How archival is a straight print?

Travis Nunn · May 17, 2006

If you go through fixing, hypo clearing and washing properly how archival is the print without toning?

I generally don't tone my prints other than my lith prints (selenium and gold) and occasionally I'll sepia tone some prints so I've only toned for aesthetic reasons, never for archival reasons.

Flotsam · May 17, 2006

This is just a purely anecdotal reply but...
I've been sifting through some of my 25 and 30 year old drymounted (on board of questionable petigree), untoned and probably fixed and washed pretty well, but not to any scientifically stringent archival standards (those college years are a bit of a haze ) and stored in old photo paper boxes with zero consideration to ambient storage conditions.

Frankly, I can't tell them from prints that I made last month.

Travis Nunn · May 18, 2006

Flotsam said:
This is just a purely anecdotal reply but...
I've been sifting through some of my 25 and 30 year old drymounted (on board of questionable petigree), untoned and probably fixed and washed pretty well, but not to any scientifically stringent archival standards (those college years are a bit of a haze ) and stored in old photo paper boxes with zero consideration to ambient storage conditions.

Frankly, I can't tell them from prints that I made last month.

See, that's what confuses me. I hear this from a lot of people, yet I also hear people say that if the print is to be sold, it must selenium toned to archival standards. Is this mindset from an earlier time when there were more unknowns regarding paper and chemistry?

removed account4 · May 18, 2006

SNIP

Flotsam said:
untoned and probably fixed and washed pretty well, but not to any scientifically stringent archival standards (those college years are a bit of a haze ) and stored in old photo paper boxes with zero consideration to ambient storage conditions.

Frankly, I can't tell them from prints that I made last month.

same here.

i've never selenium toned anything.
and i've never heard what you were told ( and i've submitted archival photographs and negatives to the library of congress ( habs/haer) ...

from what i understand ( but i might be wrong), it doesn't need to be toned to be archival ..

-john

Donald Qualls · May 18, 2006

If you want your print to have the best chance of lasting centuries, something needs to protect the silver. The sepia toning you do, BTW (assuming it's a bleach-redevelop "odorless" thiocarbamide process) is one of the most protective; the silver is coated with a layer of silver sulfide, which is as permanent as any toning you can give.

However -- there are a large number of prints still around from the early days of salted paper and albumen prints; as long as they were well washed in the first place, the small level of residual hypo that's effectively impossible to get rid of will actually give the silver that sulfur coating that protects it. Too much will destroy the silver, though, so you *do* still need to wash well.

Bottom line, if you print on RC paper, don't worry about it; the RC base is probably only good for about 50 years anyway, and the silver will easily last that long. If you print on fiber, and are trying to sell your prints, toning is a must if only because many buyers don't want prints they think they won't be able to pass on to their grandchildren; they look at the longevity of oil paintings from the Renaissance and the way those artworks have escalated in value, and think they're putting away their grandchildren's retirement.

A very light toning in highly dilute selenium will protect with little or no change in print tone. Platinum/palladium can be adjusted to give almost no color change from most warm to neutral prints (though it can get a little teeth-gritting when you throw away several prints, at $10 or $20 each for the metal in the toner, before you get the toning just the way you want it; there's a good reason gold, platinum and palladium aren't used much for toning silver gelatin prints).

I've got a few commercially made (well, drug store) B&W prints around here, from the early 1970s, just before RC beat out fiber in commercial processing (and a few years before color started to push B&W into the background) -- and more than thirty years on, with processing that gave little thought to permanence relative to volume, and they look as good as prints I make now (except I can't get single weight paper to dry that flat!).

I've never toned a print, except one sepia and one selenium in a college class in 1981. I'll probably get some selenium toner sometime soon, because I need it for alt-process (it keeps van Dyke brownprints and salted paper from bleaching in the fixer); I'll likely try it on my silver gelatin prints as well. Couldn't hurt...

david b · May 18, 2006

For most of my prints, I use a double-fix bath, hypo-clear and then a 30 minute wash.

