We report on the spectroscopic and hole burning properties of free-base naphtophthalocyanine with and without 1-chloranthracene in polymer host. These materials exhibit a strong 0-0 absorption band in the region 800 nm matching the wavelength range of most semiconductor and Ti:Sapphire lasers. The materials studied feature two persistent hole burning photochemical mechanisms, i.e. one-photon proton tautomerization, and two-photon-gated hole burning likely due to donor-acceptor electron transfer. The last mechanism includes the long living intermediate state. The hole width at 1.5 K is about 300-400 MHz depending on the hole burning conditions, while the inhomogeneous width is about 107 MHz. Holographic storage is an important potential application of these materials. We demonstrated 10 plane wave holograms angularly multiplexed at one frequency channel in a spectral hole burning medium. It was shown that the M/# is still a valid system metric and the measured M/# in one frequency channel is about 0.01. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.