Quando o patrimônio é uma imagem que quebra: políticas de acesso e preservação de coleções fotográficas de negativos de vidro

Abstract

Brazilian cultural heritage is dispersed in archives, museums and libraries, all memory centers with a common focus: to collect conservation and make society memory available to its users and researchers. In archives the medium are many, manuscript documents, audiovisual, sound and bibliographical materials. The present study concentrated to investigate a specific documental medium, the glass negative. Invented in 1848, the glass negative was the main documental medium for photographic images until 1888 when the flexible negative film was invented. Therefore, visual information sources about the Brazilian history from the second half of the XIX Century still exists because at that time the existing medium for image sensitization was the glass plate. It was in this medium, that images from the end of Brazil Empire and early Republic of Brazil were produced, using heavy wood photography cameras, the so called Lambe-lambe . The importance of this documental medium glass negative as a research source for Brazilian and World history was proven after incursions in literature and research in Brazilian photographic heaps. It was found that photography is a powerful mean of visual communication besides its value as information source and documental heritage. This premise imposes the cultural institutions that custody these documental type the need to define specific policies to them. Under the light of conservation, access and diffusion which constitute the theoretical reference and chronologically determining the invention of the different photographic processes, this study analyzed conservation and access policies that are adopted by photographic documentation centers that custody glass negative heaps, based in the policies from two cultural institutions with similar heap, objectives and institutional goals but, with climatic differences due to its geographical location, the South and Northeast regions of Brazil. It was ratified the importance of the archivist functions: preservation and preventive conservation to the long term duration of documents; the access, the need to create research instruments that guarantee access to the images content and, cultural editorial and educative diffusion. Involving all this, there is the need of continuous planning programs the policies. As a result of this study and to meet the requirements of a Vocational Masters Program, we produced a Guide with the adequate procedures to preserve photographic documents, especially in the glass negative medium, that aims at orientating archivists, conservators, historians, librarians, museum experts and other professionals about the correct procedures for preventive conservation, preservation and image restoration of information kept in this documental medium.