Athletic Archive Chromogenic Color Prints: Document Fading Before Digitizing Team Photos
Athletic archive chromogenic color print fading intake is the pre-digitization assessment process that provisionally identifies color team photographs as likely chromogenic prints, documents visible dye fading and color shifts in each print’s current state, records prior storage conditions that bear on fading severity, and separates an unchanged preservation capture from any labeled, color-corrected display derivative produced afterward. Color team photographs from the mid-1960s onward — the team portraits, individual athlete images, and candid photographs that document school athletic seasons across five or more decades — are in most cases chromogenic prints: photographs whose color is formed by organic dyes synthesized during development. Those dyes fade through chemical reactions driven by heat, humidity, and light. Fading is irreversible. The Canadian Conservation Institute’s guidance on care of colour photographic materials notes that colour photograph dyes appear to be among the only materials in a visual art medium to fade appreciably even in dark storage, where heat and high relative humidity drive dye destruction. The fading already present in a school’s color team photographs is documented at intake — not corrected before digitization and not treated in-house — so the preservation record reflects the actual condition of each print and any downstream display copies can be accurately labeled.
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