Is it harmful to photograph paintings with flash?

On the main rule of art museums, the impact of flash on paintings, and the experiment of the National Gallery of London.

Many visitors to art museums often want to take a souvenir photo in front of their favorite painting. But even where you have to pay to take pictures, flash photography is usually prohibited.

Museum staff explain it simply: the flash pulse is very harmful to the color layer of paintings and can lead to their fading. But is it really true? Let’s find out.

If photos, dyed fabrics, or ordinary drawings are left in the sun for a long time, they will actually change color. It’s all down to ultraviolet radiation. The fastest fading color is red, and the slowest is blue, since it is closer in spectrum to ultraviolet.

It turns out that ultraviolet light can harm paintings, but… when exposed to them for a long time. Let’s find out how many times a painting needs to be photographed before its condition deteriorates.

The pulse duration of a standard on-camera flash is 1/2000 of a second. So, in order for the light to fall continuously on the picture, it needs to be photographed 2000 times in one second! In a minute – 120,000 times. And for the light falling on the painting to be comparable to the sunlight, 7.2 million pictures should be taken in an hour. And even then, the painting is unlikely to change color during this time.

The fading process requires much longer exposure to light.

In 1995, the staff of the National Gallery in London conducted an interesting experiment. They left some paintings in their original conditions. Others were shot with a flash every 7 seconds. The camera was equipped with an ultraviolet filter. The third group of paintings was placed in a room where the lighting was provided by fluorescent lamps with ultraviolet light and halogen lamps that hardly emit it. The fourth group was placed in a room lit only by halogen lamps. Finally, the fifth group of paintings was also photographed with a flash, but the camera was not equipped with an ultraviolet filter.

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And then the experts compared how the colors on the canvases changed and made sure that the light generated by the flash is more dangerous than the light that falls evenly on the paintings in the hall. Thus, the damage from flash to paintings is practically zero.