Print Longevity

Mike comments:

I’ve got prints on my walls that are over 20 years old. They still look as good as the day they came out of the wash. And as far as I can tell no one’s proven that this inkjet stuff will last that long.

Because of my heavy focus on enjoying the process, and the fact that I view prints as being of relatively little importance, I’m probably not as worried about print longevity as some folks are.  I confess that I don’t understand the extremes of passion that are directed toward archival processing, etc. when it’s manifestly true that for all but a handful of photographers working today, the eventual fate of all of our physical prints will be that our grandchildren will shuffle through them, think “Old Grandpa sure was a weird guy”, and tip the entire thing into the trash.  If every print made lasted forever, then we’d eventually be neck deep in prints, folks.  Not everything important needs to last forever.

But one thing I don’t understand is this: the implicit assumption seems to be that, since there are gelatin silver prints around that are 20 years old, (or 60 years old, or 100 years old) we can expect that ALL gelatin silver prints will last that long.  That’s rubbish.  We have gelatin silver prints that have been around for a long time because there were so very many made, and they’ve been processed in a staggeringly wide variety of ways, and then stored in an even wider variety of ways.  And a very small minority of them have survived.  Folks who crow about the demonstrated longevity of gelatin silver prints are conveniently ignoring the millions and millions of gelatin silver prints which have NOT lasted.

Now, I understand that the argument goes “Yes, some GSPs have not lasted very long.  But we now have Archival Processing, and so OUR prints will last forever.”  The problem with this argument is that exactly what Archival Processing is has changed over time.  First, it was two bath fixing.  Then it was the Ilford quick fix process.  Everyone thought that selenium toning would guarantee prints that lasted forever, and then Kodak changed the formulation of Rapid Selenium Toner and eliminated the (previously considered unimportant) trace ingredient that was providing the protection, so lots of prints that everyone thought were archivally processed were, in fact, not.

And, to be honest, I think the whole ‘archivally processed’ thing is more marketing hype than anything else.  A while back, I decided to take a survey of exactly what this much ballyhooed ‘archival process’ was, so I sent email to wide swath of photographers who claimed that the prints they sold were ‘archivally processed’ on their web sites.  About half of those who responded said that they just followed the archival standard, but could not point me to a copy of the standard.  About a quarter told me that they used the old, now discredited minimal selenium toning technique.  And about a quarter said that they’d done residual fixer testing, and anything that passed was by definition archival.  I didn’t consider all this to be very promising.  Face it, there is no ‘archival standard’.  Folks who claim that their processing meets archival standards are, as far as I can tell, blowing smoke and asking you to watch the pretty mirrors.

But the killer is this: because of longevity concerns, resin coated gelatin silver papers have undergone heavy accelerated aging testing.  We have some sense of how long they’ll last.  Likewise the various color processes.  Inkjet printing, too.  But I can find NO such testing for conventional, fiber based gelatin silver papers.  Apparently, it doesn’t exist.  And, to make matters worse, we can’t even extrapolate from the performance of previous years papers.  NONE of the currently marketed traditional gelatin silver papers are the same as they were just a decade ago.  Emulsion formulations have changed repeatedly.  Suppliers have changed, and so the trace impurities (which often have big effects on longevity) have also changed.  So if you’re currently printing on gelatin silver papers, even if you’re using what you believe to be archival processing techniques, you’ve simply got no testing at all to back up your beliefs about the longevity of your prints.  None.  (hint – almost all of the research on things like using toners for permanence were done to preserve (wait for it…) microfilm records, not continuous tone photographs)

At least with inkjet prints, you can fall back on the accelerated aging and fade tests.  They may not be much but they’re better than nothing.  I don’t trust the Wilhelm accelerated aging tests farther than I can throw them (which is just about to the end of the decade) but I trust them more than nothing at all.

And a little perspective is helpful, too, when you’re deciding how much energy and worry to invest in the longevity thing.  At a workshop, John Sexton told a story about how his earliest photographs were of drag racing.  And, he said, they weren’t really all that good.  The good news is that when he made them he knew next to nothing about proper processing, so most of his embarassing work is now gone.  From this I take the lesson that worrying about print longevity is, for me, putting the cart before the horse.  When I can make photographs that are good enough to make them worth preserving forever, I’ll start worrying about making them last forever.  Until then, I’ll work on the art part.