Has anyone out there had any experience with trying to separate old photo negatives?

I recently acquired an inordinate amount of 100+ year old negatives from the Kansas City Southern. These are 4x5 and 5x7 negatives that date from 1912 to 1935. These were photos taken by the KCS and kept in their files, they cover everything from every structure at every station along the line to roundhouse expansion projects to early grade crossing accidents and everything in between.

The negatives were stored in kraft paper envelopes, with every negative for a given subject stored together in the same envelope. While many of the negatives have survived just fine, others, not so much. Some of the negatives have become stuck together while others seem to have fused into a solid brick inside the envelopes.

The ones that are just stuck seem to be the result of some sort of moisture causing the emulsions to stick together, some will separate with gentle lifting (and no apparent damage), while others have become very brittle at the stuck spots and break if you look at them wrong.

The ones that have fused into solid bricks seem to have undergone some sort of chemical transformation, to the point of fusing with the envelope and oozing a black, tar like substance through the envelope. My guess is that heat is responsible, but I don't know for sure.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I can say definitively, despite what everything I could find says (and despite my experience developing black & white film decades ago) water is not the answer. I tried soaking some in a tub of water and it took less than five minutes for the emulsion to completely dissolve and become just a disgusting slimy cloud in the water. That said, the negatives did separate into nice clear, blank squares of whatever.

Thanks

Jason Midyette

You might want to check with the George Eastman House in Rochester NY. Among other services, they do film restoration and preservation. I don't know whether they might offer free advice.

https://www.eastman.org/

JR

I've had some luck separating solid blocks of stuck negatives by soaking in water with a wetting solution. I used some Kodak Photoflow 200 I had around. I managed to save about a third of them. The emulsion gets soft and often came lose in patches. Tough to say how long to soak, it kind of varies, anywhere from a couple hours to half a day. I gently agitated them and tested them a bit every half hour or so.

Drying the ones you save is a matter of hanging from a line with clothes pins on corners.

Good luck!

There still exist entire textbooks on caring for and restoring old negatives and photographs, some published by Kodak and others by museum agencies. Worth your investment if you're expecting to curate a "large collection."

Thanks for the replies so far.

While I know soaking the negatives in water works for some, and has worked for me in the past, I can not over emphasize how much it does not work on these negatives as all it did was remove the emulsion from the backing in a matter of minutes on the batch that I tried. Thus, I shall not try that approach again!

As to whether or not it qualifies as a "large collection", I suppose that is a personal definition. Considering that it has taken over our dining room and adjacent parlor, my wife would vote that yes, it is a large collection. From a numbers standpoint, I started with a 14x10x8 box packed as tight as possible with envelopes of negatives. Thus far I have managed to sort and file about 1500 negatives, there are about that many waiting to be dealt with and probably that many that are sitting off to the side as stuck together or brick status. To me, it qualifies as an inordinate or excessive amount of negatives, if not a large collection.

As to what I am going to do with them, I am not sure yet, I figured step one was get them into a better storage format and in the process organize them and figure out what is there. To that end, I have been placing the negatives in 4x6 photo pages and thence into binders, organized by subject. Once that is done, it will be time to decide what comes next.

Jason Midyette

Given the age you mentioned these are nitrocellulose film. They are highly flamable. When the film base brakes down it turns to a gel and releases sulferic acid fumes which attacks the silver in the image. The best place to store them is in a freezer. Good luck with your project.

I should add DO NOT put the negatives in plastic sleeves. Put them in individual acid free paper envelopes. Plastic sleeves will speed up the degradation of the negatives.

Thank you for the information. Nitrocellulose film seems to be an exquisitely lovely material!

Chemical decomposition definitely explains what has happened to some of these negatives and why separating them is proving impossible. Moisture has not stuck them to each other, the material itself has decomposed and welded the negatives together.

It is interesting to see how it has happened, given that these negatives have been stored together and in the same environment as each other for their entire existence. Most are AOK and look like they were made yesterday while about 40% have suffered some sort of failure, ranging from becoming welded together in spots to every negative in an envelope Turning into a solid brick.

I really can't find any rhyme or reason as to which negatives bit the dust and which did not. All were placed into kraft paper envelopes by the KCS and remained there until now. The envelopes range in condition from as new to brittle piles of disintegrated paper shards, the condition of a given group of negatives seems to bear no correlation with the condition of the envelopes that contained them. A new looking supple envelope is as likely to contain ruined negatives as not and vice versa. Also, the number of negatives in the envelopes does not correlate with their survival. Groups of 100 negatives stored in the same envelope seem to be just as likely to have died as those stored in groups of 1. 5, 10, 20 or whatever and vice versa. My best guess is that it would come down to slight inconsistencies in the various chemical processes that the negatives were subjected to during manufacture and processing.

Hopefully, a short stay in the photo pages will not be detrimental to the negatives. My goal was to put them in some format where it was easy to see what they were and then work on scanning them. As I am able to scan them, I will make prints and place them in the photo pages and then put the negatives in appropriate envelopes.

Jason Midyette

Could be that at some point in their storage history, some of these negatives were stored where they were exposed to higher temperatures, or they got wet.

And yes, this is why the recommendation is to always store negatives in individual, pH-neutral sleeves. Negatives (and prints, for that matter) should never be stored touching each other. Of course, there's the "should" and then there's the actuality. Very few railway museums have the resources (material and staff) to do this the "right" way.

One crazy idea. It is probably impossible to separate them now. But is there a digital process whereby a series of scans can be taken, and the individual images reconstructed?

If you haven't determined if these negatives are nitrocellulose you really should before you go any further. It is extremely flammable and needs to be treated as such or you will be risking your home or wherever you have it stored. I do know of a museum where the staff was sorting glass plate negatives and found a small folder of nitrocellulose that had fused and was unsalvageable, and being told for so many year it was so dangerous, they decided t fid out. They took a small chunk and lit it in the parking lot and they were not disappointed by it's volatile reaction to flame.

IIRC the procedure at the time for nitrocellulose negatives that were in decent shape was to scan them and once the image was recovered, the negative was disposed of a s hazmat. while this may seem to be destruction of an artifact, the NC will continue to deteriorate and remains a fire hazard that most museums cannot afford.

I believe that Periscope Films has developed a technique to recover old film stock that involves a slow heating in a Underwriters rated fume hood to soften and unstick the print before its scanned. Even then it's a one shot process because once it cools it's brittle and breaks at the slightest touch.

Good luck with your recovery efforts. I'm afraid that much of the NC ere photography era will be lost due the instability of the material.