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2010 Eastern European Photograph
Conservation Internship Wraps Up

Alexander Vatov observes as NEDCC conservator Claire Grund prepares the treatment of a parchment document. Internship Project Director Monique Fischer looks on.

NEDCC’s 2010 Photograph Conservation Intern, Alexander Vatov, from Sofia, Bulgaria, has finished the last week of his three-month internship at the Center. The program was made possible by grants from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Alexander arrived at NEDCC on September 14 and maintained a busy schedule of benchwork, visiting other conservation labs, attending workshops and courses, and performing consultations. A special focus during the internship was the identification of photographs.

One of the highlights of his internship was a two-day workshop on the Characterization of Silver Gelatin Photographs, which was presented by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation and held at the New York Public Library in New York City. While in New York, Alexander toured the photograph conservation labs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs.

After touring the photograph conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Alexander sat in on a class on photograph identification for the conservation students at NYU, taught by Nora Kennedy.

In October, local trips included visits to the paper conservation lab at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard University.  Alexander was interested in seeing how different types of conservation labs were set up, ranging from the very large to a small private practice. He also conducted a condition survey of a small but significant photograph collection for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in November. He developed a photograph condition assessment form in preparation for the project. 

Bench practice included inpainting a silver gelatin photograph from the NEDCC study collection.

Alexander prepares to shoot a "before treatment" photo in NEDCC's digital documentation studio.

In between his travels he had many hours of dedicated bench time in the NEDCC lab, surface cleaning, washing, mending, and preparing digital documentation of treatments. Alexander was also able to observe many ongoing treatments by NEDCC conservators in the lab.

Alexander said that the internship will have a lasting effect on his professional life and on the collections that he will care for in the future. "The value of museum collections requires a high level of professional care and it is very important to have a conservator with the proper training." The National Museum of History in Sofia, where Alexander works as a paper conservator, has more than 9,000 photographs and negatives in storage, dated from 19th century to the present.