Archivist Power Hour: On Capturing Old Photos With Silvering

When I digitized my grandmother Esther’s archive this year, I had maybe 2000 photos to ingest, half of them loose, half in scrapbooks. Many of the black and white photos shot prior to 1920 suffered from silvering, the condition where the dark parts of a photo are obscured by a shiny reflective coating. Age and poor storage are to blame. A black and white photographic image, generally speaking, is…