Never had a problem.

Flotsam · May 18, 2006

I've also heard that unless you selenium tone to the max (with perhaps undesired tone and contrast changes), the untoned silver will not get the archival benefit anyway. (Close only counts with Horseshoes and Hand Grenades ) So unless you are demanding the specific aesthetic benefits of toning, personally, I give it a pass.

Since I am over 50, If you think that my prints aren't quite as clean fifty years from now, just bring them on back to me for a full refund. You'll likely find me a very grave fellow .

Joe Lipka · May 18, 2006

I'm right there with Flotsam on the definition of archival. Too much is emphasis is placed on archival processing.

Should you desire my entire views on archival processing, I do go into a bit more detail on my web site. From the home page, Miscellany > Random Thoughts.

juan · May 18, 2006

I, too, have prints made 35-years ago that show no signs of age. At the time, I had never heard of archival processing nor selinum toning - I fixed with one bath of Kodak fixer and washed them by changing water in the bathtub. Some are mounted on plain old poster board - not even all rag.

I think, though, if you plan to sell prints to knowledgable people, you will have to process to current archival standards.
juan

Jim Jones · May 18, 2006

My FB prints from 48 years ago are still good. Some may have been treated in Kodak HCA, but none were toned. No particular care has been taken in their storage. The only problems I've had with 30 or 40-year-old RC prints has been with contamination during washing due to careless darkroom work.

Lee Shively · May 18, 2006

Photography is not that old. Silver gelatin photos from the early days have managed to last pretty well without any special archival processing. I have some old family photos from the early part of the 20th Century that haven't faded at all. I'm sure no special processing was done on these pictures--just the standard commercial printing of the time. I have some black and white snapshots of my parents and me when I was an infant over fifty years ago that still look good and they're marked by a low cost commercial photo finisher of the day. All these pictures have been kept stored in boxes for decades. The ones my family pasted in scrap books with Elmer's glue or whatever look pretty bad.

There's no real way to know how long a photograph will last. There are a lot of theories based on accelerated aging procedures but there's no absolutely accurate way to guarantee your photographs will last for the next 2-3 centuries. Dark storage appears to be more important than archival processing procedures.

Personally, I use a dilute selenium toner for purely aesthetic purposes. I use HCA and an archival washer for convenience. If the pictures last a thousand years, it's a bonus.

raucousimages · May 18, 2006

I selenium tone because I like the look and because buyers want it. Selenium changes silver to silver-selenate, when it attaches to the silver it blocks oxygen from attaching to the silver and creating silver oxide. This may also stop polutiants like sulphur from staining prints. This may be a factor in the future but a well washed and properly displayed print should be fine in our lifetime without toner.

Oren Grad · May 18, 2006

So long as prints are washed properly, they shouldn't "age" perceptibly; you shouldn't expect to see substantial deterioration of a FB print just from the passage of a few decades. The real problem is that the silver in a print, if not protected, is very vulnerable to attack by atmospheric pollutants. If you happen to be in a relatively clean environment you may never see a problem. But you can't be sure of how your prints will be stored and displayed once they leave your hands.

Unfortunately, research findings in recent years indicate that, contrary to long-standing dogma, light toning with selenium offers little protection. Some are convinced that this is attributable to an undocumented change in the Kodak Rapid Selenium Toner formula over the years - if I recall correctly, it may actually have been a sulfide contaminant that was providing the protection - but for most of us the details don't matter. The bottom line is that the product available to us today doesn't do what the conventional wisdom says it does.

Toning to completion in selenium does protect, but causes substantial change in the appearance of the picture; I've done experiments on toning to completion with selenium using several different FB papers and didn't like the results at all. Similarly, sulfide toning, while highly protective, radically changes the character of the print.

These days I don't hassle with toners at all - I just dunk my prints in Sistan and leave it at that. Yes, there's controversy over just how protective Sistan is over the long run - there are no guarantees. But Sistan is cheap, easy to use, and doesn't change the way the prints look. I decided that it's a reasonable precaution to take - beyond that, I'd rather spend my time, money and energy making more prints rather than hassling with toners that are a nuisance to use and produce effects I don't like.

