In 1999, Paul Messier analyzed two prints by renowned photographer Lewis Hine that were suspected of being forgeries.
Messier, then a private photo conservator, wrote a report outlining the evidence he had collected, which strongly suggested that the prints, supposedly made during Hine’s lifetime and bearing the late artist’s signature, were forgeries. (The prints appeared to contain, for example, brighteners believed to have been used many years after Hine’s death.) But Messier found it difficult to draw firm conclusions.
““I was nervous,” he said. “How do you judge whether you have an authentic connection to the artist, to the moment of creation, or not? I thought it would be very simple, but it was so complex and nuanced and so difficult. When I wrote that report, I ended up with a lot of good data, but I’m not sure it would have held up in court.”
This experience prompted Messier, now Pritzker Director of the Lens Media Lab (LML) at the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale, to look for more effective methods to identify and measure the material properties of photographic paper.
““I had to back up my claims with material facts,” he said at a recent symposium entitled “From the Darkroom to the Data: New Insights into the Material History of Photography” hosted by LML in the OC Marsh Lecture Hall in the Yale Science Building.
Founded in 2015, the LML is a research facility on Yale’s West Campus that combines science with the arts and humanities and develops innovative tools and methods for understanding the history of black-and-white photography. The symposium demonstrated how LML staff are using data to help curators, conservators, and art historians better understand photographic collections and the methods used by artists who make photographs.
After his experience with the questionable Hine prints, Messier began collecting photographic paper – the basic material used to make photographic prints – and eventually amassed a reference collection of about 7,500 specimens dating from 1890 to 2012, the largest known collection of its kind.
He brought his collection to Yale after being appointed founding director of the LML.
The Reference Collection consists of the collection papers and sample books issued by manufacturers to market their products and provides a basis for material-oriented research. It enables researchers to recognize patterns in and across photographic collections, facilitating their maintenance and supporting scientific and scholarly investigations.
Now researchers can easily explore and analyze the collection using Paperbase, an interactive visual platform that LML introduced at the symposium. Designed and built by LML’s chief scientist Damon Crockett, the web application provides access to data – base color, gloss, thickness and texture – from about 7,000 objects in the reference collection.
Crockett demonstrated the tool to those gathered in the lecture hall.
Upon opening the app, users encounter thousands of small cubes, each representing a collectible, arranged in a grid pattern. Each cube is tinted to match the color of the photo paper it represents.
“I designed it that way because in a traditional collection viewer, it’s very difficult to see the entire collection at once,” Crockett said. “For me, that felt a little claustrophobic. I like to zoom all the way out and have that bird’s eye view and see the entire collection.”
Clicking on individual cubes brings up a small text box with basic information about specific papers, including manufacturer, brand, color, texture, gloss, and the date of first manufacture. The background of the text box can be changed to reflect the color of the paper, provide a microscopic view of its texture, or display images of its packaging. Users can access multiple text boxes at once.
An extensive filter menu allows users to browse the collection in detail, for example within a specific date range or by manufacturer, brand, base color, gloss and structure. Users can search for papers that include processing instructions or search for papers that are reverse printed, i.e. have the manufacturer’s logo and/or brand name on the back.
With one click, users can organize the data from their search results into various visual representations that transform the grid view into scatter plots, clusters, and histograms.
Kappy Mintie, senior researcher in art history at the LML, described to participants several case studies on the potential of Paperbase to facilitate research. In one scenario, a researcher searches for the base colour “special cream”. The search revealed that all of the special cream papers in the reference collection belonged to the Gevaluxe brand, which was produced from the 1930s to 1960 by the Belgian manufacturer Gevaert.
“Given these results, it is likely that Gevaert was the only company that used this basic color description,” said Mintie. “This would be very useful for you if you do not know the manufacturer of the paper you are studying.”
To add context, a researcher can use the app to compare the Gevaluxe papers with other papers from the same time period.
Adding color to the backgrounds of the text boxes shows that Special Cream is a warm color. Mintie changed the visual display to a histogram that arranged papers in bars sorted by year of manufacture, with the warmest paper tones at the extreme ends and the coolest in the middle. The Gevaluxe papers occupy the extreme ends of the range, showing that within the reference collection they were the warmest papers produced during that period.
The symposium also highlighted several research partnerships LML has established with key cultural institutions to better understand the material history of photographic collections and the artistic processes of famous photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Man Ray.
Nora Kennedy and Katherine Sanderson, conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, discussed a collaboration with LML that began as an attempt to better understand Man Ray’s process for creating his “Rayograph” photograms—images created by placing objects directly on the surface of photographic paper and then exposing them to light—in preparation for an exhibition opening at the museum in October 2025.
The project soon expanded to include non-rayograph photographs by Man Ray from three private collections and four other institutions, including the Yale University Art Gallery. Researchers examined 55 rayographs and 63 photographs for color, gloss, thickness and texture.
““This is where the importance of the Lens Media Lab becomes very, very clear, both in terms of its paper sample collection and its data processing and digitization capabilities,” said Kennedy, who is the Sherman Fairchild Conservator in charge of the Met’s Department of Photographic Conservation.
LML developed a “Rayograph app” – heavily influenced by Paperbase’s computational and methodological design – to analyze the data they had collected from Man Ray’s photograms and photographs. Among other things, they discovered that almost all of the Rayograph prints they examined were made on matte, not glossy, paper, consistent with his photographic prints.
““From the data we have collected so far, it appears that Man Ray did not have a strong aesthetic preference for his rayographs over other photographic works,” Kennedy said.
In his closing remarks, Messier emphasized that LML’s efforts to quantify and understand the materiality of photographic prints enrich our understanding of artists such as Man Ray who used photography as a medium for creative expression.
““It’s not about data for data’s sake,” he said. “It’s about understanding the creative process. I think that’s fundamental.”
