Henry G. Wilhelm, American researcher and author, is the co-founder,  along with Carol Brower Wilhelm of Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc. Wilhelm serves as president, and director of research at Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc. and appears frequently as a speaker on print permanence technology at industry conferences, trade shows, and museum conservation meetings.

Wilhelm conducts research on the stability and preservation of traditional and digital color photographs and motion pictures. He publishes brand name-specific permanence data for desktop and large-format inkjet printers and other digital printing devices. Wilhelm also provides consulting services to museums, archives, and commercial collections on sub-zero cold storage for the very long term preservation of still photographs and motion pictures.

Wilhelm received a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 for what became a ten-year study of color print fading and staining under low-level tungsten illumination that simulates museum display conditions. In the early 1980’s Wilhelm served as a technical adviser to film director Martin Scorsese in his successful effort to persuade Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. to increase the stability of their motion picture color negative and color print films.

Wilhelm was a founding member of the Photographic Materials Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, is a member of the Electronic Materials Group of AIC, and was a founding member of American National Standards Institute/ISO subcommittee IT9-3 (now called ISO WG-5 Task Group 3), which is responsible for developing standardized accelerated test methods for the stability of color photographs and digital print materials. He has served as Secretary of that group since 1984, and is an active member of the ANSI/ISO subcommittees responsible for storage standards for black-and-white films and prints.

Henry Wilhelm has been a consultant to many collecting institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on various issues related to the display and preservation of both traditional photographic prints and digital print media. Since 1995 he has been an advisor to Corbis (owned by Bill Gates) on the long-term preservation of the Corbis Bettmann photography collections in a high-security underground storage facility maintained at minus 20 degrees C (minus 4 degrees F) and 35% RH. With more than 65 million images, it is one of the world’s largest privately held photography collections.

Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower Wilhelm are the authors of the landmark 744-page book, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures, published in 1993.

References

The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures, 1993, ISBN 0911515003

http://www.wilhelm-research.com/

“Who Is Henry Wilhelm”, Popular Photography. June 1990.

Anders, George (July 31, 2003). “In a Digital Age, Who Knows When Photographs Will Fade”. The Wall Street Journal.

“Guggenheim Fellows,” John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Riper, Frank Van (November 24, 1995). “Watching the Colors Fade”. The Washington Post. Retrieved April 17, 2018

Hendriks, Klaus (August 1994). “The Permanence and Care of.. (Review)”. Popular Photography.

Moore, Kevin D. (2010). Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980. Distributed Art Pub Incorporated. ISBN 9783775724906