Monophoto · May 18, 2006

Flotsam said:
I've been sifting through some of my 25 and 30 year old drymounted (on board of questionable petigree)

Several years ago, I was challenged by the house manager to reduce the amount of junk I had stored in various cubbies around the place. (I could comment on what she had stored - - - but in the interest of marital bliss I will restrain myself). So I went through the large stack of mounted prints that went back almost 30 years to select those that I liked based on my current vision and standards. The result was that many of the older prints were selected for disposal. Many of these were not selenium toned, and frankly, the reason for selecting them had more to do with the evolution of my vision and print quality standards than with the way they had "matured" archivally.

The points being that

a. 30 years more or less may not be long enough to detect any difference in the archival performance of prints with or without selenium toning.
b. Your personal standards for what constitutes a "keeper" are almost certainly going to change faster than the print ages.
c. Therefore, for most of us, the concept of "archival" is really a conundrum - we want to produce the best work we can, but in the end it may not matter.

fschifano · May 18, 2006

That may be true. Thirty years isn't a very long time to consider something archival. All I can offer is that I have some prints that I made back in the late 1960's that still look good. No yellowing, fading, etc. They are nothing more than snapshots really. They haven't been mounted and for many years had been stored in a shoe box in a basement. Selenium toning? Back then I didn't know what that was. Only in recent years have I begun to use that on my prints; not so much for it's archival properties, but rather because I like the way it looks.

sanking · May 18, 2006

Oren Grad said:
So long as prints are washed properly, they shouldn't "age" perceptibly; you shouldn't expect to see substantial deterioration of a FB print just from the passage of a few decades. The real problem is that the silver in a print, if not protected, is very vulnerable to attack by atmospheric pollutants. If you happen to be in a relatively clean environment you may never see a problem. But you can't be sure of how your prints will be stored and displayed once they leave your hands.

Unfortunately, research findings in recent years indicate that, contrary to long-standing dogma, light toning with selenium offers little protection. Some are convinced that this is attributable to an undocumented change in the Kodak Rapid Selenium Toner formula over the years - if I recall correctly, it may actually have been a sulfide contaminant that was providing the protection - but for most of us the details don't matter. The bottom line is that the product available to us today doesn't do what the conventional wisdom says it does.

Toning to completion in selenium does protect, but causes substantial change in the appearance of the picture; I've done experiments on toning to completion with selenium using several different FB papers and didn't like the results at all. Similarly, sulfide toning, while highly protective, radically changes the character of the print.

These days I don't hassle with toners at all - I just dunk my prints in Sistan and leave it at that. Yes, there's controversy over just how protective Sistan is over the long run - there are no guarantees. But Sistan is cheap, easy to use, and doesn't change the way the prints look. I decided that it's a reasonable precaution to take - beyond that, I'd rather spend my time, money and energy making more prints rather than hassling with toners that are a nuisance to use and produce effects I don't like.

I agree with most of what Oren writes. You might also have a look at this web page, http://www.largeformatphotography.info/toning-permanence.html

The article is by Douglas W. Nishimur, Image Peermanence Institute of the RIT.

My thoughts are.

1. Even the best processed silver gelatin prints will deteriorate with age because of tarnishing of the silver. This will vary according to storage conditions but can not be prevented. A silver gelatin print is in essencel a print comprised of silver metal. See what happens to silver knives, forks, etc. to understand what will eventually happen to a silver print.

2. Selenium toning is not effective in providing true archival qualities to silver gelatin prints, unless it is done to completion. Most people who selenium tone their prints do so to change the color or add some snap to the Dmax and do not tone to completion. Unfortuately, toning to completion changes the nature of the print in terms of color

3. Sulfide toning is more effective than selenium.

4. Replacing the silver with a more noble metal such as gold, platinum or palladium is also more effective than selenium.

