What Happened to Dry Mounting Prints? [Archive] - Large Format Photography Forum

Bernice Loui

5-Dec-2019, 09:57

With the move to a new house semi-settled, decided to get out the Seal 210M dry mount press and all related to try dry mounting some fiber paper prints made years ago. Shopping for dry mounting tissue and related supplies, discovered there appears to be a trend to not allow or use dry mounting of fiber based prints by the archival folks. The claim against dry mounting is based on the print not being removable once dry mounted and degradation of the print due to materials and process of dry mounting.

Question is, I've got dry mounted fiber prints done decades ago that are not much if any different than the day they were dry mounted. Granted these mounted fiber prints were properly stored. Yet this has got me wondering what is all this !!!! about. Historically, dry mounting the print was part of the photographic print making process. Any serious photographer would deliver finished B & W art prints dry mounted. Color transparency images were a different deal.

What wrankles me about the dry mounting of fiber paper prints, if not dry mounted to keep them flat, they do not look acceptable at all as the mounted print is part of the finished print.

Add to this, the suppliers and all have changed.. lots.

Bernice

Ulophot

5-Dec-2019, 10:25

I have seen the same but still dry mount. Paul Strand's friend, Walter Rosenblum, dry mounted his prints on single ply board which was then mounted to the larger matte and over-matted. I don;t know how the mounted prints are attached to the larger matte. I have adopted this for the time being, at least, simply because I varnish the prints, as he and Strand did, but don't have space for storing many images on 16x20 mattes.
Conservation is important, but it can go overboard (no pun intended), as when conservators severely underlight a B&W print exhibit.

Peter De Smidt

5-Dec-2019, 10:31

Dry mounted prints simply look better over time. The mounting board becomes part of the piece. Sure, mount boards can become damaged, but so can unmounted prints.

Bob Salomon

5-Dec-2019, 11:27

Seal had removable dry mount tissue. Don’t know what happened to it but you might check with some archival storage/mounting and art supply dealers if it or something similar is still available.

Tin Can

5-Dec-2019, 11:42

I was taught to Dry mount 20 years ago in a college class

My prints from that era look great and i am still friends with the instructor

I recently bought a lifetime supply of NOS 8X10 Kodak No2 Dry mount here on the forum

and have some 11X14

For the last Print exchange I asked people to not dry mount to conserve box room and International shipping costs.

I heat flattened my 8X10 print in a Seal Press and it hangs by one pin behind me.

A little curl...

Paul Ron

5-Dec-2019, 11:56

i love dry mounted photos. they look finished.

i started dry mounting 50 years ago, n still use the same press. i also have a ton of mounting tissue left over, mostly 8x10 which i hardly use.

my 16x20 tissue went years ago. i recently ran out of 11x14, n talk about future shock, i cant believe what it costs these days. i keep my eye on the classifieds since that's always the best deal in town.

presses are selling dirt cheap n a great tool in the darkroom not only for mounting, but also for flattening prints. i heard you can also make a great cubano sandwich with m too.

Drew Wiley

5-Dec-2019, 11:56

Drymounting is extremely alive and well. Some of the manufacturers and brand labels have changed, but everything necessary is still available, even if products and sizes way beyond the needs of common home darkroom users. In many ways drymounting actually adds protection to a print because it provides a barrier to the backside of the print, and allows secure attachment of a different perimeter material for handling. Sometimes hand-coated media on textured surfaces like watercolor paper look more natural hinged and "floating" than pressed flat; but for most silver prints, especially glossy ones, they look horridly sloppy and incomplete without it! I would defy anyone to show an instance where a known vintage image lost even 1% of value due to drymounting, unless it was done incorrectly to begin with on an unsuitable substrate. That kind of error did sometimes happen, but there's no reason for it now. A lot of misinformation gets disseminated about this, validating the common axiom, " a little knowledge is dangerous".

Doremus Scudder

5-Dec-2019, 11:57

I dry mount everything that I exhibit. As far as I'm concerned, the mat board is part of the art work; it's color and surface is important to me. I don't want someone else matting my prints on whatever color of off-white they can find that clashes with the whites in the print. Plus I like the presentation of an exactly-trimmed, well-mounted print with the opening in the window mat cut slightly larger than the print. It is flat, three-dimensional and seems to be a window to another world, not just a piece of paper with an image on it. I hate wavy fiber-base prints mounted with corners and with the window mat intruding into the image.

