Artists • Damage Done

Jennifer Givogue / the Royal Ontario Museum's "vinegar" negatives

In the work of Toronto artist Jennifer Givogue, damage is a state that precedes her intervention. Givogue became acquainted with “vinegar negatives”during an art school field trip to the photo studio of the Royal Ontario Museum. Impelled by the redemptive possibilities of working with previously damaged materials, she later used this material as the basis for her artwork.

The self-destruction of a swath of 1960s large-format black-and-white negatives in the Royal Ontario Museum’s archives has created somewhat of a mystery for conservationists, as these acetate-based negatives were produced at least a decade after the last of the infamous, spontaneously combustible cellulose-nitrate negatives of a slightly earlier era. 22 Safety and storage problems with the latter are well known, as they exist in every institutional archive that contains photographic negatives or motion picture film dating from before 1950. The cellulose nitrate base was highly unstable and could burst into flame while being run through a projector or placed in a hot enlarger. Even without causing fires, many of these types of negatives crumpled over time, rendering them unprintable. What the ROM’s negatives have in common with the earlier ones is the telltale stench of acetic acid announcing their decomposition (hence the term “vinegar negatives”). Perhaps most significantly in relation to questions of history, choices must be made as to which of the often overwhelming numbers of vulnerable negatives are to be salvaged and which must be “let go.” Everything cannot be saved due to the sheer volume of material, the slowness of the copying process and the consequent expense.