Speaker 1: Welcome.
Speaker 2: This is Marcia for Radio I, and today I will
Speaker 2: be reading National Geographic Magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder.
Speaker 1: RADIOI is a reading.
Speaker 2: Service intended for people who are blind or have other
Speaker 2: disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
Speaker 2: join me now for the continuation of the art of
Speaker 2: Calibi can last time entitled at Work with the Gorilla
Speaker 2: Ballooness of South Korea by Paul Sellopek.
Speaker 1: Could be a North.
Speaker 2: Korean spy, said Lee, a former agricultural engineer in the North,
Speaker 2: or a pro North Korean citizen here. He added, there
Speaker 2: are people who disapprove he means communist sympathizers. Lee launches
Speaker 2: his airships at night from a remote valley near the DMZ.
Speaker 2: He packs the balloons with thousands of pages of photocopied
Speaker 2: essays on free will and less frequently with aspirin thumb
Speaker 2: drives located with nature documentaries, women's nylons, anything scarce. In
Speaker 2: the threadbare North, he lives in a rusting shipping container
Speaker 2: at the site. His South Korean wife and son deserted
Speaker 2: him for California, Desperate to connect with someone on the
Speaker 2: other side of the fortified border. He takes the risk
Speaker 2: of including his real name and phone number on his
Speaker 2: political leaflets. After years of balloon releases, he admitted wearily,
Speaker 2: nobody has called my entree to the ballooning world. The
Speaker 2: younger Park still possesses a novice's enthusiasm. His balloons are
Speaker 2: constructed from tough but lightweight plastic normally used for agricultural purposes.
Speaker 2: An electronic ultimeter triggers clamps to release sacks of religious literature,
Speaker 2: kish and other cargo from about five thousand feet. The
Speaker 2: bags float down on tiny parachutes, which Park tracks via
Speaker 2: GPS devices. On the night that he allowed me to
Speaker 2: join him, his crew released all of their balloons at once.
Speaker 2: Park arms stretched skyward, muttered a prayer. The team stood
Speaker 2: gazing up for long seconds as the twenty five balloons
Speaker 2: fluttered and climbed in the night breeze. Park said the
Speaker 2: balloons would be picked up by South Korean radar in
Speaker 2: twenty nine minutes, after which military police would come to investigate.
Speaker 2: The balloonists began loading up in haste to depart. I
Speaker 2: watched their handiwork ghost up into the darkness like a
Speaker 2: sad miracle next can Forensic science Stopped the illegal wildlife
Speaker 2: trade by Joshua Hammer. Novel technologies and fresh crime fighting
Speaker 2: techniques are transforming the battle against trafficking, one gorilla handprint
Speaker 2: at a time, the sound of a gunshot altered the
Speaker 2: rangers that sometimes was a miss. Advancing through the forest
Speaker 2: in thung Yai Naraswan Wildlife Sanctuary in western Thailand, they
Speaker 2: arrived at a campsite littered with evidence of murder.
Speaker 1: The blood soaked carcass.
Speaker 2: Of a barking deer lay on the ground. Other bits
Speaker 2: of victims, a khalije pheasant and a rare black leopard,
Speaker 2: oozed on a cutting board and simmered in a soup kettle.
Speaker 2: The rangers arrested four people at the scene on suspicion
Speaker 2: of poaching protected species and violating gun laws, crimes punishable
Speaker 2: by a maximum.
Speaker 1: Ten year jail term. But there was a complication.
Speaker 2: The leader of the hunting group was prem Chai Karnusuta,
Speaker 2: a construction empire tycoon and one of Thailand's most prominent
Speaker 2: and powerful men. Karnasuta professed his innocence, apparently trusting that
Speaker 2: his well paid lawyers would get him off, but he
Speaker 2: hadn't counted on the doggedness and determination of Thailand's wildlife police.