There is also evidence that dry mounting a well-processed print on good-quality board with good-quality tissue actually contributes to longevity of the print. I think conservators who advocate not dry-mounting prints are often basing their preference on storage space considerations rather than aesthetic considerations.

I use BufferMount (Bien Fang now or maybe whoever their successor is... not sure anymore). It is heat removable. I have successfully unmounted and remounted many prints (I had to do quite a few after a water leak in my print storage :( ). Works just fine. It is low-heat and buffered; perfect for black-and-white materials.

If my prints don't last as long as someone else's because I dry mounted them, then so be it. I don't want to display or sell them any other way.

Best,

Doremus

Drew Wiley

5-Dec-2019, 12:03

Follow up. Doremus has made some good points. But I don't trust Buffer Mount. I've seen it fail when prints have been shipped or stored in hot environments, even briefly, like a car trunk. And alkalinity, or added artificial CaCO3 buffering, is not good for certain kinds of photographic images - another "archival" myth. It all depends.

Peter De Smidt

5-Dec-2019, 12:16

Tin Can

5-Dec-2019, 12:16

Well Drew, I need some 16X20 Dry mount, what do you suggest?

5-Dec-2019, 12:17

Many of the new dry mount tissues are made with color inkjet in mind. They melt at lower temps and would be safer to to use (less risk of heat damage to the photo). Inkjet media is sometime like RC paper; plastic layered and more easily damaged by heat.
It would make sense the newer tissue might not behave well in a the trunk of a dark car in summer desert heat.

Andrew Tymon

5-Dec-2019, 12:24

This thread reminds me that my last stock of dry mount tissue was defective. I'll be needing some soon. What do you folks recommend? I'll be mounting fiber-based double weight BWprints. No need for the tissue to be removable.

Hey Peter what brand was it? I had some Light Impressions own brand that would not stick. I tried it at different temperatures still no joy.

Peter De Smidt

5-Dec-2019, 12:27

I think it was Bienfang, but I bought it a long time ago now. I probably did buy it from Light Impressions. I generally go a decade between getting a group of prints that I want to drymount and frame.

Drew Wiley

5-Dec-2019, 12:36

I relied on Seal Colormount for many years, and still have some left. It went from Seal branding to Bienfang, then to DK, an importer, but all seemed the same. Now a product called Trimount made by Drytac is being pushed as comparable or perhaps even superior. I need to order quite a bit of 16X20, so will find out. But I just spent a lot on a big pile of museum board and have other projects underway, so it might be awhile till I form my own opinion about Trimount. It will soon be too wet and humid for volume drymounting this winter anyway. As for drymounting color prints - no way, unless its non-buffered museum board and a dye transfer print on actual baryta paper base. Cold-mounting foils are better for color, but need their own kind of equipment and skills. There's a distinct technique to proper drymounting, including pre-drying of all necessary materials. But once that's understood and practiced a little, it becomes easy.

Doremus Scudder

5-Dec-2019, 12:48

Follow-up from me.

First, I'm speaking of black-and-white fiber-base silver gelatin prints only here. I don't do color anymore and would likely go d*****l if i did.

I use the BufferMount just because it is removable; I like that feature and it has come in handy more than once. Plus, if a print mat board ever gets damaged, the print can be remounted.

For those that want a permanent mount, ColorMount or its successors has been the standard for years. It's what most B&W prints are dry mounted with.

I haven't bought dry-mount tissue in years, but am getting set up to do a bunch of mounting sometime in the next few months. I'll be asking for advice/resources when I run out of my stock of tissue. Who's in business now anyway? DK, Drytac, any others?

