Current preservation guidelines call for a master negative, along with an intermediate "printing" negative, to be secured in a controlled environment.
The original negative is used to make a master positive, sometimes known as the protection positive, from which a printing negative is then made to run off the release prints.
Nick Ut even helped Kim to safety – an author, she is alive, well, married and a mother of two in Canada today – before rushing to an AP darkroom and printing negative number seven from the roll of 35mm film wound tightly inside his bombproof Leica. .
Her cameras, prints, negatives, and souvenirs (press passes, celebrity letters, state invitations) disappeared into storage.
In 2005 the Getty Research Institute acquired his archive of more than a quarter-million prints, negatives and transparencies.
The material used in "Photo Nomad" are to be returned to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where the rest of his archives -- prints, negatives, first editions, cameras, notebooks, gifts from Picasso -- are kept.
Over the next decade or so he printed negatives salvaged from trash cans, took up Kodalith and Polaroid film, experimented with the Thermofax (an early photocopier) and made montages and collages.
A small selection of the images can be found on the Parks Department's Web site, but the majority — including prints, negatives, and digital scans of the first hundred years' worth of material — are stored at the Olmsted Center, in Queens.
"As it stands," she wrote, "the room is packed full of photo prints, negatives and the like, and we'd like to convert part of it into a baby's room by March," when their daughter was due.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust said on Monday they had jointly acquired a huge collection of the prints, negatives and letters of Robert Mapplethorpe, further strengthening California's position as a major center for 20th-century photography.
Since his death, last fall, the apartment has become Leiter's de facto archive; Margit Erb, his gallery representative, and Anders Goldfarb, his long-time assistant, have spent months organizing the boxes of prints, negatives, portfolios, and books that he left haphazardly piled throughout the space.
