cold mounting materials

Will you please confirm or refute the following?

Double stick materials made today are 'anti-acid' and should be safe, even though not optimal, for long-term mounting of photographs. I am talking about anything from 3M mounting tape to Scotch double-stick tape. Even carpet tape that I have had for many years is as good as new (no discoloring). Comments?

You know, dpn, I am sick and tired of being told that ONLY certain materials are possible to be used. The other day I 'noticed' that a ream of really OLD copy paper, over 10 years old, was just as white and bright as the day I had bought it. That got me thinking ...

Today's sticky materials are really great ... great enough to force me to come to terms with this heresy that I have dared to impart. Really, if you use a simple double stick tape (yes, even CARPET tape, heaven forbid), will the Devil himself come and send you to hell for such transgression?

Really, are we, collectively, being a bit too snobbish and just plain wrong when it comes to 'preservation'? Actually, in more recent years it has been determined that a slight bit of fixer SHOULD remain in the paper in order to thwart worse atmospheric chemicals from impregnating those precious fibers. There is almost a newly constructed religion which posits that under no circumstances should anything other that traditional hot mounting be employed. I think that I am getting tired of such mandates, iconoclastic as I am. - David Lyga

Carpet tape and such will dry out and fail soon enough, yet leave a lot of miserable residue. It's also never going to give you a flat smooth
print surface. Even the Devil wouldn't hang pictures on the walls of hell using that stuff. After all, he has a lot of money and seems to be able to get anything he wants. Your expression "anti-acid" sounds like a pill I take after eating spicey food. Those pills are typically calcium carbonate, which is exactly the cheap ingredient used in most "buffered" art board. Not necessarily a good thing for every print medium,
and not the same implication as "acid-free" or "acid-netural". Certain products like Gatorboard contain acidic components, but these are
trapped in such a manner they cannot migrate into anything outside. It's an involved subject. The problem with high-tack acrylic double
faced products marketed for large smooth pictures is that they are utterly unforgiving once applied, so need special skills and equipment.
A medium-tack product like 3M Repositionable is a better choice for amateurs, but isn't strong enough to hold prints bigger than 16x20.

I use double stick tape, sometimes tape with padding.

I personally would not use any product that is not specifically designed for mounting prints. Who knows what chemicals might be present and the effect on archival permanence. But then I don't mount prints in that fashion. Anyone interested in dealing with dealers or museums should know that they do not approve of any permanent mounting technique.

Your print, use wallpaper paste if it works for you.

I spend a lot of time walking around seeking out my subjects. Then I invest a lot of time and money in the processing and printing of my work.

Why would anyone want to put all of that work at risk using untested materials?

There are a wide range of hot, cold, tape and paste solutions to securing your prints that have all passed the PAT test that spread over a wide price range.

I personally have always preferred to dry mount my work and these prints (even those from the 1970s when nobody in the UK talked about archival materials) are all still fine.

However, as others have said here, they are your prints so do what you want with them - just do not expect that all of the adhesives out there will treat them well.

Bests,

David.
www.dsallen.de

A simple answer to that question is not possible. There are just too many variables and they are changing all the time. It is just not a matter of acid free or not. It is a combination of chemicals in the adhesive, the paper, the chemicals used to create the image and then time, temperature, humidity, and the spectrum of light hitting the print (UV, Infrared, Visible). Some combinations will be very stable for a few years and start to degrade. Other combinations might degrade significantly in short time and then be more stable for a very long time. Others will just slowly degrade over time. What if the printing process uses a rare acidic process? Those prints are harmed by mat board and mounting board that is buffered to make it more acid free.

Another variable is how well the mounting is performed. If you used a press and removed all the air and fully and evenly applied and activated the adhesive across the entire surface then cold mounting can last as long as dry mounting. If however you subject the print to a huge temperature and humidity changes then even a perfect dry mount will fail in a short time.

Temperature changes cause items to expand and contract at different rates. Foam-board and mat board expand and contract at different rates. Foam-board and mat board will have different types of facing materials that are in contact with the print. There are different types of print paper with different weights. Some combinations of paper and mounting substrate might expand and contract at similar rates, and others may not. As the temperature changes if the paper expands more than the mounting substrate it will put more stress on the adhesive. Air trapped between the print and mounting substrate will expand with temperature increases putting stress on the paper. Different adhesives can handle this stress more than others and how they handle it may change over time.

You might hear from a photographer in Phoenix AZ that a combination has worked great for him for decades with no problem. However, you live in Bar Harbor Maine and the same combination fails for you in a couple years.

I am just scratching the surface of how complicated this is. If you talk to a professional conservator such as Mark Mccormick-Goodhart at
AARDENBURG IMAGING & ARCHIVES he will make your head spin.

"Yes" glue is a basic wheat dextrin paste sold by art stores, a lot like old-fashioned wallpaper paste. So are most nontoxic glue pens sold in
office stores. During the siege of Leningrad, people ate wallpaper paste. But booklice like to eat it too. And unless you're just mounting a very small photo, this stuff is hard to work with. If you really want to get into wet mounting, there are special glues made for this by both Daige and Seal, intended for vacuum presses, but usable under simple flat weights too. But it's messy process and a lot can go wrong unless you have experience. Gosh knows how many print mounting systems and substrates I've tried, and then deliberately hung some big print under abusive conditions or harsh climate just to see what would happen. But that's how I separated fact from fiction.