Photographs are tangible, tactile proof that an ephemeral moment in time can be captured, at least by lenses and light, chemicals and paper. Conserving a photograph preserves the power, even the truth, of these moments.

So, imagine what it was like for Sarah Wagner, AS '89M, a graduate of the UD/Winterthur Art Conservation Program, to examine one of the most significant photographic records imaginable--the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

"It was amazing," Wagner, senior conservator of photographs at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., says. "I had to do a condition exam. I had to measure it, and make a map that documented the major scratches, the sprocket breaks, the repairs that had been done."

Although too young at the time to recall the event itself ("I can remember one of my sisters crying"), Wagner, like most Americans, had seen portions of the film on TV, or excerpted in still pictures. The familiarity created what she describes as a "distancing effect" from those images of the fateful motorcade in Dallas.

But, the experience of examining the film frame-by-frame, including the horrifically bloody sequence, the moment the bullet strikes the president's head, was "very emotional," Wagner says.

Wagner, who lives in Silver Spring, Md., with her husband, Steven Puglia, grew up in Fayetteville, N.Y. She did her undergraduate work at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., where she majored in biochemistry. She was working as a research assistant at Rockefeller University in New York when she heard about Delaware's art conservation program, one of a handful in the nation.

"Delaware was my first choice," Wagner says, citing its association with Winterthur Museum and the caliber of the faculty and administration, including Debbie Hess Norris, associate professor of art conservation and the program's director, and John Krill, adjunct associate professor of art conservation and head of the paper conservation laboratory at Winterthur. Norris also teaches photo conservation.

The University's program offered "total immersion" and featured a very useful first-year focus on individual conservation techniques for essential materials (metals, paper, photos), as well as a concentration in paper and photographic media during the second year. Wagner says a University internship at the Library of Congress during the third year was "a great experience."

Wagner says she expected she'd end up working in a fine arts museum, but the Library of Congress exposed her to "the entirely different world of working in a research collection"--the major difference being, of course, that photographs in a research collection are handled and studied by researchers and, often times, by the general public as well.

"People are coming in and using these things," Wagner says, "historians and lawyers and people with a need to see them as historical documents."

These demands pose problems, and solving them is a big part of what a photo conservator does, Wagner says.

Sometimes used interchangeably, the terms photo preservation and photo conservation are different, though somewhat overlapping, parts of the same process.

Conservation involves the care of the physical objects themselves. For example, protective housings stabilize fragile photos, allow safe handling and facilitate treatment of damaged structural parts such as the image materials, binder and support.

A preservation program, such as the one at the National Archives, encompasses conservation treatment, the duplication of deteriorating films and the broader care of the entire collection through maintenance of a proper environment, good storage facilities, disaster preparedness, research room guidelines and staff training.

As a photo conservator, Wagner also is involved in preservation activities (developing guidelines for handling photographs, for example) and in training the employees of outside contractors, such as those involved in a recent digital access project. The latter is increasingly important as the digital revolution continues.

"More and more institutions are wanting to [digitally] scan things," Wagner says. "Scanning or digitally photographing objects can cause damage if precautions aren't taken. Projects like these should have conservation input from [the point of] inception."

Damage takes many forms. Photos get bent and torn. They get stuck together. "An envelope gets stuck to it," Wagner says. "Someone put tape on it or it got wet in some disaster."

Confronted with such a photo, the conservator typically reaches for some simple tools--scalpels, brushes, microscopes, goggles and gloves.

"It's a lot like surgery," Wagner says. "It can be a strain on your eyes and on your back."

Currently on a year's sabbatical while she serves as a Kress Conservation Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, Wagner also is involved in developing standards for photo storage, environmental conditions and test methods. She represents the National Archives on several imaging technology standards committees of the American National Standards Institute.

Wagner says she enjoys the challenge of this sort of proactive problem-solving, of putting in place mechanisms to protect current and future acquisitions. "I feel like I've had a positive impact on the field through these standards that museums, libraries and archives cite when storing photos or upgrading facilities," she says.

There's something deeply satisfying about the concrete task of fixing a photo, she says, especially one that documents history, an interest of Wagner's since childhood. Her family lived next door to an historic site--the home of pioneering feminist Matilda Joselyn Gage, whose son-in-law was Wizard of Oz author Frank Baum.

One of four children of an engineer father and a medical research assistant mother, Wagner remembers family vacations and day trips that helped foster "that sense of history of place" that now informs her work.

Take the 162 albumen prints of the Civil War by George Barnard and Alexander Gardner that Wagner worked on last year. Associates of famed photographer Matthew Brady, Barnard and Gardner had made pictures of pivotal events, including Sherman's march to Georgia and the aftermath of the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg.

But, these images had long been "withdrawn from service" because they had become quite brittle, Wagner says. "I had to figure out a system that wouldn't harm them during treatment, so I had to test all the materials for photographic reactivity.

"Fortunately, I had treated some things from the same era that had been mounted similarly, and I figured they would react the same way, and they did."

The photographs had to be split from their circa 1920 cardboard mountings, cleaned and remounted.

"It was neat," Wagner says. "It was also nerve-wracking. It was a big project and challenging in a number of ways."

Figuring out how to make a process work, and replicating it efficiently, is one satisfaction for a photo conservator. Another is "seeing it as a photo, and it looks great," Wagner says. "And, you know it's going to last."