History of the Department

Nora Kennedy joined the Metropolitan Museum's Paper Conservation Department as the first Photograph Conservator in 1990. The need for such a specialist first had been voiced in a memo authored in the 1960s by the then Head of Paper Conservation, Merritt Safford. In 2001 Kennedy moved her small staff to a dedicated photograph conservation lab within the Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation. Her position was endowed just one year prior with seed funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, matched by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. In 2007 Georgia Southworth was hired part-time to advise on the exhibition, treatment, and handling of the approximately 1000 bound volumes in the Department of Photographs. Her expertise has enlightened us all on the complexities of binding styles, and has highlighted the specific challenges concerning bound volumes used to hold photographs such as albums and photographically illustrated books.

For a number of decades, photograph conservators led the Museum-wide effort to establish a time-based media art conservation program at The Met. A collection-wide assessment and survey was carried out in 2016–2018 by outside consultant Glenn Wharton, assisted by a graduate from New York University's Moving Image Archiving Preservation Program, and a student from the Institute of Fine Arts' Conservation Center. In 2019, The Met hired its first conservator of time-based media, Jonathan Farbowitz, who works within Photograph Conservation.

The Department collaborates closely with many curatorial departments including Photographs and Modern and Contemporary Art, and frequently joins forces with colleagues in the Department of Scientific Research, Digital, the Archives and Libraries, IS&T, and the Imaging Department.