Most like true as we did not become aware of this problem of free oxalic
until that last year or so.
<snip>
>
>I would not use kallitype again until I found out what happened to one I
>made for John Dugdale 3 or 4 years ago... I was doing kallitype & printed
>one of his negatives as a neighborly demo-- procedure as usual. He took it
>home & rolled it up or whatever, and it dropped down behind something,
>where it rested until it turned up again, recently. It had distinct
>stripes of fading across it, regular bands and lines across the center. I
>don't have a clue what caused it or how, haven't seen it in my own,
>perhaps something in the resting place, but..... it did take away my
>appetite for kallitype.
>
>I told John to throw it away....
I gave a Kallitype to my good friend Chris Rosmini around 1970. It has
spent that time in a frame in a well lit living room since then. It gets
full sun for at least an hour a day. Other than some slight edge staining
which I attribute to my earlier archival(!) mounting technique of using
rubber cement and railroad board, It looks qite normal.
Reading through the set of PhotoMiniatures of the early Century, one might
suspect that it was common to "tone" prints with a slight toning of
platinum or gold. A brief toning has the remarkable effect of stopping
bleach back when fixing. I made this print before I began doing platinum
and I never had any pt or pd salts until then so this print is not toned.
Toning could have a considerable if not an enormous effect on a Kallitype's
archivalness.
Almost thirty years in a frame in a lit room is a reasonable test. A print
that doesn't fade significantly in 30 years under these conditions is not
likely to fade very much in the next 20. I would suspect that fading etc,
is a logarithmic function. This leads to an interesting question, how do
prints fade? Do they fade more in the first years or later years; or do
they fade in a linear fashion. That is, say a print in 50 years has faded
20%, does it fade more in the first 10 years or the last 10 years?
We have here two prints, one that faded quickly in a few years and one that
has suffered little fading at all in 30 years. To my mind the more
significant indicator is the one that didn't fade. This leads me to think
that my original premise is correct, that they are lurking out there as
Kalli's.
I am sorely tempted to do a micro test on one of our Ullman prints. Melody
would kill me if she caught me -- and I won't do it -- but I'd ike to put a
tiny drop of nitric acid using a fine drawn glass tube and watch under a
microsope to see if it bleaches the print. I'll bet it does. I won't to
find out more of what V. D. Coke is saying about the Ulmman's having no
platinum or palladium in them. We've had one for quite a while, but the
other was purchased at auction as a "platinum print" a few years ago and
quite frankly I would be absolutely delighted to find out it was a
Kallitype or a hybrid Kalli of some sort and not platinum.
And there is also the common labeling of any brown metal print as
"palladium." I've seen 19th Century prints labeled as such since the common
assumption is, brown is palladium and black-brown is platinum. Until after
1920, they were likely to be all platinum as there were many warm toned
papers and developers available, the brown agent being mercury.
And lastly, Judy, I'll replace your ferric oxalate with some acid free
stuff whenever you want to do Kallitypes again.
--Dick Sullivan