Speaker 2: The rangers cordoned off the crime scene and seize the carcasses,
Speaker 2: along with three rifles, rounds of ammunition, the bush meat
Speaker 2: in the cattle, and later even a pile of human excrement.
Speaker 2: The evidence was then transported in sealed bags to a
Speaker 2: crime lab in Bangkok, where technicians under the supervision of
Speaker 2: Kanita Utavan, director of the Parks Department's Wildlife Forensics Laboratory Center,
Speaker 2: sequenced the DNA of the bush meat and the feces,
Speaker 2: and the Police Forensic Science Office conducted ballistics tests on
Speaker 2: the carcasses call it CSI in the Bush. To combat
Speaker 2: a surge and poaching and wildlife smuggling in Asia and Africa,
Speaker 2: conservationists and police are turning to method's long reserve for homicides,
Speaker 2: sexual assaults, and other crimes with human victims. DNA sequencing,
Speaker 2: fingerprint analysis, infrared imaging to detect blood, ballistics tests, and
Speaker 2: additional scientific techniques have been utilized with success against miscreants
Speaker 2: ranging from pangolin poachers in Zimbabwe to peregrin nest raiders
Speaker 2: in Scotland. A dramatic change in wildlife statutes has led
Speaker 2: to the increasing reliance on forensics. In the past, poachers
Speaker 2: and traffickers caught in the act typically pleaded guilty and
Speaker 2: paid a token fine, But between twenty ten and twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: as poaching numbers, sword countries began to drastically raise their penalties.
Speaker 2: They went from a fine of fifty dollars for possession
Speaker 2: of ivory two up to ten years in prison, says
Speaker 2: Rob Ogden, director of conservation science at the University of
Speaker 2: Edinburgh and a specialist in DNA profiling. Criminals with resources
Speaker 2: began hiring skilled lawyers to fight it out in court.
Speaker 2: The defense started saying things like proved that its ivory.
Speaker 2: Ogden says, persecution collapsed. Prosecution collapsed because they lacked the
Speaker 2: scientific evidence. The scientific evidence analyzed in the Bangkok Lab
Speaker 2: was critical in bringing Karnasuta to justice. The defense attempted
Speaker 2: to discredit the forensics and the evidentiary chain of custody,
Speaker 2: but Wetevan, the lab director, felt no doubt in left
Speaker 2: no doubt in the judges minds that Karnasuta's group had
Speaker 2: shot the animals. In twenty nineteen, a court sentenced the
Speaker 2: tycoon to three years in two months and a two
Speaker 2: million bought fifty nine thousand, seven hundred dollars fine, an
Speaker 2: outcome hailed by the WWF as a victory for wildlife
Speaker 2: and a victory for the rule of law. Karnasuta's conviction
Speaker 2: comes at a time when wildlife and the rule of
Speaker 2: law are both under siege. High prices for ivory, rhinal horn,
Speaker 2: pangolin scales, and other wildlife products such as bush meat,
Speaker 2: the growing sophistication of insurgent groups and international crime organizations,
Speaker 2: and endemic corruption are all putting unprecedented pressure on endangered species.
Speaker 2: In South Africa, poachers slaughtered ten thousand, three hundred thirty
Speaker 2: four rhinos, both black and white, between two thousand and
Speaker 2: six and twenty twenty four, the equivalent of two thirds
Speaker 2: of the country's entire population. The majority of horns end
Speaker 2: up in Vietnam and China, where they are carved into
Speaker 2: decorative objects or ground into powder for sale allegedly as medicine.
Speaker 2: Africa's elephant population dropped from four hundred seventy two two
Speaker 2: hundred sixty nine to about four hundred fifteen thousand after
Speaker 2: the Convention on International trade in endangered species sites CITES
Speaker 2: in two thousand and eight permitted a one time sale
Speaker 2: of ivory to China, stimulating demand and opening the floodgates
Speaker 2: for laundered tusks. The numbers have stabilized, but the pacoderms
Speaker 2: remain in danger. Pangolins, tigers, snow leopards, and many other
Speaker 2: species are also considered at grave risk. Nations estimates the
Speaker 2: global illegal wildlife trade to be worth as much as
Speaker 2: twenty three billion dollars a year. Wildlife experts have begun
Speaker 2: training law enforcement officers in Africa and Asia to back
Speaker 2: up their arrests with evidence that will stand up in court.
