Pedro Vicente
Appearances
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
When we started to do the project, we thought we were going to get, I don't know, maybe 10, 20, 30,000 photographs. But now we have got 280,000 photographs. So it was massive, the response that we got, because, well, there were those photographs that were damaged.
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think when people who have lost everything, they hold on to memory and photographs hold memory. So that's why it's so important or family photographs. They say who we are, who we were and probably who we are going to be. A few weeks ago, a man came to us with just one photograph, just one. Normally, people came with hundreds of them, but this man only had one.
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
It was the only photograph he had of his father who died when he was five years old. He had lost everything because the flood, everything. And the photograph was the only thing that he had left alive. So you can imagine the pressure on us, the big responsibility and incredibly moving and emotional to be able to clean that photograph and ultimately to save it.
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
Well, the first thing we do is we freeze them because there's a lot of bacteria on the papers. that are destroying, literally eating the paper. So if we can't intervene then immediately, we freeze them. And then when we restore actually the paper, we clean them with clean water, with several baths of clean water, around 10 baths.
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
Very, very carefully, one photograph at the time, one by one with some brushes and trying to get out all the bacteria, all the mud they still have on the paper. And then we clean them. We scan them because we also give a digital copy of all the photographs to the families. And then we mount them on clean piece of cardboard to give the family back their
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
Well, not the album as it was, but at least as close as it is possible to how it was.
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
Yes, we are starting now with this second stage of the project in which we are trying to train artificial intelligence to restore digitally some of those photos. We are thinking that we could restore around 80,000, 90,000 photographs with this AI. The problem is, I mean, to restore these images using Photoshop or any other program for retouching photographs is quite easy. It's not difficult.
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
The problem that we have here are numbers. We have 80,000, 90,000 photographs that need to be digitally restored and with the artificial intelligence what we are trying to do is to automatise so it will be much faster and quicker than if a human restores the image.
Global News Podcast
UK announces European plan for peace in Ukraine
When people who have lost everything, they hold on to memory and photographs hold memory.