Capstone Stage 6: Permanence, Presentation and the Finished Portfolio

Requirement 11 asks you to evaluate the permanence of the portfolio. Not of a specimen, not of the process in general: of the objects you are actually submitting. That is the whole difficulty, and it is why this stage comes last.

A residual test on a print processed six weeks ago in a fixer whose capacity log you kept proves something about that print. The same test on a print processed yesterday in a bath you had stopped counting proves nothing about the first. So the tests here are run on the objects, or on companion sheets processed identically in the same run — and Stage 4’s instruction to carry an unexposed control sheet through every batch is what makes that possible now.

Then the set is reduced, sequenced, labelled and presented, and the rubric is filled in with a named piece of evidence behind every band claimed.

Safety classification

Level B, and it is the small volume of test chemistry rather than the mounting that sets the level. Silver nitrate is Danger with H272, H290, H314, H318, H360D, H400 and H410: an oxidiser that causes severe skin burns and serious eye damage, and stains skin black. It is handled with sealed chemical splash goggles, nitrile gloves and an apron; prepared in a small volume in a dedicated dropper bottle that is labelled and dated; kept away from the working surfaces; and collected as silver-bearing waste rather than rinsed away. Eyewash within reach before the bottle is opened.

A drop test is done on a sacrificial area over a tray, never over a finished print, and a tested sheet does not go back into the portfolio.

The rest of the page is Level A or lower, and saying which parts and why is part of the assessment. Trimming and mounting involve a sharp blade used towards a cutting mat; a tacking iron or press is a burn hazard and a fire hazard if left unattended; adhesives need ventilation. Nothing here needs a fume cupboard.

What is not a hazard here, and why. Handling the finished prints is chemically uneventful: a processed, washed, dried print carries no free reagent, and the substances that made it are locked in a hardened gelatin layer or have been carried out by the wash — which is precisely the claim the residual tests exist to check rather than assume. The board, the tissue and the box are inert materials at room temperature. The reason the same silver nitrate that is a dropper-bottle reagent here is a Level B substance is concentration and exposure route, not identity: a drop on a sacrificial margin is a very different proposition from a jar of solid being weighed. And the sulfide test’s reagent arrives as a dilution because Part XII settled that weighing the solid is Level C work done once, elsewhere — which the capstone does not permit at all.

Local regulation governs disposal of the silver-bearing test waste and this page gives no jurisdiction-specific instruction; read the disposal caveat.

Testing the objects you are submitting

Three tests, and one rule about what they are run on.

The rule. Test the actual work, on a sacrificial margin, or a companion sheet processed identically in the same run — the unexposed control sheet Stage 4 carried through every batch. A test on a different print from a different session is evidence about that session and nothing else.

Residual thiosulfate, by the SOP and under the Part XII criterion: process an unexposed white sheet of the same paper with the batch, cut a strip after the final wash, immerse it about three minutes in 1 per cent silver nitrate, rinse, and compare it wet, in subdued light, against the untreated part of the same sheet. No colour difference means the hypo has been removed; a yellow-brown tint means it is present.

Residual silver, by ILFORD’s sulfide test: a drop of the 1+9 dilution on a white area, blotted after a few seconds, read against a reference spot placed on a print known to be well fixed and thoroughly washed. Anything beyond a barely visible cream tint means the print is not properly fixed. The print must be well washed first; the test is not effective on a print straight from the fixer, and a reading taken there is no reading rather than a weak one.

The wash record for each work, which is not a test but is evidence: the sequence used, the batch it was in, the fixer’s rotation state and its running sheet count on the day.

📓Name the reagent you actually mixed, and the two names are not symmetrical

The classical designations are Kodak’s HT-2 for residual hypo and ST-1 for residual silver, and both are published in this course’s formulary. Which of them your record may name depends on what you put in the bottle, and the answer differs between the two.

ST-1 you have been running all along. ILFORD’s residual-silver test — 2 g of sodium sulfide in 125 mL, diluted 1+9 — is the composition Kodak publishes as ST-1. Two makers, one test. So a permanence statement that names ST-1 for a test run by the Part XII procedure is accurate, and the honest form is to say so: “residual silver by ILFORD’s sulfide test, which is the composition Kodak publishes as ST-1.”

