Dry mounting a photography exhibition and sales

[Drew Wiley]

Static issues with the acrylic? Just use an antistatic plastic cleaner first. It's needed anyway to repel lint and so forth.

[Kirk Gittings]

There was some discussion about having this 32"x96" print professionally mounted. Does anyone have ideas on what service to do it though? It's over $300 worth of materials so I want to make sure it is done right the first time.

IME Hinge mounting a print larger than 16x20 will not lay flat unless it is in a very tightly controlled temp/humidity environment. Mat surface prints will be less of a problem but any luster or glossy print will look bad as the bulges will reflect light oddly. Personally, I dry mount anything mat over 16x20, silver, ink whatever and glossy anything over 11x14. I can't dry mount anything larger than 16x20 at home, so for larger prints I use a local framing service.

[paulr]

There is no correct answer to the archival properties of digital paper. If you ask on this forum, you may receive many well intentioned answers. However, this is new territory, yet to experience the ultimate test; simply the test of time. All that we know in this instance are accelerated tests in controlled situations and environments.

What we've actually learned is that the same caveats apply to the traditional processes. The accelerated aging tests show us that there is a huge difference in (expected) longevity between one paper/ink combination and another. Likewise, real world archiving experience show the exact same phenomenon with traditional materials. Some silver prints look pristine after seventy years, others have degenerated.

It's tempting to blame the degeneration on poor processing or storage conditions, but frequently conservators do not know the reason. The phenomenon has been attributed to idiosyncratic differences between the materials and chemistries used. And since we can no longer use the precise materials that have lasted a century, we are stuck evaluating traditional materials with the same imperfect methods we use to evaluate new materials.

Many old assumptions about longevity have been debunked in recent decades. For example, it's been shown that a small level of residual fixer in the print actually improves permance. And that toning in selenium and gold chloride has virtually no effect (both discoveries were shocks to me; I always washed the bejeezus out of my prints, and did a lot of gold toning, assuming both would do magical things). It's quite possible that characteristics of the paper base in silver papers--something manufactuers rarely talk about--make a big difference. Even with hand-coated processes, there's a certain amount of mystery concerning the papers themselves.

[paulr]

As far as convservators "preferring" unmounted prints ... that kind of statement doesn't make any sense. They take what they get.

Yes, my point was that they take what they get. But their preferences tell us something about what makes conservation easier rather than harder.

The reason they prefer unmounted prints is simple: the mat is there to protect the prints. If the mat gets damaged, its trivially easy to replace if the print is attached with corners or a hinge. It's difficult to impossible if the print is mounted. There's also the matter of the conservator not knowing the quality/type of the drymount tissue, etc...

I don't know anyone who would even want to purchase unmounted prints.

Every institution I've ever sold or donated to, or approached with the hopes of selling to.

But we both seem to agree that it doesn't make much difference. If my prints had been mounted (as I'm planning for my next project, for esthetic reasons) I don't think that would have deterred anyone.

[Drew Wiley]

Yeah ... a conservator doesn't always know how a print has been mounted, so would
prefer to mount it themselves if they happen to be preparing the print for auction or
archiving. But heck, they'll sell some collage by Picasso or Mattise that was clipped out
of acidic crepe paper or cheap newsprint or something and glued to ordinary cheap cardboard, charge tens of thousands for the thing, then figure out how to control the already visible deterioration. They'll spend millions just trying to clean the ceiling of the Sistine or glue back DaVinci's Last Supper chip by chip. Most photographs just aren't worth enough for that level of fuss. If you have to refix something it's a lot easier without the mount. Nowadays most "fine art" photographers know how to properly fix, tone, and mount. Inkjet, on the other hand, is still a sort of "wait and see"
category. There's probably some voodoo priestess in Haiti or New Orleans that has all
the answers.