Best,

Doremus

Kevin Crisp

5-Dec-2019, 12:54

When I was 16 or so, my photographic mentor was a well-known newspaper photographer. He dry mounted his display prints at work, trimmed to the edge with no borders. He mounted them at home on the wall with about an inch of stand-offs that I think were blocks of wood. Some fifty years later nearly all of them looked quite yellow/brown, so did the mounting board he used. The tissue didn't protect the photos from the board damaging them. I, of course, copied what he did for my supposed keepers, using different materials I got at "the camera store." My prints from the same era still look fine, but then the board hasn't turned like his did. I lucked out. I had never heard of archival board. Other than physical damage from handling, or spilling something on them, every print I dry mounted after a proper washing looks fine going on 50 years.

Tin Can

5-Dec-2019, 13:02

Thanks Drew, looking at Freestyle the specs and description are similar between Arista and DryTac.

I will try some soon.

Alan9940

5-Dec-2019, 13:37

I have B&W fiber prints mounted on archival board w/archival overmatt framed in Nielsen silver frames hanging on various walls of my home for nearly 40 years now and they still look as good as the day I made 'em. Seal mounting press, permanent mounting tissue (bought so many years ago I forget what brand it is), normal piece of glass in the frame (not UV protecting, etc).

Jerry Bodine

5-Dec-2019, 14:35

FWIW in his thread, this link may be of interest. This material is what I've been using since it became available for mount board and mat. I'm still using Colormount tissue for dry mounting. No issues here.

https://www.lodima.org/advances-in-archival-mounting-and-storage

Maris Rusis

5-Dec-2019, 15:00

Drew Wiley

5-Dec-2019, 15:08

DK was just a marketing company which took over Colormount etc from Bienfang, but subcontracted it to Chinese mfg, which caused me some trepidation at first, though it turned out to be the same product in terms of performance. Drytac, on the other hand, makes a giant selection of mounting supplies plus machinery targeted at numerous trades - outdoor advertising, signage, large-scale laminations and art presentation, plus good ole humble drymounting applications. B&H has switched to them, and apparently the rest of major suppliers; so there must be a reason. Nothing new aobut what Michael Smith once posted. For a long time alkaline-buffering has just been a way to market substandard board as "archival". You really need to understand what you're getting and why. I like Rising Museum Board for it's high quality. It's processed in water that comes through limestone, so is naturally buffered a bit. But alkalinity can be a detriment to certain media, such as albumen, dye transfer (which is based on acid mordants) and certain other kinds of prints, as well as artworks on wool and silk. I have albumen prints well over a hundred years old beautiful preserved, glued to distinctly acidic cardboard stock all along. You simply can't take a blanket term like "archival" and make the same shoe fit everything. That's more marketing nonsense than anything else. Most of us, including myself, mostly drymount for sake of silver gelatin prints, where the protocol is well understood.

Jim Jones

6-Dec-2019, 09:13

Years ago I used Colormount tissues and acid-free rag boards from Light Impressions for B&W darkroom prints. Eventually many boards became discolored around the print edges. This also happened to a Cole Weston print he perhaps did while conducting a workshop in Minnesota in 1978. Now I print on an Epson with Epson Exhibition Fiber paper extending beyond the overmat's window. The paper remains unmounted. For the last 9 or 10 years this has worked well.

Drew Wiley

6-Dec-2019, 10:14

Anything resembling edge discoloration around a print mounted on museum board would be due to some kind of foreign contamination, or perhaps due to a bit of the mounting tissue itself being in sight due to being improperly trimmed. I've never even once had that happen after drymounting gosh knows how many thousands of prints, nor have I ever seen a case of what you're describing. Colormount was used for decades by many many photographers with complete reliability. What kind of material did you use between the press platen and the print/ragboard sandwich itself?

Jim Jones

6-Dec-2019, 18:51

Probably another sheet of that acid-free rag board from Light Impressions.

Drew Wiley

6-Dec-2019, 18:54

A mystery. Wonder if some of your Colormount itself had deteriorated due to being stored too long under hot conditions before you bought it? The old version was on glassine tissue, I believe.

Greg

6-Dec-2019, 19:22

fiber-base silver gelatin prints: dry mont on 1 ply board

Platinum/Palladium & Salt: flatten the prints and hang them with archival hinges on 4 ply board

B&W fiber base and RC prints that I made in the late 1970s and dry mounted look like they were done yesterday. Unfortunately also used some textured "archival" board in the 1980s and the board has yellowed from the outside inwards.