HT-2 is not the residual-hypo test above, and the difference is not cosmetic. HT-2 is 7.5 g of silver nitrate per litre acidified with 125 mL of 28 per cent acetic acid, applied as a drop for two minutes and read against the printed tints of the KODAK Hypo Estimator. What the Part XII procedure runs is Kodak Limited’s 1949 test: plain 1 per cent silver nitrate, immersed about three minutes, read wet against the untreated part of the same sheet. Different reagent, different application, different reading.

And the Estimator card is the reason HT-2 is the harder route rather than the better one. This course does not hold it and cannot reproduce it, so HT-2 without the card gives you a stain and no scale — a mark you can see and nothing to read it against. The 1949 test carries its own scale with it, because the untreated half of the sheet is the comparison.

So: name ST-1 if you ran it, name HT-2 only if you mixed HT-2, and name Kodak Limited’s 1949 test when that is what you ran. All three are checkable statements. “HT-2” written against a plain 1 per cent immersion is borrowed authority, and it is the exact failure the documentation set exists to prevent — a reader in ten years cannot tell what made the stain.

!What these tests establish, and the four things they do not

They are comparisons, not quantities. Both read a colour against a control. Neither returns micrograms per square centimetre, and no figure in those units appears anywhere in this course.

They answer two different questions and that is why both are required. Thiosulfate leaving the paper is a washing result. Silver left behind in the paper is a fixing result, because the silver should have been dissolved and carried out before washing began — and a wash cannot remove silver the fixer never dissolved. The remedies are on different sides of the process.

A negative result is weaker evidence than a positive one. A yellow-brown tint is a definite finding: something is there. “No difference detectable by eye” is bounded by your eye, your light and your control sheet, and the honest record says so in those words rather than writing “passed”.

Meeting a published limit and being permanent are different claims, and this course cannot make the first. The limits live in international standards it names by number and does not hold — ISO 18901 for film stability and ISO 18917 for the test methods. Two different documents are missing here and they are worth keeping apart: the ISO standards, which carry the limits, and the KODAK Hypo Estimator card, which carries the tints HT-2 is read against. The formulas themselves are published; what neither the course nor you can supply is a scale to read a result against. What the course publishes instead is the criterion above, in full, where you can check every part of it. A result obtained under it is the course’s own measurement under the course’s own criterion, and your permanence statement uses those words.

One more limit, from the fixing side. ILFORD note that silver estimator papers are usually not sensitive enough to test the very low silver levels suitable for optimum permanence, which is why for important prints the paper itself is tested rather than the bath. Their own boundary figures are a silver concentration below 2 g/L for fibre prints requiring high permanence — about forty 8 × 10 prints per litre — and below 0.5 g/L for maximum long-term stability, about ten.

The threats, worked out per object

A capstone portfolio contains objects made of different things, and their threats are not the same. Work this out per class rather than in general, because the storage plan follows from it and one portfolio may need incompatible storage.

The object	What threatens it	What follows
Untoned silver gelatin print	Residual thiosulfate from the inside; oxidative attack from the air, giving image fade, silver mirroring and microspots	The wash record and the enclosure. Mirroring starts at the edges, where the atmosphere reaches first, and IPI’s framing guide prints the unintended control experiment: a print mirrored under a poor mat, with the oval the window left uncovered still clear
Toned silver gelatin print	The same threats, altered rather than removed. Conversion to silver sulfide or silver selenide is partial, so part of the image is still metallic silver	The permanence statement says what was converted and what was not measured
Iron-blue print, or an iron-blue toned silver print	Alkali. Prussian blue is destroyed by it, and the alkaline reserve that protects the paper attacks the image	Unbuffered board, interleaving, enclosure and adhesive. This is the incompatibility that splits the portfolio
Iron-silver print (Van Dyke, kallitype)	Residual iron from incomplete clearing; and humidity, which mobilises what is left	The clearing record is part of the object’s evidence
Albumen print	Yellowing of the binder, and a humidity sensitivity the binder’s own chemistry sets	Stable humidity matters more here than an enclosure upgrade
Any of them	Light. 30 to 100 lux on display, ultraviolet below 75 microwatts per lumen, and permanent display is not recommended	The display advice on the label, not just in the statement

