Commission working to save photographic history
Darlington County Historical Commission director Brian Gandy working to restore and preserve archived photographs.
Photo by Samantha Lyles
By Samantha Lyles, Staff Writer, slyles@newsandpress.net
A picture is worth a thousand words, and the staff of the Darlington County Historical Commission is working to salvage and save the photographic encyclopedia of our area with a special yearlong initiative called “The Year of Preservation.”
Brian Gandy, Historical Commission director, says the program aims to restore, digitally scan, catalog, and properly preserve not only the Commission’s archive of images, but those taken by Darlington County residents.
“If you have photographs that are over fifty years old, you can bring in fifty photographs and we will digitize those photos and give you access to the digital file online so you can download copies, and we will keep an archived copy here at the Commission. And if you can document who is in the photograph, that information will be preserved here for as long as we exist,” Gandy says.
Lest you think this program is just a data chunking exercise, know that volunteers and staff are taking great pains to enliven these old images before scanning them into digital immortality. For instance, photos with silver finishes can grow tarnished over time, but a careful cleaning with specialty solvent removes the obscuring layer of age and brightens the picture so much that faces and other details become clear again.
“It’s taking the grime and dirt off… and in some cases lightening the photo by twenty percent, bringing it back to a new level,” Gandy says. “It’s like hands-on Photoshop, but it’s not altering the photo in any way, just clearing away what time has done to it.”
He adds that photos marred by sticky tape residue or ink (or perhaps crayon) are also candidates for this photo cleaning treatment.
“We had several photographs with handwriting, like a child had written all over them, and we were able to take every bit of the ink off and restore those photographs. It is amazing,” says Gandy.
Once the photos are looking their best, they are scanned and stored on both high-capacity hard drives and in Google cloud storage. Gandy says they have preserved over 39 gigabytes so far, with much, much more to come.
The physical photos are preserved in polyester archival sleeves to prevent scratching or damage before returning to storage. Each photo is given a reference number that corresponds to an exact location in the building’s vast archives for the real photograph, as well as providing a keyword-driven index of people, places, events, and objects depicted. This information will make it much easier for Historical Commission staff, visitors, and Internet searchers to find specific pictures.
To learn more about “The Year of Preservation,” contact the Darlington County Historical Commission at (843) 398-4710 or visit them at 204 Hewitt Street in Darlington.