Schöne Schäden

Nadine Reding is a photo conservator, restorer and retoucher. She trained as the last photo retoucher apprentice in Switzerland. She founded Atelier Reding in Liebefeld, near Bern, in 2004, and has spent more than 20 years working with museums, archives and private collections across Europe.

This conversation took place at Vidmarhallen on 8 April 2026. It was not a formal interview. It was two people thinking together about what it means to preserve the photographic record, what an original is, and why any of it matters.

The detective and the work

Patricia: When a photographic object arrives at the studio, what is the first question you ask about it?

Nadine: I have never been asked that. The first question is usually about what needs to be done. But very often that is clear before the object even arrives. Then it becomes a question of how. Is it a single photograph? Several objects? Part of an archive? And the approach depends on whether it is restoration alone, which I do myself, or whether my collaborators are involved for the digitalisation. There is never just one question.

Most of the time, we recognise what we are looking at. But sometimes we do not know the process. And sometimes it turns out to be a combination of processes. There are more than 1,500 in photography. For a conservator, knowing which process is on the table is essential.

Patricia: So many questions must come up. How was it made? You must find yourself searching for clues, given how many different processes and experimental techniques exist.

Nadine: Sometimes the answer only comes during treatment. Not at first glance. You start working on something and notice a detail at the edge, or a reaction in the material, and then you understand.

Patricia: The clues arrive one at a time. Like uncovering a mystery.

Nadine: Right now I am working on a photograph that is ten by two metres. Most people picture something the size of a table. It can be anything. A single large-format work, or thousands of individual objects. That is what makes this field so compelling. You start with one question about the technique, and as you go deeper, you realise there is always more to discover.

The surroundings matter too. Is there a cassette, a frame, an envelope? These carry a great deal of information. Sometimes you notice something very small, a single detail, and suddenly the whole orientation becomes clear. It is detective work.

Patricia: If you were given three different versions of the same 1840 daguerreotype, each presented differently, how would you even begin?

Nadine:It requires research. I usually start by consulting my network to see whether someone has experience with a comparable case. And then you trace it back. Where is the original? Where has it been?

There is a famous early colour photograph of a ribbon, a "Schlaufe": the Tartan Ribbon, made in 1861 by Thomas Sutton under the direction of James Clerk Maxwell. It is the first demonstration of three-colour photography. Three plates exposed through red, green and blue filters and projected together. In nearly every publication, the image is printed the wrong way round. Rotated 180 degrees, upside down. That in itself tells you everything about why the research matters: where is the original, and what does it actually look like?

If all you have is the image, it is nearly impossible to determine whether it is the original. You need to see the complete object, the frame, the housing, all of it.

Patricia: Have there been cases where that really mattered?

Nadine: In 2018, fake daguerreotypes appeared on the market. Which is revealing in itself. If there were no value, no one would bother to forge them.

Schöne schäden

Patricia: When you work with a damaged original, at what point does an intervention change the object? Is there a line between stabilising something and altering it?

Nadine: The deeper question is: what is an original? The damage is part of its history. You can choose to leave it. But sometimes a broken glass plate is simply broken. What I find interesting is when we encounter collections where plates were damaged during production and the photographers repaired them at the time. That is its own form of early restoration, and it too is part of the history. Glass breaks. That is its nature.

In the profession, we sometimes compare it to the Mona Lisa. By now, it is as much the work of successive conservators as it is da Vinci’s. In photography, the question is no less complex. When I treat a photograph, it remains the original. It is not mine. I am only removing or retouching damage so that it survives into the future.

But sometimes the damage itself is beautiful. I call them “Schöne Schäden”. The reactions of silver, the chemical and physical transformations. They can produce something extraordinary.

Patricia: What is the difference between conservation and restoration in practice?

Nadine: Conservation concerns the surroundings. The boxes, the envelopes, the conditions. Restoration is the direct treatment of the object itself. A broken glass plate: you fix it, you restore it. If you want to prevent the break in the first place, you conserve: proper housing, proper storage. Then there is preventive conservation, which addresses the climate of the depots. Photographs are extremely fragile. Silver corrodes.

But conservation also requires knowledge of photographic processes. If you house a photograph without understanding its process, you can lose critical information. Sometimes there are numbers written on the negatives, and those must be preserved. Otherwise the object becomes meaningless. It is not enough to put something in a new box. You must also protect the information.

We belong to a generation that understood the complete process, from camera to lab. Now everything happens inside a single device, and the knowledge of those processes is disappearing. Preserving that knowledge is as important as preserving the objects themselves. That, too, is conservation.

Patricia: The knowledge is available. But it is not accessible.

Nadine: Digitalisation makes things visible in the present. It does not conserve the object, which remains as it is. But it extends its reach beyond the physical. Without that visibility, the object risks being forgotten.

