Salvaging water-damaged photographs in enclosures

Emiko Davies <emikodavies [at] hotmail__com> writes

>Freezing water-damaged material is generally used to prevent mould
>from growing on the wet items if immediate air-drying is not
>possible (for example when there is a large quantity of wet items).
>It would be ideal to remove external material from the photographs
>such as enclosures, frames, etc but NOT at the risk of damaging the
>wet photograph. Assuming this was an emergency situation, there
>would not be enough time to separate each and every photograph from
>its enclosure, then freezing everything to deal with later would be
>the solution. ...

A caveat re Emiko's excellent response to Mary: some types of
photographs, such as collodion glass plate negatives, should not be
frozen.   Very cool storage just above freezing would be safer for
these types.  See the authoritative article, Klaus Hendriks and
Brian Lesser.  "Disaster Preparedness and Recovery:  Photographic
Materials," American Archivist, 46:1, (Winter 1983), 52-68.

Gary D. Saretzky
Archivist, Monmouth County


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 23:33
                 Distributed: Wednesday, March 3, 2010
                       Message Id: cdl-23-33-002
                                  ***