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The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners' decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners' decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.

In 1999 a group of nineteenth-century glass negatives were transferred to the Rijksmuseum from the University of Leiden’s Print Room. The negatives came from the estate of the Dutch artist Laurens Lodewijk Kleijn (1826-1909), who also made them. Kleijn lived in Rome between 1851 and 1868, became interested in photography and began to experiment with the medium. While he was in Italy, he came into contact with Princess Marianne, who awarded him a number of commissions. He also looked after her sizeable collection, first in Rome, later in her museum in Erbach. As the curator, Kleijn photographed part of the collection and the museum’s interior. These photographs were used for a museum catalogue and for picture postcards. The Rijksmuseum’s glass negatives show a variety of artworks from the princess’s collection. There are more experimental shots, too, family photographs and portraits, and photographs of paintings by Kleijn and of his studio. Thanks to the surviving glass negatives – and the artist’s estate as a whole – it was possible to reconstruct his interesting life story and take a fresh look at the history of photography.

This article explores the significance of the material practices of photography and its archiving in interpretive approaches to the relationship between photographs and history. Drawing on work in material culture studies in anthropology and on the concept of \"material hermeneutic,\" it argues that photographs should not be understood only through forensic and semiotic analysis of content, but as objects that constitute material performances of a complex range of historiographical desires in the negotiation of the relations among past, present, and future. The analysis is grounded in an exploration of the material practices of the photographic survey movement in England between 1885 and 1918. This loosely cohered group of amateur photographers recorded a historical topography of ancient churches, cottages, passing events, and folk customs in order to create a photographic record for the benefit of future generations. As such it was a self-conscious statement of \"popular historicism.\" The members' concern for key values of permanence and accuracy, expressed through the detail of photographic and archival processes, reveals the ways in which cultural loss and photographic loss become mutually sustaining metaphors for each other, and in which the photographs themselves are material markers of both evidential value and of an affective historical imagination.

It is not uncommon for archival photographs to appear in multiple copies, versions, or formats. Photographs of the same provenance are often found in various locations or housed in several institutions. Format diversity, duplication, and dispersion pose profound challenges for archivists attempting to represent photographic images scattered across many institutions. This article identifies four dimensions of archival dispersion—geographical, temporal, provenancial, and material—that simultaneously act as barriers for providing consolidated representation of dispersed photographs. Understanding the context and nature of dispersion is key to effective representation of photographs in archival custody. \"Archival Diaspora\" explores the complicated nature of distributed collections.

Examines interviews and papers assembled as part of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution's 'New Deal and the Arts' initiative begun in 1963 to document the many government art projects of the 1930s and 1940s. The author notes the appointment to the Historical Section of the government Resettlement Administration, later reorganised as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), of Roy Stryker in 1935, whose assembly of a photographic record of the Great Depression and the country's mobilization for war became known as the File, highlights the many now-famous photographers who contributed to the File including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, and with reference to new material, explores how Stryker managed and promoted the FSA photographs, energetically pitching images to editors and publishers and creating a mechanism to distribute copies of photographs to any reputable magazine, newspaper or book, known as the Duplicate File. She concludes by arguing that material from the Duplicate File shows how Stryker edited, promoted and preserved the FSA images and by noting that although closed in 1946 many of the images from the Duplicate File are still circulating, showing how the photographs have been reimagined in the decades since they were created.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's (1889-1968) La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) has endured a harrowing journey since its 1928 premiere. Prints of Passion were butchered and put through fires on at least three reported occasions. However, the film miraculously survived and resurfaced in almost immaculate shape. Passion had become so associated with flames, both in Joan's ordeal and the film's prints, that a book publisher titled an anthology of Dreyer's screenplays Fire Film. This article examines the various roles content providers have played in changing the form and content of Passion. It seeks a balanced analysis of Passion's various incarnations and their content (re)producers -- delivering relatively equal breadth and depth to each. It argues that the DVD and Blu-ray releases issued by the Criterion Collection and Masters of Cinema Series have given the film a new life and contributed to the rebirth of Dreyer's work.

This article considers how the development and early uses of Eastman Color technology shaped its stability. Drawing on primary sources, including documents held in the Eastman Kodak Collection at Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, trade press accounts, and Kodak veteran John Waner's personal memoir of Eastman Color in the 1940s and 1950s, Heckman shows how and why the innovators of monopack color so often subordinated preservation to other considerations. She hopes to to resuscitate some of Kodak Research Labs scientist Dr. Paul W. Vittum's original awe at these technologies now that they face extinction with the rise of digital formats.

In 2011, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, in collaboration with the Haghefilm Foundation, carried out the most recent restoration work of Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's Ballet mécanique (1924) and employed coloring techniques as used in the 1920s. Although the work conducted did not result in a new projection copy, the project remains a potential next step in the evolving restoration history of Ballet mécanique. The authors describe the history of the film and its colors in the various prints, versions, and restorations to contextualize and historicize the work. They situate the project within an archival approach called experimental media archaeology that, though being outside of standard restoration practice, will allow a better understanding of the achievements of the restoration.

Martin Koerber (b. 1956) is head of the film archive at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. During his career as a film restorer, he collaborated with numerous archives, such as the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (now EYE Film Institute Netherlands). He is an expert on German film history and film archiving, and in this interview, conducted in August 2013 in Berlin, he discusses various aspects of color restoration of German silent films.