This image is from a broken glass plate negative made at Cobb's Studio in Albuquerque in 1916, The Albuquerque Museum's Archivist, Jill Hartke, included it in an exhibit about the various kinds of damage which are sustained by these old glass plate negatives over the years. In this case she carefully assembled the broken pieces and scanned the result.
As Hartke notes in a Youtube video about the damage to this image and others that were scanned for the show, the damage actually produces something new and interesting beyond what might have been present in the original negative. I think what she may have had in mind was the Zen-inspired idea of Wabi-Sabi or Kintsugi.
As explained in Wikipedia,
This traditional Japanese art is called Kintsugi (golden joinery) or kintsukuroi (golden repair). Artisans mend broken ceramic pieces using a natural tree-sap lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Rather than hiding the damage, the method highlights the cracks to treat breakage as a proud part of the object's history.
I'm comfortable with that idea, but I was also curious about what AI tools might be available to restore damaged images to something close to how they originally appeared.
A quick search turned up ai.nero.com/photo-restore, and a few minutes work produced several levels of restoration:
I thought the free-trial AI program did a pretty good job of what it was asked to do. Definitely not Wabi-Sabi, but I suspect there are AI tools available which could get much closer to the kind of subtle refinements consistent with the ancient tradition.
