Material Matters
Paul Messier, the founding director of Yale University’s Lens Media Lab, is a student of art history and conservation. His aesthetic impulses initially leaned toward Italian and French paintings, but he made the leap to photography when apprenticing with José Orraca, who was enlisted by Georgia O’Keeffe to preserve Alfred Stieglitz’s prints when photographic conservation was in its infancy. A decade plus later, Messier blocked an attempted forgery of Lewis Hine prints, putting collectors on high alert while making himself a go-to guy in the burgeoning market for fine art photography—and fraud detection. As owner/ founder of one of the world’s largest conservation studios, begun in Boston in 1994, Messier continues to advise clients, from private collectors to major museums, as an independent conservator. He sees his role, “bridging the complex web of art-historical and market-driven forces,” as critical to how photography is perceived today.
Paul Messier alongside Sarah Schlick (center) and Genevieve Antoine (right) in the Lens Media Lab at the Institute for the Preserva- tion of Cultural Heritage. Photo: Susan Rand Brown.
“The higher the stakes,” Messier explained over lunch in downtown New Haven, “the more important provenance becomes, not just the image but its material basis,” taking into consideration such features as the gloss, texture and thickness of the paper. Given the current flow of digital images circulating globally, material attribution, even for professional photographers, could disappear. At this moment, Messier is also involved in questions about digital (non- material) photography: What happens as digital imagery becomes the universal currency?
Arriving at Yale in 2015, Messier team-taught undergraduates, taking students behind the scenes to view Robert Mapplethorpe’s prints at the Guggenheim. “Curators and conservators pulled out a selection of prints and talked about image content, how a film negative was made into a physical print. We don’t ordinarily think of these things,” he said in his gentle, professorial voice. “Too often, when we think of a photograph, we think of the image and not its material history. The role of the lab is to provide scientific tools toward this goal, to animate the physical image.” In this post-paper era, animating an image through its material underpinning is a complex challenge. It’s on Messier’s mind as we leave the Gothic Revival architecture of Yale’s main campus in New Haven and head for Yale’s West Campus.
He led the way through the soaring structure housing the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and its handful of sparkling rooms designed for the Lens Media Lab, including the kind of darkroom with developing trays now rarely seen. Throughout, the lab’s focus is on decoding the material language of black- and-white photography through analysis of historic photographic papers. Messier oversees two research associates—one a writer and budding conservator and the other a chemist. Messier also enlisted a data scientist to analyze the results of this research.
Messier (never a serious photographer himself) learned to look at his profession through the prism of an explorer. When Yale invited him to create this science-based conservation lab, the institution also acquired his reference archive of 19th- and 20th-century photographic papers, the world’s largest and most unique collection. Messier called this treasure chest the “genome of black-and-white-photography.” The collection of roughly 6,500 paper samples was assembled primarily through eBay auctions. “This is the sort of collection only possible through eBay,” Messier explained, “as it provided a centralized platform for the consolidation of materials coming out of obsolete darkrooms.” In the Lens Media Lab, papers are preserved in a cold storage unit, their colorful unopened packages (the paper is extremely light sensitive) with elaborate typefaces reading Ilford, Gekko and Oriental as enticing to the modern eye as they were in a different time.
Sounding the alarm more than a decade ago in a piece titled “The Demise of an Art Medium,” (Art on Paper, March/April, 2007) West Coast art appraiser Amanda Doenitz likened Messier’s then-private collection to an “agricultural seed bank” aimed at protecting information about photography’s material history should disaster occur. Continuing to look ahead, enlarging the definition of “photography” to include images coded in computer-speak rather than chemicals and paper portends opportunity for Messier. Anticipating Material Immaterial, an interdisciplinary gathering of stakeholders hosted in early autumn by the Lens Media Lab, Messier said, “A photograph collection is not just a bunch of images. There is meaning and coded information in materials, and having the tools to get at that meaning is going to remain important, even as our visual culture has made the pivot” to include images conveyed in bits and bytes.
Susan Rand Brown is a poet, art critic and frequent contributor to Art New England. She also writes for Provincetown Arts and The Provincetown Banner.