Digital BW, The Print

At 6:33 pm +0000 12/15/03, Steve Kale wrote:

>I just checked with my framer and the matts they are using are 
>Arqadia 401 solid core ... They had not heard of these being eaten 
>by insects.


I don't think I would spend a lot of time worrying that my prints and 
their mats were going to be eaten by bugs, but I do have a cautionary 
tale:

In the Southwestern United States we have a household pest that is 
commonly called a 'weevil.' I don't know what its true name is, and 
it certainly doesn't appear to be of any conceivable relation to the 
family of Curculionoidea beetles to which the name 'weevil' properly 
refers.

Regardless, they love to infest flour and the most common sources of 
them appear to be dog, cat or bird food which has been brought into 
the house and left for a few days without freezing. The adults are 
brown, flying, moth-like creatures about a quarter of an inch long 
(about 6 or 7 mm), while the larval stage is a small light-colored 
worm several millimeters in length. I suspect that they, or their 
close relatives, occur world-wide.

Once they have started to multiply they will quickly infest anything 
edible that isn't secured in air-tight containers, sometimes 
burrowing through plastic bags to get to anything from rice to pasta 
to flour to, occasionally, cardboard. The only way to get rid of them 
(other than bait traps and fumigation) is to destroy everything you 
can find that is (or might be) infested, seal everything else in your 
pantry and kill any of the adults you see.

Now to the cautionary tale, after that long-winded introduction:

Many years ago I had a collection of European (primarily German) 
coasters from various bars which I kept in a drawer in my apartment's 
kitchen. I had an infestation of 'weevils' and, while cleaning up the 
aftermath, came across the coasters. They had been tunneled through 
by larval 'weevils' so thoroughly that they looked like those 17th 
and 18th century drawings of the depredations of 'book worms' and 
'ship worms.' Opening up a stack of the coasters was like looking at 
some psychotic ant farm.

So, why do I mention bar coasters in a discussion about archival mats 
and bugs? Simply this: I have no idea what the coasters were made 
from, but they felt remarkably like mat board.

Mat chewing insects isn't something that I am going to spend a lot of 
time worrying about but, based on my experience, it isn't something I 
would discount as an urban legend.

I think that protecting prints from sunlight and florescents is a 
much greater archival concern. Framing with glass can be a big help, 
but is certainly not a panacea; even with so-called UV filtering 
glass.

There are also a lot of air-borne contaminates (including the 'air' 
--> oxygen is a _major_ reducing agent...) that are far more 
destructive than simple dust contamination. Nonetheless, aside from 
UV (and, possibly, heat) degradation, I think that the greatest 
archival concern should be the pH and buffering of the paper and its 
backing (including the mat): It's low pH that accelerates the effects 
of gaseous degradation more than any other factor (IMHO).

I would be _greatly_ interested to know if anyone has any controlled, 
scientific and statistically analyzed, data on whether paper pH, 
regardless of other paper composition factors, has an effect on UV 
damage-susceptibility of silver halide, conventionally-printed color 
dye, or inkjet-printed photographs.


-=-Dennis