Vaughn

6-Dec-2019, 21:12

As I type this reply, on the bench behind me is a big roll of Kodak type 2 dry-mounting tissue and my tacking iron is heating up. All being well by the end of the day I will have dry-mounted 70 gelatin-silver photographs for my Xmas mail out. With the right gear and a bit of practice dry-mounting is quick, easy, and as perfect as it gets.

Type 2 is what I used for 16x20 prints for years -- a little tricky at times...too hot is a problem. I trimmed the photo (and attached tissue) to the image area and floated the print in a hole about an inch bigger than the image area.

In theory, dry mount tissue should form a barrier to moisture and chemicals.

Eric Woodbury

6-Dec-2019, 21:31

A friend sold a sizable number of prints to the Santa Barbara Museum several years back. They specifically did not want them mounted because of the increased storage volume.

Another issue is bad mat board. What if the mat board goes bad? It is not impossible to remove a dry mounted print from a board (lots of practice), but it is impossible to remove the signature, etc. Same friend had worked for Ansel and had a dry mounted AA print. The board turned pink over a few years. Friend called Ansel and asked if he'd re-sign the print if he had it remounted. Ansel was fine with this. Friend insured the print, had it removed, and re-signed.

Thirdly, the quality and texture of the printing paper is more interesting than a piece of museum board.

Fourth, and perhaps this is just me, but I don't sell a lot of prints, but I give a lot away. Time is precious and I'd rather print more and dry mount less. Dry mounting is expensive, takes room, and requires more time than I like to 'give away'. I gave a friend a nice print, dry mounted, and even an over mat. They were thankful and framed it...without the over mat, print against the glass. I haven't given them any prints since.

My personal prints, yes, I like them dry mounted. I learned at a time when that was the 'right' thing to do. Even better, I prefer the print mounted in a debossed mount on 2-ply, but this takes even more time and equipment and space.

How prints are displayed is a personal decision. There are many fine ways to do it.

Drew Wiley

6-Dec-2019, 21:50

Good rag museum board has gotten quite expensive. But I don't trust the alternatives for fiber-based prints. In fact, the mounting board is probably a far more stable material than the base of the paper itself. Even good book paper has gotten costly. How come a book printed two hundred years ago still has the pages intact, but most book pages nowadays discolor in perhaps a few years? But acquiring a stockpile of materials is nowhere near as expensive as mounting and framing large color prints. So right now, I'm only drymounting only one or perhaps two prints of a given black and white image. I don't mount color prints at all except on demand. Drymount tissues seem to keep well even decades before use. Acrylic cold mount foils don't apply right just after a few years, just like masking tape that isn't used promptly. But in general, I just don't real an image is complete until it's properly mounted; and I sure as heck don't like it when someone messes with my own mat proportions reframing something to match their stupid sofa or whatever. But once they own it, there's nothing I can do about it.

Paul Ron

7-Dec-2019, 05:20

materials in general have gotten very expensive but framing prices hit the roof. i make my own frames these days. plastic also got expensive, i went back to using single weight glass.

Jim Jones

7-Dec-2019, 07:27

A mystery. Wonder if some of your Colormount itself had deteriorated due to being stored too long under hot conditions before you bought it? The old version was on glassine tissue, I believe.

I lived in a hundred-year-old farmhouse in Missouri without air conditioning until recently. Humidity could also be a problem. Two small Edward Weston photographs printed by Cole Weston and bought at the same time remain in perfect condition. The larger Cole Weston was probably not printed and mounted by Cole.

Sal Santamaura

7-Dec-2019, 09:14

Given how much we don't know about the fiber base gelatin silver papers available to print on today, such as how well their base* will hold up, how long the optical brightening agents (in the base and/or emulsion) will last, etc., worrying about mount board's potential effect seems a waste of effort. :)

* Note that I wrote "base," i.e. singular. All black and white fiber base paper on the market now is coated upon the same Schoeller base:

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/has-adox-mcc-110-changed.107990/page-2#post-1426034

Willie

8-Dec-2019, 06:54

https://www.designsinkart.com/library/M-AbridgedHistoryofDryMounting200410.htm

https://www.framedestination.com/framing-accessories/photo-mounting-supplies/mounting-and-laminating-handbook-by-chris-paschke.html

https://www.designsinkart.com/

The links above will give you more information than you probably want. Chris Paschke is excellent on dry mounting and one to check out. She is up to date with standards and methods. An accepted authority whose writing is worth checking out.