Speaker 2: Tracy Alexander, director of forensic Services for the City of
Speaker 2: London Police, recalls that when she started working with police
Speaker 2: in Zimbabwe, they would stop a car based on a tip,
Speaker 2: find rhino horns in the back, four mobile phones and
Speaker 2: three guns. The driver would say, I know nothing about this.
Speaker 1: I'm just the driver.
Speaker 2: The guy in the passenger seat would say he just
Speaker 2: picked me up and I know nothing. The two guys
Speaker 2: in the back would say, we just asked for a lift.
Speaker 1: Then they would let them go.
Speaker 2: Now the wildlife police learn how to dust for finger
Speaker 2: prints technically known in forensics as finger marks or ridge details,
Speaker 2: data mines, cell phones, conduct ballistic tests, and seal off
Speaker 2: crime scenes. Grant Miller, counter trafficking adviser at the Zoological
Speaker 2: Society of London who has trained ecological police in Mongolia
Speaker 2: and park rangers in Thailand, the Philippines, Benin, Cameroon, Nepal,
Speaker 2: Niger and Kenya, says that officers once passed around elephant
Speaker 2: tusks and rhino horns and posed with the contraband without
Speaker 2: using gloves, but they're coming to understand that effective crime
Speaker 2: fighting means avoiding contamination and finding evidence that will be
Speaker 2: admissible in the court room. In India, the Forest Department
Speaker 2: and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau implemented a cutting edge
Speaker 2: intelligence gathering system that led to seventy three arrests and
Speaker 2: the dismantling of an elephant poaching network that ravaged the
Speaker 2: population in twenty fifteen. In Mongolia, a haven for vulnerable
Speaker 2: and endangered species ranging from snow leopards to soccer falcons
Speaker 2: and wild camels, the Ecologic Police teemed with the Zoological
Speaker 2: Society of London and Mangolia's National Forensic Agency and the
Speaker 2: Zoological Society lou Ujin. Now they're well trained and they
Speaker 2: have a sophisticated forensic setup, says Alexander, including a DNA
Speaker 2: lab the whole nine yards. The wildlife cops are also
Speaker 2: benefiting from new tools aimed at improving evidence gathering. At
Speaker 2: the London Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory in Lambeth, I
Speaker 2: met Mark Moseley, a silver haired police photographer fifty who
Speaker 2: spends his workdays snapping blood curdling images of homicide scenes.
Speaker 1: In his spare time, he experiments.
Speaker 2: With forensic innovations aimed at combating wildlife crime. Moseley achieved
Speaker 2: his first breakthrough twelve years ago after his two young
Speaker 2: daughters came across online photos of decapitated elephants while making
Speaker 2: elephant themed birthday cards for their grandmother. The girls begged
Speaker 2: their father to invented technique that would give the cops
Speaker 2: an edge in the war against poachers.
Speaker 1: Moseley turned to.
Speaker 2: The method pioneered by Sir Edward Henry of the British
Speaker 2: Colonial Police in India one hundred thirty years ago. Lifting fingerprints.
Speaker 2: Elephant tusks are coated in cementum, a porous material that
Speaker 2: resembles a sponge when looked at through an electron microscope,
Speaker 2: and fingerprints left by poachers and smugglers rarely survive for
Speaker 2: more than seven days using traditional powders. Moseley wanted a
Speaker 2: material that would provide a record of the numerous hands
Speaker 2: that pass over Ivory during the weeks that often elapse
Speaker 2: between poaching in the bush and smuggling overseas. In twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: after months of testing compounds, Moseley came across supr Nanomagnetic powder,
Speaker 2: a fingerprint enhancer made up of microscopic chemical particles that
Speaker 2: can both absorb and repel sweat and oils. It proved
Speaker 2: capable of reaching reaving finger ridge details for up to
Speaker 2: twenty eight days after prints were deposited. The powder fit
Speaker 2: into those tiny pores which the others couldn't do, so
Speaker 2: we were bringing back much higher resolution, Moseley explained.
