TUCSON, AZ.- The University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography announced the completion of its state-of-the-art cold storage facility. With this facility, the CCP joins a small yet growing number of museums to have this advanced capability, a project led at the Center by Dana Hemmenway, Arthur J. Bell Head of Conservation. Encompassing approximately 4500 square feet, the new cold vaults have been seven years in the making and now serve as the occasion for the first major collection storage expansion—the Collection Sustainability Initiative—in more than 36 years, since the current building opened in 1989.

“This cold storage facility is a necessary step to fulfill our commitment to responsible collection stewardship,” said Todd J. Tubutis, director of the CCP. “For fifty years, we have been charged with preserving the photographs, negatives, and archival materials of some of the most significant photographers in the history of the medium. We hold these materials in trust for the public for study by researchers, artists, and University of Arizona students and faculty, and we now can ensure the integrity of these collections well into the future. This new facility also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to reorganize our holdings to best meet the needs of our audiences and the objects themselves.”

Film and negatives deteriorate and become unstable at room temperatures, and dyes in color photography are vulnerable to fading and degradation. While sections of the CCP’s vaults were previously equipped with cold-storage units to protect against such degradation, the Center, with more than 120,000 photographs and more than one million items across 300 archives, did not have a dedicated cold-storage facility. In 2018, CCP staff identified an underutilized area in its Tucson complex and, with the support of a private grant and generous assistance from the University of Arizona, began the transformation of this space into three different cold storage chambers, one each for nitrate film, acetate film, and color photography. The new storage facility is designed to hold not only all existing collection material but also twenty more years of projected collection growth.

The two vaults for nitrate and acetate negatives will maintain a temperature of 25 degrees (F) with 35% relative humidity, while the color photography vault—which will also contain the CCP’s audio-visual collection—will be held at 40 degrees (F) with 35% relative humidity. The new vaults will additionally be fully in compliance with regulations for storing nitrate. The CCP relied on current conservation research and best practices in the field to design and construct the vaults.

“I am thrilled that the CCP is now able to provide these unique collections with an extended life span by utilizing low-temperature storage,” said Hemmenway. “Deterioration of at-risk materials such as plastic supports used for negatives and dyes found in color prints will be significantly decreased, in some cases by an order of magnitude. This effort will allow these materials to be accessible for exhibition and research well into the future.”

Because the new vaults also increase the amount of storage area for the CCP, the Center has now undertaken the massive effort to reorganize its vast collection to make best use of the new facilities. All the Center’s current holdings will need to be culled to separate negatives—more than 11,000 by photographer Edward Weston alone—and other items that belong in cold storage. For nitrate and acetate material storage, the CCP will move from an artist-based organization to one determined by process type, including video, magnetic media, optical media, and works with glass supports. The new facilities also have expanded capabilities for storing framed items of all sizes, oversized photographs, and new formats resulting from continual experimentation with techniques and materials over the past century.

This effort is the largest collection reorganization in the CCP’s history, requiring a tremendous commitment of resources and staff working toward making significant progress on the project by the end of 2027. As a result, the CCP is now instituting a collection loan moratorium and a temporary suspension of new acquisitions by purchase and donation. Such a pause in activities is necessary to devote appropriate resources to the move into the new vaults. Exhibitions at the CCP will continue through this period in its Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery and the Norton Gallery at the Phoenix Art Museum. The Center Galleries at the CCP will be closed from January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2027.