⚗Silver mirroring, in one paragraph, because it is the threat the storage plan is built around

Oxidative attack needs nothing left behind at all: it attacks a perfectly processed print. An oxidant takes an electron from image silver, the ion is mobile in a damp gelatin layer, and where it is reduced again decides what you see. Reduced at the surface, it forms the bluish metallic sheen the AIC describes as beginning at the edges and visible under reflected light; reduced locally, it gives the red or orange microspots IPI define.

Two consequences for a portfolio. The deposit is fragile: the AIC warn that mirrored areas are extremely susceptible to abrasion and that rubbing may move or remove image material, so a mirrored print is not cleaned. And the oxidants are domestic: nitrogen oxides from combustion; ozone, including from some electrostatic copiers and printers; sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which form acids with atmospheric water; and peroxides from untreated wood, paints and varnishes, poor paper or plastic near the prints, and the fumes of common cleaning solvents. A new frame, a new shelf and a freshly painted room are all sources.

Choosing mounting and enclosure materials on evidence

Four decisions, each made against a printed claim rather than a word on a packet.

The qualifying test is the Photographic Activity Test, ISO 18916. It puts the material in prolonged contact with two detectors: one screening for oxidation and reduction reactions that cause image fade, silver mirroring and red or gold spots, and one for chromophores that yellow the support. ISO 18902 then adds what the PAT does not cover: a pH between 7.0 and 9.5, an alkali reserve of at least 2 per cent calcium carbonate, a lignin content low enough to give a Kappa number of 7 or below, and a colorant-bleed test.

Passing is not a guarantee, and IPI say so twice. A material passing only the pH requirements or only the PAT is not necessarily photo-safe. And “photo-safe” refers only to the chemical reactivity of a material — it says nothing about abrasion, creases or tears. Meanwhile “acid-free”, “archival”, “museum-quality” and “conservation board” are, in IPI’s own words, not standardised or legal terms but simply marketing terms. The claim that means something is the printed sentence naming the standard.

Buffered or unbuffered is a decision per object, and one class of print inverts the usual answer. The Library of Congress recommend buffered paper at pH 7 to 9.5 for silver prints, platinum prints, chromogenic prints and acetate and nitrate films — and unbuffered paper at pH 6 to 7 for cyanotypes. So a portfolio containing an iron-blue print needs both kinds of board, and the two prints do not share an enclosure. Where a silver-gelatin print has been iron-blue toned, the course’s own reading — stated as the course’s, because no source it holds addresses that specific object — is to treat it as a Prussian blue object for every material it touches.

The attachment stays reversible. IPI’s position is that heat mounting, spray adhesive and pressure-sensitive tape are not recommended for preservation framing because they are not easily removable, and that it is best to choose a method that can be undone. That is the course’s default, and it settles the dry-mounting question for this specification: two hinges of Japanese tissue with a starch paste, or corners of an inert plastic or good paper. The argument is not that dry mounting damages a print; it is that a board which turns out to have been the wrong one can be replaced only if the print comes off it — and you are mounting objects whose enclosure requirements you have just discovered are not all the same.

A dry-mounted print may satisfy the specification’s “finished work” criterion if you argue the choice and record it. What it may not do is be presented as the conservation-preferred option, because the source this course holds says the opposite.

Glazing, where a work is framed: ISO 18902 recommends glazing that blocks at least 97 per cent of ultraviolet energy.

