dcearls wrote:
. . .All the matting and fiber board is mottled with mold? fungus? not really sure what and it is also on the white border of the photo.
If anyone has any experience with handling old photos such as this I would appreciate any advice as far as removing it from the backing, what the mottling is and how I might clean/prevent it or if any of that is advisable at all. . .
For most people it isn’t advisable. They will make a copy of this and make new prints from that copy.
For a few people who are willing to do a lot of work, and who have some obsolete photo/darkroom equipment, it is possible.
In many cases, trying to treat the affected areas will mean using liquids, and that means that the photo will eventually need to be dried. And there is your problem. If the original print was made on a glossy, fiber-based paper, and you want it to remain glossy, it needs to dry with the surface in contact with a ‘ferrotyping’ surface, usually a polished, mirror-like metal surface. It is hard to find, as the newer, resin-based photo ‘papers’ made ferrotyping obsolete in the mid 1970s, and not much equipment has been made since 1990.
Without a ferrotype tin or a dryer with a similar surface you can dry the print to a matte or lustre finish, but not glossy.
The brown paper was just to keep out dust. The mounting board may be destroyed, but no loss there, during restoration.
I suspect mold grew under the mat, where it was in contact with the print’s border and the mounting/ backing board.
The steps involved would be removing the print from the backing, and removing any residual glue or adhesive.
Chemically treating the print to kill any mold, to stabilize it for future years, and possibly bleaching away the mold stain.
Then the print would be washed to remove any traces of these chemicals and dried.
Finally the print would be remounted in a similar fashion (mount board, mat, frame, dust cover) using modern archival materials (sulfur free, acid free).
Two time consuming areas would be separating the print from its mounting and bleaching the mold areas. The cardboard backing will deteriorate in warm water, with some physical action. The print is much tougher and should stay intact. The print was probably bonded to the backing with a liquid glue or a heat activated ‘dry mount’ adhesive. Once the bulk of the cardboard is removed you can try removing the glue with heat or solvent. This may be tedious work, as you want to avoid having any solvents soak into the paper fibers and stain them with dissolved glue.
The most common bleach for removing mold discoloration on many items is household laundry bleach. Unfortunately you don’t want that anywhere near photos. It destroys the emulsion and the image.
Borax (sodium metaborate) has antifungal properties, which will stop future mold growth, and it had a long history of compatible use with photos. It is used to maintain the alkalinity in many photographic developers. After treatment it will wash out easily. But that might not remove the discolorstion. Personally, I would try oxalic acid ( a wood bleach) or sodium thiosulfate (hypo, or a photographic fixing agent) as my next options—testing them on areas of the border.
Another possibility would be to cover the image area with an opaque cardboard and use high intensity UV light to (possibly) bleach the white areas of the borders. This would also destroy any mold spores there, and since it is a dry process you could leave the print mounted. (I haven’t tried this)
So, there is a possible process. But how much effort do you want to put into this? Paying someone to do it for you could easily cost hundreds of dollars for their time, while a clean, high quality copy would be a small fraction of the time and cost of preservation and actual restoration of the original.