Digital BW, The Print

At 12:06 AM 12/15/03 +0000, you wrote:


>Alan,
> >
> >I just have to ask - have you ever seen a photograph in a gallery or
> >museum framed and matted but not glazed?
>
>This is irrelevant. It is a look that I like (and do others who have seen
>them) and hope to be able to achieve ­ I am not bound by precedent. The
>question is whether it can be done without (severely) reducing the life
>expectancy of the print or incurring decay of the frame materials.  I am
>surprised to learn that matting boards are not as archival as I would expect
>(and worse yet potentially a delicacy for insects).  However, to answer your
>question, I have certainly seen many exhibitions where the images were not
>behind glass (I would say this is most common) and also framed without glass
>­ I don¹t recall whether they were matted or not.


Steve,

At the risk of quibbling - leaving the print open to the elements is the 
surest way to loose it. Casual, student galleries my have pictures pinned 
to the wall, but really... .  In the first place conservancy (which is the 
main issue with so-called archive-ability) is a process that includes 
restore-ability.  Imagine ordinary window panes - they need cleaning even 
if they are never touched. The same residue that gets on glass also gets on 
paper. Egads!  Worrying about the matt makes no sense either - it is easily 
replaced every twenty or thirty years.  Make display copies for your 
un-glazed work and keep conserved copies.

Unless the frame is intended to complement a decorating theme - a perfectly 
fine choice and subject to all sorts of tastes,  it is desirable to mount 
salon prints with a generous, plain white overmat and a simple, thin 
cross-section frame so as not to detract from the picture.

AZ

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