The storage plan

What stands between an oxidant and your image, in the order it is met

an oxidant arriving from the room, working inward

1. The room30 to 50 per cent RH for a mixed collection without cycling more than 5 per cent a day, 30 to 40 per cent for photographs alone; 18 °C for extended-term storage with daily swings under ±2 °Clargest effect
2. The enclosurePAT-passing, ISO 18902-compliant, buffered or unbuffered according to the object. A material that fails becomes a source rather than a barriercan be a source
3. The bindergelatin, albumen, a resin coating — or, for a cyanotype, no binder at all, the pigment sitting in the paper fibresfixed when made
4. The image materialmetallic silver, silver sulfide, silver selenide, Prussian blue, reduced silver on iron. Toning acts here, and partiallytoning acts here
5. What you left in itresidual thiosulfate and residual silver, which need no arrival at all because they are already insidewashing and fixing act here

IPI's own ordering of effect: enclosures cannot overcome deficiencies in the storage climate, and improving the climate is more effective overall. Most people buy the boxes first.

Write down what your storage conditions actually are, not what an ideal would be. A cupboard in a heated interior room at whatever humidity your house runs at is a legitimate answer and a far better record than a set of figures copied from a leaflet. State the room, the enclosure, the orientation (flat or upright), whether the humidity cycles, and what you know about the air — a gas boiler, a laser printer, a newly painted wall, a workshop next door.

And state the display intention, because that is where the light figures bite: 30 to 100 lux, UV below 75 microwatts per lumen, and permanent display not recommended at all. A portfolio that will be shown occasionally and stored the rest of the time is in a different regime from one that will hang.

One line about the incompatibility. If your portfolio contains an iron-blue print, say in the storage plan that it is enclosed separately in unbuffered materials, and why. That sentence is the clearest evidence in the whole documentation set that the permanence work was done per object rather than in general.

Writing the permanence statement

One paragraph per class of object, to Part XX’s four-part template, and the four parts must not blur into one another.

The four parts, strongest first, and what each may contain

1. 1What was doneMaterials, processing sequence, fixer and its rotation, wash route, toner with its dilution, time and temperature. Fact, and the part a stranger could repeat.
2. 2What published procedure it followsNamed by publisher and document, with the document's date. Never by the word "archival".
3. 3What was tested, and against what criterionThe residual tests, the criterion used, the result, and the date. Measurement — and the only sentence in the statement anyone can check.
4. 4What is inferenceThat the toning protects. That the print will last. Anything about years. Clearly labelled as inference, or struck out.

The order encodes the rule: a reader must be able to tell which sentences they could check and which they are being asked to take on trust.

And every sentence carries its class. The capstone’s requirement 11 is a rule about sentences: a claim with no measurement behind it is written as an inference and never as a fact.

✕Five sentences that fail requirement 11, and what replaces each

“Archival.” Name the sequence: “processed in ILFORD’s optimum permanence sequence, one minute’s fixation at 1+4, a five-minute first wash, ten minutes in the washing aid at 1+4 and a five-minute final wash.”

“Museum quality.” IPI say plainly that this and “acid-free”, “archival” and “conservation board” are marketing terms rather than standardised or legal ones. Replace with what the packet claims: “mounted on board whose packet states that it meets ISO 18902.”

“Will last N years.” Nothing in this course’s corpus attaches a figure in years to a print on the strength of its processing or its toning. Strike it. There is no replacement.

“Selenium toned for permanence.” States an outcome where the evidence supports a mechanism. Replace with the manufacturer’s claim as theirs plus the gap: “toned in [product] at 1+20 for four minutes, the dilution and time the maker gives where the primary reason is protection of the image. The makers recommend toning as protection against oxidising gases; ILFORD name sulphide, polysulphide and some metal replacement toners as giving a protective effect and note that blue (iron) and red (copper) toners may not. The degree of conversion achieved here was not measured, the standard written to measure it prescribes no treatment and no criterion a print can meet, and no claim is made about how long this print will last.”

“Fully fixed and washed.” Only if you tested it. Replace with the test, the criterion and the result — and if you could not test it, say not tested and why, which is information rather than a gap.

📓One thing the statement should say that most do not

Include at least one sentence stating what you do not know. It is a rubric requirement under honesty, and it is also the most useful sentence for a future reader.

Two candidates that are true for almost every capstone. First: whether the conversion in a sulfide- toned print can ever be established from the object — Getty’s atlas records that even when sulfur is clearly visible in an XRF spectrum, the main source is not the silver sulfide of the toned image but the barium sulfate of the baryta layer beneath, which makes the two extremely difficult to separate. You are the only source for the fact that this print was sulfide toned, which makes the session log part of the object rather than an accessory to it. The selenium case is the opposite: Getty report that XRF detects selenium even in a print toned very briefly.