Speaker 1: Moseley's innovation took off.
Speaker 2: The International Fund for Animal Welfare IFAW, in partnership with
Speaker 2: the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, distributed one hundred
Speaker 2: finger printing kits, two jars of the magnetic powder and
Speaker 2: a magnetic wand brushes and lifting tape packed into a
Speaker 2: durable plastic orange case, to police and rangers in twenty
Speaker 2: three countries in Africa and Asia. In twenty seventeen, IFAW
Speaker 2: announced that the Kenya Wildlife Service had arrested fifteen people,
Speaker 2: including five police officers, after using the kits to identify
Speaker 2: the suspects by their fingerprints on confiscated ivory. The kits
Speaker 2: have also been tested successfully on rhino horns, tiger claws,
Speaker 2: hippopotami teeth, sperm whale teeth and even eggshells.
Speaker 1: All coveted by trackickers.
Speaker 2: Moseley's kits have their limitations. Finger Print databases are still
Speaker 2: so underdeveloped in Africa that the chances the marks will
Speaker 2: turn up any matches remain low. Most African police departments
Speaker 2: lack Wi Fi and mobile fingerprint scanners that allow officers
Speaker 2: to send the images from cell phones to data centers,
Speaker 2: which are also often lacking, and many cops don't seem
Speaker 2: to be invested in the new method. I went to
Speaker 2: a wildlife crime conference in Kenya after the kids were distributed.
Speaker 2: Kits were distributed, says Alexander. I asked people there, how
Speaker 2: many fingerprint marks did you get a few?
Speaker 1: How many IDs? We don't do that.
Speaker 2: We are the finger marks now, I've stashed them in
Speaker 2: my drawer. In twenty fifteen, Grant Miller, then working for
Speaker 2: the UK's Border Force, used the supranano powder to dust
Speaker 2: an ivory shipment seized by customs at Heathrow Airport on
Speaker 2: its way from Angola, trafficked by Vietnamese nationals. The dusting
Speaker 2: turned up several sets of fingerprints, but technicians couldn't hit
Speaker 2: on a match in the UK's vast database. Since the
Speaker 2: highly publicized bus in twenty seventeen, not a single arrest
Speaker 2: has been attributed to the powder kits. Despite those disappointments,
Speaker 2: Tracy Alexander and her partners at King's College, London are
Speaker 2: working with a fingerprint gathering technology called vacuum metal deposition,
Speaker 2: which uses a sealed chamber and metal rods to bring
Speaker 2: out prints on canvas, bags and other non smooth surfaces,
Speaker 2: including elephant tusks that have been buried in the ground
Speaker 2: for long periods and have accumulated a coating of dirt
Speaker 2: or mud. London police once used the technology to expose
Speaker 2: a victim's face on the pillow that was used.
Speaker 1: To smother her.
Speaker 2: The Zoological Society of London, meanwhile, is promoting a gel
Speaker 2: lifter that can pull prints from panglin scales, whose uneven
Speaker 2: surfaces like those of tortoise shells, also make.
Speaker 1: Ordinary powders useless.
Speaker 2: The pliable gel goes deep into the grooves and a
Speaker 2: camera and a light source are used to expose the
Speaker 2: finger ridges.
Speaker 1: But the gel has yet to.
Speaker 2: Be distributed for wildlife forensic purposes, and Lisa Highwood, who
Speaker 2: rescues orphaned pangolins in Zimbabwe and rehabilitates and reintroduces them
Speaker 2: into the wild, doubts it'll.
Speaker 1: Work in the African bush.
