Weston at The Huntington

[Sal Santamaura]

First, since Google hasn't crawled our site's pages yet, I just searched the archive by manually reviewing thread titles in Photographs (85 threads), Darkroom Printing (323 threads) and Printing (non-darkroom and Exhibiting) (81 threads) and reading quite a few threads within those categories. The subjects of this question did not appear to have been covered, so I'm going to post it. If answers lurk in the archive, many apologies to everyone, including the most vocal complainer about cluttering things up with redundant questions: me!!

Having never seen one of his originals, I made my way to The Huntington last weekend to view "Edward Weston: A Legacy." Forming an opinion of this work was nearly impossible. As mentioned on other forums, light levels were far lower than he seems to have printed for, making almost all the images appear very heavy. In addition, mirror-like reflections from the acrylic glazing obscured them almost completely. Yesterday I sent a message to The Huntington's Curator of Photographs advising her about Tru View RF Acrylic, and she responded that she'll look into using it for future exhibitions. Doing so should solve at least one problem.

My assessment of the exhibit's other characteristics is not much better. First, all the silver-gelatin 8x10 images were in frames that I scaled (using the brochure) to be around 16x23. This felt much too large and rectangular. The overmats revealed only a very small area of the mat to which the print was mounted, typically in the neighborhood of 1/16" - 1/8". Very awkward looking. And the images were mounted dead center top-to-bottom; a weighted bottom always feels much better to my eye.

Finally, all the prints were significantly yellowed. They were printed a bit over six decades ago. I have been to other exhibits, including several of Adams' work, where many prints of similar age were displayed, and only recall a small percentage of those being as yellow as these uniformly were. To make matters worse, the mats were fairly white, a jarring contrast to yellow prints. Even with less highlight detail than originals, I'd rather look at the reproductions in this exhibit's brochure; at least they're white.

There have been several Adams Yosemite Special Edition 8x10s hanging on my wall for over twenty five years, and they show no signs of yellow. Can anyone shed light on the possible cause for yellowing in the exhibited Weston prints? Do baryta-based silver-gelatin papers react similarly to some paints, that is, yellow more if dark-stored than when displayed in room light? Thanks in advance for sharing any information/experience.