and Disney wooed Congress in this
huge, gross political move.
Copyright went from something that was meant to protect the
creators so that they could gain some income from it. And it became something
that corporatized the assets, themselves. And the irony, of course, is that
nobody cared that much about Mickey Mouse, but it forever changed the landscape
of copyright. So that, for us, is always the painful thing. Do we put this
material out here in spite of the fact that we might get sued or we will have a
cease and desist sent to us or don’t we? We've had to set up very distinct user
classes about where these digital files can be seen.
Right. So, to rehash, digitization does change the nature of
the object. Copyright plays a humongous issue.
Putting [archival materials] on the web is seen as publishing,
so it falls under publishing laws, as well. There are always generational
issues in the past. If you had a book and you wanted to save it in
microfilm ‑‑ Microfilm is less desirable than the original book. The thing with the digital copy is if you
make a copy of a digital copy, it's exactly the same as the digital copy; so,
the potential goodness of the file can be exactly the same as the original. And for some reason that has turned against
us in a bad way, when we had hoped it would be liberating. I think in some ways
it is liberating because you can now go to the web and look at, you know ‑‑
Digital Scriptorium will show you the most valuable manuscripts held in this
country, which you never would have been able to see except by getting a pass
from NYPL and gloves and all that. So there's some very good things about being
able to digitize.
***
Going back to earlier in our conversation, I love that term you
use[d], ‘denaturing’. I really like that. I think that gets to the heart of
it.
It's kind of a weird Zen exercise in a way. There are a lot of
digital tools that are made specifically to enhance and make things look
better. We actually have to turn all of those tools off. We calibrate our
equipment so that what you see is what you get. That's hard. All of our
scanners we have to use the photo spectrometer made by X‑Rite. And what we have to do is we have to
calibrate and characterize so that what you see is actually what was
there. It doesn't make it brighter. It doesn't
make it redder. It doesn't make it bluer. The photo spectrometer that we use,
which is a good one, is an expensive device, and you have to be trained on
it. So, you know, we use sort of a moderate
level of spectrometer, which is about $3,000, but people like L.L. Bean, who don't
want to get 10,000 shirt returns because it wasn't exactly that color
blue, use the really high‑end. You could pay millions of dollars. They're not
making any of the stuff for us. We're sort of backing on to ‑‑ We're
appropriating other people's technologies to manage our own.
In my defense, I really enjoyed changing the poster to make it
look cool, and I really enjoyed using my digital skills to make it look big and
sharp and detailed, but it's a bit of a fabrication.
Thanks to Melitte and the Fales Library staff for being so accommodating.
*Photos courtesy of Joe Mondello; portrait of Cesare Brandi via Cesare Brandi official website.
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