Athletic Archive Cyanotype Photograph Intake: Protecting Blue Team Photographs Before Digitization
Athletic archive cyanotype photograph intake is the pre-digitization assessment process that examines possible historic school team photographs for the visual and physical characteristics associated with the cyanotype process — the distinctive blue Prussian-blue image tone produced by an iron-based chemistry — and determines how each print should be re-housed, documented, and routed before any scanning or handling decision is made. When a school athletic archive holds team photographs from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, some of those images may be cyanotype prints: a photographic process based on ferric iron salts that produces a characteristic Prussian-blue image ranging from rich deep blue in the shadows to pale cyan-white in the highlights. The iron-based chemistry that gives cyanotypes their color is also what makes them chemically distinct from gelatin silver and albumen prints — and what makes standard photographic enclosure guidance potentially damaging if applied without process-specific review. Buffered, alkaline enclosures recommended for many photographic materials are not appropriate for cyanotypes: alkaline chemistry can bleach and fade the iron-based cyanotype image. Getting the enclosure decision right is one of the first practical actions of a cyanotype intake workflow.
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