Dry Mounting Disadvantages?

[Diaga67]

I wanted survey the thoughts of everyone regarding any potential disadvantages to dry mounting prints. I understand it is a great way of keeping fiber paper prints flat, and it works well for framing, but are there those individuals that would rather create/collect unmounted prints? If so, why?

Just curious to get thoughts on this. Thanks!

[mark]

If the board the image is mounted too gets damaged you are SOL.

[KenM]

To me, the downsides of dry-mounting are:

• presses are heavy
• presses are expensive
• they take up space
• you need dry mount tissue, something more to buy
• a press can only do dry-mounts up to a certain size - within reason, that is. You can dry-mount via 'bites', but that quickly gets tiresome

Now, that said, I think the benefits of a flat print far outweigh the downsides listed above. That's just my opinion, which is surely different than many other folks out there.

And yes, if you ding the mat you have a problem, but generally speaking you have an overmat sitting over the mounted and framed print, so any dings to the base are covered by the mat. If you ding the print, it's dinged, whether it's dry-mounted or hinge-mounted.

[wildbill]

Mounted prints are hard to remove but i did do it yesterday on one that wasn't centered.

[JosBurke]

Well !! Hopefully the disadvantages are pretty minimal as I just bought a used Seal 200 with plan to put it to use--It wasn't big bucks ($200) but seeing a post as this is rather discouraging if you know what I mean!!

[jnanian]

i guess i am one of the folks that doesn't dry mount prints.
i did once, 20+ years ago, and the prints are coming off of the board.
i shy away from dry mounting mainly because it is difficult to reverse ... a nice window mat or hand made book ( not hard to make ) i think presents better than drymounted prints ... but that is just me, and i know lots of folks love to drymount their "stuff"

have fun!

-john

[KenM]

That's the beauty of it - you do what you want, and I do what I want

My issue with prints that are not dry mounted is that they tend to go 'wavy', especially when the humidity changes. Also, with dry mounted prints, you can be very precise with what you want to show of the print - I can't see being as accurate (maybe you can!) by cutting an overmat, and overlaying the print. Then again, I guess you could print with a white border, and show some of the white border when the mat is hinged. I dunno, I've never done it.

Ah well, I'll stick with dry mounting. I've only been doing it for 6 years, and I've yet to have a failure.....

(fingers crossed)

[Jim Jones]

To me, if a print is worth selling as art, it is worth dry mounting and window matting. I like to send my babies out into the world with the best possible start. A painter said, "A good picture deserves a good frame. A poor picture needs one." This may well apply to photos and their mounts, mats, and frames. Of course the needs and desires of the customer or client should be considered. For some applications mounting is inappropriate.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Conservators generally prefer prints not to be drymounted, though of course they will deal with drymounted prints as best they can. The main issue is reversability, and in general, not reversable=not archival by definition. This has nothing to do with questions of whether the mat protects the print or whether drymounting keeps it flat. If, say, the mat develops mold, the print needs to be removed, and it's a heck of a lot easier to unmount a hinge mounted print.

I like the look of a drymounted print, but one sees much less drymounting in the better New York galleries than there used to be. Another issue is storage. Galleries usually have drawers full of unframed, unmounted prints available for browsing.

Flat prints are a passing fashion. We'll all get used to wavy prints eventually. We look at corner mounted prints all the time in galleries and museums and if the prints are otherwise compelling, we often don't notice.

Okay, I'm being a little facetious, but I think the compromise is eventually going to be starch mounting, which is the traditional method of mounting albumen prints. Albumen prints curl more than gelatin prints, because albumen is just less stable, so they really do have to be mounted flat, and virtually all of them are starch mounted, and they've been holding up for about 100-140 years. I haven't tried it yet, but there are instructions in Reilly's book at albumen.stanford.edu. If a starch mounted print ever needs to be unmounted, it can be floated off the board in distilled water.

[per volquartz]

It is archival. It can be removed quite easily. If in 30 or 40 years the mount board gets damaged, remove the print and re-apply to another mount board.


It is easy to use.