Speaker 2: You bring the gail into an environment with a temperature
Speaker 2: of eighty eight to one hundred four.
Speaker 1: Degrees and it disintegrates. She says.
Speaker 2: So far, the biggest successes in wildlife forensics have had
Speaker 2: nothing to do with identifying perpetrators. Because attorneys often challenge
Speaker 2: prosecutors to prove that a seized object is say a
Speaker 2: rhino horn or an elephant tusk, Forensic crime lamps run
Speaker 2: DNA tests to determine the species beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 2: The Trace Wildlife Forensics Network, in Edinburgh based nonprofit has
Speaker 2: provided funding and support for Kineta Wetavan's laboratory in Bangkok
Speaker 2: since twenty ten, and has since worked alongside governments to
Speaker 2: develop DNA testing facilities in Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Botswana, Zombia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Gabon, Zimbabwe,
Speaker 2: Namibia and Estwantini. Rob Ogden of the University of Edinburgh,
Speaker 2: who is a co founder of Trace, recalls a Zombian
Speaker 2: colleague mentioning a case in which it was argued that
Speaker 2: a zebra skin belonged to a striped cow. Now such
Speaker 2: blatant assertions are easily demolished in the lab, he demons.
Speaker 2: He estimates that prosecutors present DNA evidence in wildlife cases
Speaker 2: fifty times a year in Thailand and Malaysia. DNA sequency
Speaker 2: can also prove that purported wildlife contraband.
Speaker 1: Isn't what it appears to be.
Speaker 2: Fraudsters often melt horse hoofs into the shape of a
Speaker 2: rhino horn, which confect black market prices of twenty thousand
Speaker 2: dollars or more a kilo. The DNA is not going
Speaker 2: to lie in such a case, Ogden says, it changes
Speaker 2: the nature of the offense from selling an endangered species
Speaker 2: to mislabeling, which is a minor crime. Kyle Ewarts Traces
Speaker 2: forensic research manager, last year launched tiger Base, a DNA
Speaker 2: profiling system for the endangered big cats. Dozens of tiger
Speaker 2: farms in Thailand breed the animals bluffily and offer tourists
Speaker 2: the chance to feed adults and cuddle with cubs, but
Speaker 2: some farms illegally snatch cubs from the wild and pass
Speaker 2: them off as captive bread. A few also serve as
Speaker 2: tiger slaughterhouses, clandestinely chopping up the corpses and selling their parts, pelts, claws, fangs,
Speaker 2: even entire dead cubs and tiger bone wine in jars
Speaker 2: on the black market in China and Vietnam. Tiger Base
Speaker 2: aims to establish a DNA registry of captive tigers throughout
Speaker 2: Southeast Asia to trace them to their points of origin,
Speaker 2: to support investigations into tiger kittens, killers, and tiger launderers.
Speaker 2: You get DNA profiles for all your captive tigers, and
Speaker 2: if there's a new cub on the scene, you can say,
Speaker 2: where did this cub come from? The Australian scientists told
Speaker 2: me in the past they would say these two parents
Speaker 2: and you had no way to disprove that, but now
Speaker 2: we can. Forensic scientists are also using DNA to crack
Speaker 2: down on the illegal trade in paragrine falcons, listed by
Speaker 2: sites since the nineteen seventies as a protected species.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen nineties, the.
Speaker 2: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in conjunction with
Speaker 2: the UK Police and the Department of the Environment, pioneered
Speaker 2: the use of genetics to identify raptor chicks stolen from
Speaker 2: the wild. These birds were illegally declared to be captive
Speaker 2: bred and were traded commercially. Over a decade later, following
Speaker 2: a controversial relaxation of regulations and arise in peregrine prices
Speaker 2: in the Middle East, wild chick thefts began to surge.
