By: Geoff Mulvihill
Associated Press
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. (AP) - Inside the cavernous headquarters
of NFL Films in suburban Philadelphia, workers who normally
handle footage from the football field are instead restoring
thousands of family photos found in the ruins at ground zero.
The photos from the World Trade Center include wedding
portraits, baby pictures and vacation snapshots, some tattered,
burned or stained. Among them are precious reminders of bar
mitzvahs and golf outings.
Eastman Kodak Co. and NFL Films, which has some 100
million feet of film documenting the football league, plan to
make the restored photos available on a Web site and send
either new prints or the originals to the owners or their relatives.
Phil Tuckett, an NFL Films documentarian, was asked to help
on the project by a New York Police Department archivist he
got to know when making a documentary about the department.
Some 6,000 photographs and slides were found in the 1.8 million
tons of debris taken a landfill in Staten Island to be sorted.
Authorities plan to return all the belongings to their owners or
their families.
In an emotional and sometimes technically challenging project,
workers at Kodak and NFL Films have been scanning the
photos onto computers.
Volunteers wear latex gloves as they carefully handle the
pictures, many of which have singed edges. Whole stacks
of prints were found fused together. Kodak officials separated
them by soaking the stacks in icy water; some of the pictures
turned out to be in nearly perfect condition.
In more severe cases, heat and the pressure drove debris into
the photos. Bits of glass, in some cases, could not be removed.
Volunteers used emulsion cleaner before scanning other pictures.
Tuckett discovered that when the cleaner was sprayed on the
cloudiest pictures, they cleared instantly and remained crisp for
about 30 seconds before clouding over again.
At one work station, Oscar-winning cinematographer Garrett Brown
photographed badly damaged photos to save whatever image
was left.
Sue Nicholson, an NFL Films information technology specialist,
was hesitant to work on the project initially, fearing the task would
be too heart-wrenching. She said she found just the opposite to
be true.
"There are a lot of happy pictures," Nicholson said. "It's not a sad,
depressing thing to do because you're looking at people's
happy memories."
Tuckett looked at one photo that showed three women.
"Hopefully," he said, "they're alive."
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