About the President

Taylor Whitney worked in film production and film preservation for over 23 years in Hollywood, California. In the early 1990s at Video Craftsmen, she awoke before the crack of dawn to assist colorist, Jeff “Chico” Dowden as a rank assistant digitizing and color-correcting 35mm film that had been shot the previous night. Here she learned how to recognize and identify various film elements from original camera negative to dupe negatives to workprints, fine grain, release prints and more. A true archivist, she still has her yellow legal pad where she made study notes accompanied by drawings and descriptions of the numerous film elements that exist.

Her next position was as the Sr. Film Librarian at Producers Library Service, also in Hollywood; Taylor researched stock footage requests for the major motion picture studios, independent filmmakers, commercial television directors, documentarians and students. She learned how to handle archival film, splice shots together and supervise film transfers–appropriate given her experience at Video Craftsmen. After four years at Producers, she was recruited as a Sr. Film Inspection Technician, by Pro-Tek (a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak), a cold storage and film inspection facility. Here, donning a white lab coat, white cotton gloves and protective eyewear, Taylor inspected film on a frame-by-frame basis and documented defects into a proprietary database (this software was in the early stages of development at the time.) In this seminal role, Taylor assisted the film restoration team of Robert Harris and Jim Katz (Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady) on such classic films as Rear Window, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Trouble with Harry and inspected such collections as The Sammy Davis Jr., Estate, The Mary Pickford Film Library and The Michael Douglas Film Library as well as films from the major motion picture studios Columbia, Universal, Fox, Paramount, etc. Taylor amassed skills along her varied career path that enabled her to establish Preserving The Past, LLC in Los Angeles, California in 1997.

The impetus for launching her own company was poignantly and specifically to address a void in the then fast emerging field of film preservation (in large part due to a phenomenon occuring in acetate film collections—inherent deterioration referred to as Vinegar Syndrome.) Most companies were focusing on major motion pictures and little attention was being paid to household collections that were languishing in closets, garages and attics. After a few successful several years in Hollywood, Taylor returned to university to add a formal educational component to her years of expertise in film preservation. Accepted into the inaugural class of a unique program that incorporates museum studies with library science and focusing on the preservation of photographic objects, she earned her Master of Arts in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada in collaboration with George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York (now George Eastman Museum.) Reentering the academic setting was a pivotal time for Taylor with the realization that cultural collections such as those found in institutions, universities, libraries, nonprofits and businesses also needed the kind of care Preserving The Past, LLC was already offering families. Services were expanded to offer more technological expertise and encompass broader constituencies.

Taylor is regarded a pioneer in offering best practice film preservation and museum-quality archiving services for cultural collections. She was awarded the 2013 Alan Stark Award honoring achievement in film preservation by the executive board of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and was a 2017 finalist for the Digital Rochester Woman in Technology Award.