Jennifer McGlinchey Sexton
EDUCATION:
B.F.A.: Photography, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Certificate in Arts Management: Purchase College, State University of New York (SUNY)
M.A. and Certificate of Advanced Study: Art Conservation, Buffalo State College, SUNY
WHAT SHE DOES NOW: Photograph and paper conservator, owner of McGlinchey Sexton Conservation in Colorado Springs, Colorado
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Printed photographs are “multilayered objects,” as Jennifer McGlinchey Sexton puts it, whether they are works of fine art, records of history, intimate family portraits, or perhaps all three. McGlinchey Sexton is a paper and photograph conservator based in Colorado. To protect and restore photographs, she must understand the chemical processes that went into producing a photographic print and how the chemistry of its layers interact with one another and their environment
That chemical information helps McGlinchey Sexton identify how and when a print was made. She is also one of only a few hundred people in the United States with the expertise to, not only recognize, but preserve and restore printed photographs.
When we spoke via Zoom this past April, McGlinchey Sexton was in Edison, New Jersey, working on a survey of the Thomas Edison National Historic Park’s photography collection. One of her biggest challenges is the collection’s enormous compendium of motion-picture still shots, some of which preserve the only existing records of the very first films in rolls that can be up to hundreds of feet long. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
—Danielle Sedbrook
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
How did you get interested in photography in the first place?
I discovered photography when I was in high school. We had a school newspaper, and there was a dark room. I struggled in high school; I wasn’t a good student. I didn’t really care that much about my classes, but that changed when I started doing photography. I still didn’t care about English and math, but it was part of me becoming more responsible at the age of 16.
Then you went to college for photography, so how did you decide to transition to photo conservation?
After I graduated, I wanted to use my art degree but not necessarily sell my work to galleries. I wasn’t really that good at self-promotion, and I didn’t see myself getting any better at it, even with practice. But in college, I found I was drawn to the more technical aspects of photography. I loved working in the darkroom, and I would spend hours getting the largest array of gray tones from a negative. I found I cared a little bit less about what pictures I was taking and a lot more about just refining the craft.
Where does chemistry come into photo restoration?
You have to understand a little bit of the photo-chemistry to understand what happens to photographs and how they degrade.
More than half of a photograph is paper, so you need to understand the components of paper—cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin—and how they degrade and interact with each other. Some photographs don’t have any paper at all.
The early photographs could be made on metal, and now we have resin-coated papers, which are made basically like a plastic support. Understanding this helped me identify the processes behind the photographs and appreciate the spirit of the photographs, especially as the media progressed over time.
There’s a lot of different types of photographs over a relatively short period of time. The history of photography is not that long, maybe a little under 200 years, but we have all these different historical processes that have come and gone, and even some that are making a comeback. We have to learn to first recognize the process to be able to conserve them.
Why not just digitize all photographs, and then throw out the print copies? Why bother conserving them?
The original has value. I start from that premise, or really, nothing matters. Might as well just give up. I don’t mean to be dramatic; honestly, if someone just wants digital restoration—creating a digital copy or removing the damage only in a digital file—I usually send them to someone else. When you value something that has its own history and tangible value for being original, then it justifies the time that we spend, and also the expense. With fine art—oil paintings, marble sculptures, and photographs—the original has the most value, right? An original print by pioneering American photographer Edward Weston is more valuable than a poster of an Edward Weston print. I would argue the same thing applies to historical materials and to family history, as well.
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