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Apr
29
Written by:
4/29/2010 3:08 PM
I make furniture (you can see my work at
www.craignutt.com) and I have been good about documenting my work with professional photography over the past thirty-five years. Since most of my work has been sold, what I have left is photographs, mostly 4x5 transparencies, negatives, and slides (along with digital images). If I had a fire, flood, or tornado, this documentation would be difficult, expensive, or impossible to replace. In addition, it would hinder my ability to respond to requests for images from magazines, clients, or for shows. My business insurance would cover some of the monetary value, but the loss of my images would be devastating. So, in my efforts to disaster-harden my career, I focused on my images first.
The Studio Protector recommends storing copies of images (and other important documents) in an "SOL" -- a Safe Off-site Location. This is a place 50-100 miles away -- far enough away that it would not be affected by the same event that might affect the studio. That leaves out my home, a few hundred feet away. My mother lives about 150 miles away, so I decided to store copies of my images at her house.
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| Organizing 35 years of images! |
My goal was to select one copy of each original image, and store it at her house, with the rest residing in my studio. Unfortunately, I had let my images become disorganized, so the first step was to sort and file all my images. I keep my images in archival slide pages, each with a hanging file spine inserted in the edge, and those hang in plastic file boxes.
Once my images were sorted and categorized (this took me a couple of days), it was easy to go through them and select one copy of each image and arrange those in slide and 4x5 pages. This was the fun part, and only took a couple of hours.
I keep my studio images in plastic file boxes like the ones on the right to keep them out of the light and dust-free. I purchased the water and fire resistant filing box on the left for about $50. While I will not withstand a major fire or flood, it is much more secure than the other boxes.
I arranged the images by category and used plastic file spines to hang them in the file box. The spines were available at the same professional photo store where I bought the archival plastic pages.
The manufacturer of the file safe suggested placing a packet of silica gel inside to absorb any moisture that might be in the box. I suspect everyone knows what silica gel is, but if you are not familiar it is a desiccant that efficiently removes moisture from the air, and usually comes in small packets with a warning not to eat them. I thought that this was a very good idea, that could be done even better. Some woodworking tool catalogs and survival catalogs sell aluminum canisters of silica gel that changes color when it is wet, so you can put it in the oven to dry or "recharge" it. I velcroed one of these to a file spine and placed it in the box.
That took care of my film images, but I still had a little space left in the box, so I backed up all of my digital images onto DVD's and hung them in sleeves in the box. I will talk later about some other strategies for backing up digital images and files, but you can never have too many back-ups, and this was a no-brainer.
This box now lives in a closet at my mother's house. On my to-do list is to print a nice big label with what is in the box, in case she forgets what it is.
If you cannot leave the box with a family member, you might exchange boxes with a "Disaster Buddy," another artist who lives in another town. You could help each other with disaster preparations, and agree to be one another's emergency contact after a disaster, and maybe even share studio space for a while if one of you needs it.
Now I have some peace of mind that the documentation of a career's worth of work is not vulnerable to the whims of fate. As a bonus, my images are beautifully-organized, and I can quickly respond to an emergency request for an image (they always have to be shipped overnight!).