5. My belief is that photographer selling their work should tone their prints to assure the greatest longevity possible. Many don't however, as most photograhers seem content to tone with a dilute solution of selenium to get a color shift or some extra snap in the shadows.

6. If a photograher is not selling his/ her work to others there is no need to do anything other than what he/she wants. A life span of fifty or more years for a well-processed silver print stored reasonably well should suffice for most purposes.

7. Photographer's who place very high importance on maximum longevity of their prints, say more than 100 years, should probably switch to a process such as carbon, cyanotype, gum bichromate or Pt./Pd.

Sandy

Simon R Galley · May 18, 2006

Reply From ILFORD photo HARMAN technology Limited

Archival permanence is a good deal to do with how you store the finished prints, protected and in the dark for instance :

The key element here is for preservation purposes or for commercial longevity.

1) RC prints, a lot more stable than people think, it is true that the base will deteriorate before the emulsion but better than the 50 years quoted for sure.

2) Fibre based baryta papers, correctly washed ( see our website for full washing instructions ) correctly stored 100 years.

3) FB Toned ( usually selenium ) greater than 100 years.

Simon

lowellh · May 18, 2006

The media, Film or Paper, is archival by definition not process. ISO 18917 defines the standard. While toning protects the image from physical degredation it is not part of the standard. Not everyone wants their image toned. Washing is the "key" to archivability. Wash suffiently, and meet the standard. Ten minutes of good washing will be enough.

pentaxuser · May 18, 2006

Again, this is only anecdotal but I have a B&W print of my father which I can date to 1937/38. It has to have been done commercially as he didn't know anyone who did their own processing. So it's possibly that it was toned archivally but very unlikely. It is a postcard sized print and unless archival processing was the norm for cheap prints prior to WWII it almost certainly isn't. After nearly 70 yrs it shows no visible signs of deterioration but admittedly it probably lay in an envelope for most of that time. It would have been FB of course.

pentaxuser

sanking · May 18, 2006

Lee Shively said:
Photography is not that old. Silver gelatin photos from the early days have managed to last pretty well without any special archival processing.

The literature from the early days suggests strongly that toning was very wide spread, indeed almost universal practice, for silver prints. I would wager that virtually every albumen print that has survived in fairly good condition to this day was toned, usually with gold but sometimes with platinum or palladium.

Sandy

Oren Grad · May 18, 2006

I agree with Sandy's additional comments.

If you like the look of silver prints more or less as they appear coming out of the wash before toning, but you also want to sell or give away prints with a claim that they are processed to the highest known standard for longevity, then gold toner is probably the only practical option at this point. Alas, that gets very expensive very quickly.

I consider Sistan a reasonable second-best. However, although its claimed mechanism of action makes sense, its protective benefits for FB silver prints over time are not so well documented or understood as they are for the toners. So although I'm comfortable using and recommending it, I consider it inappropriate to make sweeping or categorical claims about its benefit.

PhotoJim · May 18, 2006

Although I am inclined to agree that untoned prints will last longer than many think, we have to be wary of misleading samples. Any prints that were made a long time ago and were destroyed by incorrect processing will have likely been discarded by now. In essence, what you will see today are the best prints from that time, which are probably not the typical prints. It would be a little like going to a nursing home and inferring that people living into their 90s is quite common. The people who didn't make it to that age aren't there, obviously.

Lee Shively · May 18, 2006

My bet is none of us will be here to find out how long our photos will ultimately last.

removed account4 · May 18, 2006

i have a suitcase of photographs that belonged to my grandmother that i am making copies of. some are from the late 1800s early 1900s into the 1920s. they all pretty much look like they were just printed.

is there a simple way to see if they were toned? if my prints look as good as these i'd like that. straight or toned, these look beautiful.

-john

Flotsam · May 18, 2006

I wash both my prints and myself in my shower. (Not simultaneously)

I've never had any complaints about how thoroughly my prints were washed.

How archival is a straight print?

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