Tin Can

8-Dec-2019, 07:33

Great links

Read some and will study further

Thank you

gnd2

10-Dec-2019, 20:12

I recently made the leap to fiber prints. I've researched and tried various methods for dealing with the curling that didn't involve investing in a dry mount press but wasn't satisfied with anything I've tried. So I finally gave in and found a 210M locally through Craig's List.

I've adopted a method similar to that mentioned in the second post of this thread - dry mount to a 2-ply board the same size as the print, then hinge-mount that to a backing board and window mat. I'm thrilled with the results, nice and flat, no ripples or waves.

What I've gathered from B&H is that colormount is no longer produced and has been replaced by RagMount (archival and permanent) which is what I purchased. The few attempts I've made so far have been perfect, very easy.

Bernice Loui

13-Dec-2019, 11:14

Thanks Drew for the reply. Getting to the roll core of what remains of Seal Colormount and need more. Wanted some feed back and real world experience of what current dry mount tissue is ok and proven to work.

Firm believe problem with dry mounted prints are due to poor quality materials used coupled with technique and tools. It does take some print wrecking early on to learn how to do dry mounting properly. Once these skills have been learned, using the best materials available with the proper tools in good condition, long term stability of dry mounted prints should not be an issue.

Bernice

DK was just a marketing company which took over Colormount etc from Bienfang, but subcontracted it to Chinese mfg, which caused me some trepidation at first, though it turned out to be the same product in terms of performance. Drytac, on the other hand, makes a giant selection of mounting supplies plus machinery targeted at numerous trades - outdoor advertising, signage, large-scale laminations and art presentation, plus good ole humble drymounting applications. B&H has switched to them, and apparently the rest of major suppliers; so there must be a reason. Nothing new aobut what Michael Smith once posted. For a long time alkaline-buffering has just been a way to market substandard board as "archival". You really need to understand what you're getting and why. I like Rising Museum Board for it's high quality. It's processed in water that comes through limestone, so is naturally buffered a bit. But alkalinity can be a detriment to certain media, such as albumen, dye transfer (which is based on acid mordants) and certain other kinds of prints, as well as artworks on wool and silk. I have albumen prints well over a hundred years old beautiful preserved, glued to distinctly acidic cardboard stock all along. You simply can't take a blanket term like "archival" and make the same shoe fit everything. That's more marketing nonsense than anything else. Most of us, including myself, mostly drymount for sake of silver gelatin prints, where the protocol is well understood.

Drew Wiley

13-Dec-2019, 11:47

I'll order a quantity of 16X20 Trimount next, but will not have opportunity to test it for awhile. Damp weather is not a good time for drymounting because predrying sheets of paper and esp ragboard under such conditions runs up the utility bill wattage unnecessarily, and is frustrating overall. This is good weather for b&w printing instead, and rainy day walks. I still have a 20 inch roll of Colormount, but would prefer to reserve that for 20x24 prints.

Bernice Loui

13-Dec-2019, 12:00

What most do not consider before dry mounting is to dry both print AND board before mounting. The stuff holds moisture. Once dry mounted, that moisture could be a problem. Common for folks doing dry mount to put the print in the press for about a minute or so to flatten and dry, putting the board to be use in to press to dry is often not done.

Bernice

Drew Wiley

13-Dec-2019, 16:07

Ragboard is just like a sponge for atmospheric humidity. If I were to do it today, even my standardized 22x26 boards (for 16x20 prints) would shrink about an eighth inch each dimension with a just minute of preheating (I do them about 30 seconds each side). Of course, I don't store bulk museum board unwrapped like that in a damp area; but for use, it sure doesn't take long for them to wick up ambient humidity. If I just wanted to do a print or two for sale, no problem keeping things dry in that kind of brief work cycle; but not for what I really need to do, which is to mount another hundred prints. But a side benefit is that a big press makes one darn good workspace heater, and the next utility bill will prove it!