43rd Annual Meeting – Photographic Materials, May 16th, "Characterization of the Diane Arbus Archive" by Janka Krizanova

Janka Krizanova, Research Scholar in Photograph Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has focused her time at the Met on the in-depth study of the Diane Arbus Archive. The Diane Arbus Archive was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 and contains 800 final prints, 800 work prints, over 6,200 rolls of film, over 6,500 contact sheets, the artist’s personal library, photographic ephemera and equipment. Krizanova’s tasks of characterizing the materials in the archive can seem quite overwhelming but the wealth of materials offers a unique opportunity to delve deeper into the artist’s working method.
After completing an overview of the archive, Krizanova selected 26 photographs that were representative of the different papers used by Arbus. One remarkable aspect to the archive is the presence of several empty photographic paper boxes. This aids in the characterization of the papers in the archive. Krizanova was able to find and obtain unexposed boxes of paper and paper catalogs by different manufactures that correlated with the empty boxes in the archive. Using a step tablet, Krizanova printed several of the papers she purchased to perform comparative analysis with the selected papers in the archive. She is in the process of performing the technical characterization on the 26 representative photographs in the Arbus archive, 5 printed reference samples, and three paper catalogs.
The characterization Krizanova will perform includes: dimensions, thickness, backprinting, surface topography, XRF, color measurements, and fiber ID. She has already collected the dimensions, thickness, back printing, and surface topography of the selected materials. The 26 representative prints in the archive exhibit a range of dimensions including; 8×10, 8 ½x11, 11×14, and 20×26. The thickness measurements illustrate Arbus used both single and double weight papers. Backprint was present on 8 of the 26 prints; five with Agfa and three with Kodak. The surface topography suggests Arbus typically used smooth, glossy papers and she likely used Kodak Ektamatic SC for her contact sheets.
For the last year of her fellowship, Krizanova plans to broaden the selection of prints to characterize in the archive, continue to work on the surface topography using the “texturescope” developed by Paul Messier, and collect the XRF, color measurements, and fiber ID from the selected samples. Krizanova also plans to conduct analysis on the stabilization prints found in the archive. At the end of her fellowship Krizanova intends to publish a paper about the technical characterization of the Diane Arbus archive.