Other than tape, which leaves a residue and photocorners, which can be awkward to position properly, there is another product that is useful if you wish for the print to be removeable from its backing. Lineco makes a product called "archival mounting strips". You use them as tabs around the edges of the print. They are particularly useful for prints made on heavy paper such as watercolor paper and are good for conservation quality mounts.
Dry mount. Used to use tape. perhaps ok with heavy double weight paper. But, for single weight, dry mount looks a LOT better. You pretty much need a dry mount press to get prints flat anyway.....so why not dry mount? They last pretty darn long dry mounted. And if they need to fix a print....a) is your print THAT important. b) if it is, well then certainly they are fixing dry mounted prints today, maybe at more cost, but again, if its THAT valuable....
It's a pretty easy technique to learn. And, I think you will appreciate it in the long run.
the simplest, most cost-effective, and least harmful means of mounting your prints is to hinge-mount them with a water-soluble paste adhesive and linen tape to an acid-free backing board (can be foamcore, can be another piece of mat board), and then overmat to protect the print. While drymount can make for a nice presentation, it is very difficult to reverse, if not impossible, without damaging the print. If you're going to take the care and effort to make a fine print, even if you think in 100 years it will sell for less than you paid for it in materials costs, why not mount it to the proper museum standard in the first place?
As to flattening prints, I have very little problem with print curl anymore now that I have fiberglass drying screens and can air-dry my fiber prints over night. A little curl is natural to photo paper, even straight out of the factory. If you don't own a drymount press and don't want to invest the square footage of your house and the hundreds of dollars it requires to get and keep one, you can always put a (smaller) print inside a white cotton t-shirt, and then press it with a steam iron on low heat, ironing from the back.
The cost of a second-hand dry mount press was a fraction of the cost of the dry mount tissue I've consumed over the years. Unlike some pressure sensitive material I tred long ago, dry mounting has been perfectly reliable. Using acid free 100% rag board should forestall attention from conservators, if anyone really cares by then. Perhaps mounting with more concern for future conservation than for appearance is better in some markets. It's a choice each of us has to make for ourselves.
Dry mount. A print can look nice and flat in my place but after moving it to another place it may be wavy due to different moisture in the air.
I'm struggling with this right now. Even with a good sturdy paper, such as Museo Silver Rag, you are taking chances by corner mounting or top stitching a print in excess of 20x24, and you are almost certain to eventually get ripples or waves when you get to 30x40 and above. And have you ever tried to dry mount a 40x50? Most of the big color these days is mounted on plexi, aluminum or a new composite called Dibond. You can either print with a large white border, mount it to the backing, then frame with a riser to offset the glass from the image, or use a traditional mat over the mounted print. More and more, the big color guys are doing the former--i.e., using a riser and no mat.
I have discovered that many large metro areas have mounting shops of one sort or another, and the process isn't all that expensive. You can ask around at fine-art galleries to find such mounter in your area.
I'm only just now starting to get any "keepers" that I think are good enough for display, and that aren't knockoffs of other work I liked. The early work just plain sucks. When i started refining my technique to the point the print quality was decent enough for display, everything looked like Walker Evans Wannabe Imitations. This past year, I started to get some stuff that I felt were "my" images. I decided on dry mounting based on everything I read. My logical side tells me that 100 years from now, when the dry mounted prints are decaying in their mounts, nobody's really going to give a s...care, that is.
My ego, on the other hand, insists that I'll be a posthumous discovery, so naturally my work will be in tremendous demand. The museum that discovers the Light Impressions boxes with the flattened but unmounted prints that I have stored on a wire shelf will be ecstatic.
That's assuming, of course, that my kids don't just figure its easier to just throw away all of Dad's old photography crap when he's gone.
I've been drymounting with Adorama's back board and universal dry mount tissue. I never was able to determine why Seal's mount tissue was 4x the price. I used to be a big fan of the double weight mount boards Adorama sells, until I determined that in a frame the single weight was just fine.
My impression was that mount tissue is heat-reversable... why is remounting it in the future a problem?
--A
One reason I always dry mount is aesthetic and not merely technical. The windows in my overmats are cut larger than the print size so that I can float the picture within it. The overmat may never intrude upon the borders of my prints, not even a millimeter's worth. If I were to corner mount or use tape the overmat would help keep the print flat, but then it wouldn't be my print anymore.
I've recently seen some otherwise fine presentations of photographs ruined by fact that no matter what you do, if a print is not dry mounted it won't be perfectly flat. You can still see the occasional wave or crinkle underneath the mat and it makes all the difference in the world as to the final presentation.
As far as I'm concerned, if a photograph is not dry mounted and overmatted it is not finished.
Could not agree more with you Jim. I would add that using the best materials in the process with cotton rag PH balanced mat board and highest quality mounting tissue is a must. THere is a reason that Seal is more expensive - it works. When corners are cut in this regard, problems will result.Originally Posted by jshanesy
Cheers!
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