The last apprentices

Patricia: What makes the earliest photographic materials technically distinct from later work? What are you looking for that a non-specialist would not see?

Nadine: Take the daguerreotype. The silver is what we call atomic silver. The sharpness it produces has never been matched by any later process. And that, for me, is what makes early photography so fascinating: the daguerreotype was black and white, unreproducible. Each one was unique.

From the very beginning, the ambition was to make copies. They wanted more. Colour. Reproduction. Control over the spectrum of light. In the earliest processes, even rendering blue was difficult. And with each new advance, something was also lost.

Think about the daguerreotype: silver on a silver plate. Extraordinarily expensive. But as the technology developed, the materials became cheaper. And cheaper materials brought lower quality.

When I look at a daguerreotype or a salted paper print today, it is nearly 200 years old and still intact. I wonder whether anything we produce now will last another 200.

We live in an age where everything is cheap and short-term. In the early days, a photograph was something of value, made to last. That sense of permanence has largely disappeared. The most pressing conservation challenge today is nitrate and acetate film. Plastic was introduced because glass was too heavy, and at the time it was a sensible step forward. But plastic degrades in ways no one anticipated.

Patricia: Each phase brings problems you do not know about when it is happening. They come later.

Nadine: Digital photography is simply the next process. There are more than 1,500 processes in the history of photography, and we are not at the end.

When people work with digital material, it shows there is an interest. They are using the archive. And crucially, any changes are made to the digital copy, not the original. That is what matters: the original is preserved. We have no idea what happens in 10 or 20 years.

Patricia: What is the difference between digitally restored and restored?

Nadine: If I have a broken glass plate, I can physically repair it here in the studio. That is restoration: gluing the glass, stabilising the object. If I do it digitally, I scan the pieces and assemble them on screen. The glass plate itself is still broken.

The original always holds more information than we can perceive at first glance. Once digitally scanned, if you push the exposure, even in the deepest shadows, you can discover details that are invisible to the eye in the physical print.

We once treated around five thousand collodion glass plates. Very old. And there were so many remarkable photographs among them. The photographer had real skill. Seeing work made with that level of precision, that is what I mean by craftsmanship.

Or discovering that the Swiss artist Hans Erni, known to everyone for his paintings, also worked with Ilfachrome. Almost no one knows that. And once you find it, a whole other story opens up. There are always stories behind what you see.

Photography is not ancient history. It is close to us. People still tell you: my father developed prints in the bathroom. My grandfather had a darkroom at home. There is something deeply moving in that proximity. The material, the memory, the connection. I think that is what photography is.

What is an original?

Nadine: Earlier today we touched on a question: if you digitalise a daguerreotype and view it on a screen, is that authentic? I would say no. Consider a negative. To see it authentically, you would need to view it as a negative. Instead, it is inverted to a positive and displayed on a monitor with RGB. So now it is in colour. It was never in colour. That has nothing to do with authenticity. The truly authentic reproduction would be to print it on sensitised paper, using light. We reproduce digitally now, but that is a fundamentally different technology. The result is not the same thing.

An inkjet output is not a photograph. It is a print. And the language itself becomes a problem. In German, Druck. But a print can be a screen print, a mechanical print, an offset print. These are printing processes. They have nothing to do with photography. You take a photograph with a digital camera and produce an inkjet print. That print has nothing to do with the photograph. There is no light involved, no chemistry. You are depositing pigment on paper. That is not a photograph.

So what is authentic? In the digital world, I think there is no simple answer. Perhaps there are several. It is worth discussing, worth searching for a framework. But I doubt there will ever be a final answer.

Patricia: What feels important to me is preserving the record. But the record is not just the original or the digital copy. It is the story that belongs to it. The image you can study and learn from, the reference, the context. All of these aspects matter. It is not about a single physical print. It is a much larger picture.

Nadine: That is something very particular about photographs. There are some I could look at for an entire day. I am thinking of a baryta print. Truly beautiful. You could study it for hours. And then there are others you cannot bear to look at for more than a few seconds.

Sometimes it is the materiality of the print. Sometimes it is the story. And sometimes it needs nothing at all. You simply see it, and it is extraordinary. So many of these stories remain unwritten. When an object arrives at the Atelier, something shifts. People work with it, frame it, and gradually the value becomes visible. Not only monetary value. Emotional value. And I think that is what it comes down to.

Patricia: I am so grateful that you are preserving that emotion and that value, so that it does not simply disappear. Thank you for the insightful conversation.

Schöne Schäden — Preservation of the Record
A conversation with Nadine Reding, Atelier Reding, Bern, Switzerland
© 2026 Patricia von Ah — Zero Baseline of Photography, SEETHINK Lab. All rights reserved.