Speaker 2: Lucy Webster of the Department of Science and Advice for
Speaker 2: Scottish Agriculture updated the DNA methodology to help the police
Speaker 2: crack down. Recently, Webster's DNA lab outside Edinburgh played a
Speaker 2: key role in Operation Tantalon, a Scottish police investigation that
Speaker 2: snared a gamekeeper and his son in a plot to
Speaker 2: launder and sell twenty three wild peregrine chicks and two
Speaker 2: eggs to wealthy falcon racers in the Middle East. DNA
Speaker 2: sequencing is also being employed to pin down the geographical
Speaker 2: origins of poached pangolins, elephants, and other endangered species. Investigators
Speaker 2: hope the information will help map illegal trading routes, point
Speaker 2: to specific organized crime groups, and single out vulnerable subspecies,
Speaker 2: but most forensics experts concede that the day when such
Speaker 2: data yield actionable intelligence is still far in the future.
Speaker 2: Mark Moseley is also looking far ahead. Moseley's latest forensics
Speaker 2: adventure is, like his Fingerprint project, a mix of the
Speaker 2: visionary and the quixotic. Horrified by photos of several gorilla
Speaker 2: hands for sale in an African market, he devised a
Speaker 2: method of tracing the endangered apes in their body parts.
Speaker 2: By doing so, he hopes to pinpoint areas of intense
Speaker 2: poshing activity and gather intelligence on criminal gangs involved in
Speaker 2: the gorilla trade. I thought, how can we do something
Speaker 2: to identify the remains and create a deterrent, he told me.
Speaker 2: Moseley's solution photograph and record the ridge details of the
Speaker 2: hands and feet of gorillas when their sedated or being
Speaker 2: released into the wild. A few years ago, he spent
Speaker 2: months at the National History Museum, preparing for field work
Speaker 2: photographing prints from taxa dermid apes or alcohol preserved extremities
Speaker 2: dating to the Victorian.
Speaker 1: Era or earlier. Later, he moved to the.
Speaker 2: London and Chesington Zoos and the Espinal Foundation, where he
Speaker 2: captured prints from gorillas sedated for surgery. Moseley's twenty one
Speaker 2: year old daughter Mia, designed colorful graphics of gorilla hands
Speaker 2: and an individual fingers for an academic paper about the project,
Speaker 2: reflecting Moseley's efforts to bring a new generation into conservation. Now,
Speaker 2: the Zoological Society of London and the UN's Great Apes
Speaker 2: Survival Partnership are aiming to kickstart this in the wild,
Speaker 2: Moseley says, although he has accumulated just four sets of
Speaker 2: wild gorilla prints for his database, he insists he's optimistic.
Speaker 2: Once it's out there and everybody becomes aware of it,
Speaker 2: the data will drip feed in, he told me in
Speaker 2: Wildlife Crime Forensics, everyone seems to be playing the long game. Next,
Speaker 2: the world's oldest color photos are still developing. More than
Speaker 2: a century after the invention of autochromes, the revolutionary pictures
Speaker 2: are now decaying and revealing a new kind of Beauty
Speaker 2: by Katy Kelliher. In the ear late nineteen eighties, the
Speaker 2: late National Geographic Society photographer turned archidivist volkmar Venseil was
Speaker 2: delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking
Speaker 2: and heartbreaking, a box of delicate glass panels, most of
Speaker 2: them the sides of postcards displaying color images captured in
Speaker 2: the early twentieth century. Many were deteriorating their once crisp scenes,
Speaker 2: speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal.
Speaker 1: By time and neglect.
Speaker 2: They were autochromes, the products of a turn of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century race to capture the world in all its color,
Speaker 2: and now the race was on to preserve them, even
Speaker 2: as time transformed them in extraordinary ways. Introduced in nineteen
Speaker 2: o seven by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumiere, autochrome
Speaker 2: technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light
Speaker 2: sensitive silver emulsion covered with a fine layer of potato starch.
Speaker 2: That powdery extract, then popular as thickener adhesive and fabric stiffener,
Speaker 2: was crucial to capturing the chroma of the area of
Speaker 2: the era, microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were
Speaker 2: scattered across a plate and sealed.
