AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The reproducibility of film-based and digital photography provides conservators with the regular existential thrill of asking ‘what is real?’. Ongoing dialogues within the field investigate the idea of what constitutes an original and who gets to define it. The idiosyncratic terminology used to describe prints themselves - vintage, reserve, period, exhibition, modern, posthumous, reprint, etc. - suggest the varying degrees of originality or authenticity that the possibility of multiples presents. This paper will discuss the challenges of documenting the history and existence of what may be described as New Originals and Former Originals, and questions regarding the use of the Former Original for scholarship and research.




Jeff Wall’s monumental lightbox Trân Dúc Ván was created in 1988 and acquired by Carnegie Museum of Art in 1990. A popular work for loan and exhibition, fourteen years after the acquisition, Wall surprised the museum by creating a new original version of Trân Dúc Ván. Written correspondence between Wall and museum staff reveal that the decision was unprompted and unrelated to the physical condition of the original print. t. Wall explicitly specified that the new original, made possible by technological improvements in digital image manipulation, should be considered “the definitive work”. While this New Original was enthusiastically displayed and loaned, the Former Original was also retained by the Carnegie, rolled and crated, and placed into deep storage.




In the years since the switch from Former to New Original occurred, incomplete documentation, vague collection database entries, staff turnover, and a possibly poor initial understanding of the nature of the swap combined to create significant uncertainties in the originality of both versions of Trân Dúc Ván. The surprising emergence of a second, heavily damaged version of the Former Original transparencies, as well as a reserve print of the New Original further complicate the ways that the work has and has not been documented and described.