Speaker 1: On with varnish.
Speaker 2: When light struck the plate through a camera's open shutter,
Speaker 2: each colored granule blocked a range of wavelengths corresponding to
Speaker 2: colors of the visible spectrum, exposing the emulsion beneath to
Speaker 2: countless tiny dots of variously filtered light. After a few
Speaker 2: chemical baths in a dark room, the transparency that appeared
Speaker 2: on glass was seen up clothes a point tolistic mosaic.
Speaker 2: But go back and shine light through the plate covered
Speaker 2: with another glass layer for protection, and a vivid, painterly
Speaker 2: image emerged. National Geographics magazines first full time editor, was
Speaker 2: an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from
Speaker 2: photo photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long,
Speaker 2: much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes,
Speaker 2: but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived,
Speaker 2: of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet,
Speaker 2: of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India. Autochromes together
Speaker 2: with similar processes involving glass plates remained the primary means
Speaker 2: of making color photos until the nineteen thirty five debut
Speaker 2: of cootochrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were
Speaker 2: themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates
Speaker 2: were not carefully preserved. Wenzel, during more than forty years
Speaker 2: as a National geographic field photographer, saw value in the
Speaker 2: old photos, while many of his peers were focused on innovation.
Speaker 2: When the Society thinned its collection in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for
Speaker 2: safe keeping an eventual return to the archive. Others simply
Speaker 2: moldered forgotten until Wenzel rediscovered.
Speaker 1: Them in off site storage.
Speaker 2: Upon becoming the Society's first official photo archivist.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty.
Speaker 2: Wenzel made it a mission to preserve, catalog and exhibit
Speaker 2: the old photos and today National Geographics early color photography
Speaker 2: collection comprises some thirteen thousand plates, including one of the
Speaker 2: world's largest assemblages of autochromes. The largest is at the
Speaker 2: muse Albert Kahan outside of Paris. But, as with many
Speaker 2: remaining early color photos, national geographics have been altered by light, heat, humidity,
Speaker 2: and improper handling plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver
Speaker 2: particles have created radiant amoeba shaped orange blotches on the
Speaker 2: autochrome descendants, known as dou Fet colors. Violet bruises are
Speaker 2: evidence of vinegar syndrome, a chemical decay affecting layers of
Speaker 2: film between glass named for its telltale scent and contagious
Speaker 2: from plate to plate. Vinegar syndrome is a plague amongst
Speaker 2: photographic archives, says Sarah manco director of the National Geographic
Speaker 2: Society's Photo and Illustration Archives. It all sounds rather tragic,
Speaker 2: but the blemishes also have given many of the plates
Speaker 2: a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history,
Speaker 2: they become testaments to the ravage of time, abstracted, fragmented,
Speaker 2: and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's
Speaker 2: morris As image archivist Rebecca DuPont, witnessing the deterioration, a
Speaker 2: process that will only ever play out once, offers lessons
Speaker 2: about the science behind these objects. If you think about it,
Speaker 2: photography is still a relatively new medium, only one hundred
Speaker 2: fifty years old, DuPont says, and the objects in the
Speaker 2: collection haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're
Speaker 2: in a special stage right now where we get to
Speaker 2: see what happens to them. Even as the plates continue
Speaker 2: to deteriorate. Some measure of permanence has been achieved. With
Speaker 2: a twenty twenty grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
Speaker 2: MACO and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing
Speaker 2: the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized
Speaker 2: in temperature controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered,
Speaker 2: and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together. Degrading
Speaker 2: always sounds bad, but they're also developing from documentary objects
Speaker 2: into a weird science history project.
Speaker 1: DuPont says. Are the images we're.
Speaker 2: Looking at being lost or are they just being changed
Speaker 2: into something new. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine
Speaker 2: for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you
Speaker 2: for listening, Keep on listening, and have a great day.