Second: the storage climate over the next decade, which is the layer with the largest effect on everything above it and the one entirely outside your control once the portfolio leaves you.

Selection: reducing the set to six to ten

The second and harder subtraction. Stage 4 removed the print that did not belong; this one decides what the body of work is.

The constraint. At least one contact print, one enlarged silver print, one toned print and one alternative-process print must survive the cut, and they must be at least four separate works. Everything else is judgement.

The method. Lay the whole set out under the recorded judging station, at the recorded distance, and take three passes:

1. Remove anything that fails a finishing test. Not dry, not flat, not spotted, not repeatable from its map. These are decisions about objects rather than about pictures and they are made first, because they are the only ones with a fixed answer.
2. Remove what repeats. Where two works say the same thing, keep the one that says it better and record that you did. A set of ten in which three are variations is a set of eight.
3. Remove a good print that does not serve the body of work. This is the pass the rubric’s coherence criterion rewards at its top band, and it is the one people skip. Name the print in the documentation and say why it went.

And check the arithmetic afterwards, because the constraint is easy to break in pass three: it is entirely possible to remove the only contact print because it is the weakest picture. If that happens, the answer is to reprint rather than to reinstate a print you have decided against.

Sequencing, presentation and the labels

Sequencing is the argument made visible. Part VII’s portfolio review already taught the method — an opening that teaches the viewer how to read the set, a scale contrast so the eye is not asked to do the same work twice, a pair hung adjacent so a difference is observed rather than explained, the quietest picture where attention dips, the strongest non-closing picture near the end, and a closing picture chosen for what it says rather than for how hard it was to make. Lay it out physically and walk past it twice before fixing it: an order that reads well on a table often does not read well as a line.

Two things a capstone adds to that method. Surface and image colour affect adjacency: a toned print beside an untoned one reads as a colour statement whether or not you meant one, and a matte sheet beside a glossy one reads as a material statement. And the alternative-process print is the hardest to place, because it is the object most obviously made of something else.

The presentation format was decided in the project plan and this is where it is executed: a mounted set, a portfolio box, or a bound sequence. Do not change it now — the prints were trimmed for it.

The labels carry the metadata the course has been recording all along, and this is the moment it pays off. One label per work:

Field	Where it comes from
Title, or “untitled” with a number	The portfolio statement’s vocabulary
Date of the exposure, and date of the print	The exposure log and the printing map
Process	Named precisely: “gelatin silver print”, “selenium-toned gelatin silver print”, “cyanotype”
Material	Paper make, product, surface and weight; and the box code in the record if not on the label
Image size and sheet size	Measured, not nominal
Negative reference	The run and frame identifier from the exposure log
Process record reference	The printing map version, and the session record
Where relevant, the treated-print record	Toning session or coating record reference

That last pair is what distinguishes a capstone label from a gallery label. Anybody can print a title and a date. A label that lets a reader find the negative, the map and the session that made this object is the documentation set doing its job from the front of the print rather than the back.

The portfolio statement

Plain language, and short. What the work is about; what was made rather than bought; what the pictures are for.

The course’s style rules apply and they are worth stating as prohibitions because that is how they fail:

• No marketing language. “Timeless”, “evocative”, “a celebration of” — none of these says anything, and they read as filling a space where an argument should be.
• No journey. How you came to make the work is not what the work is about, and a statement that spends its first paragraph on the maker has spent it on the wrong subject.
• No imagined reader. “The viewer is invited to consider” is a sentence with nobody in it.
• No unsupported claims about the process. “Made with archival methods” belongs in the permanence statement, in its checkable form, or nowhere.

What replaces them: say what the pictures are of, what you were trying to find out or show, what you made yourself and why that mattered to the pictures, and what the set argues that the individual prints do not. Four sentences of that are worth two pages of the other thing.

Then read it against the paragraph you wrote at planning time, before any technical decision. The two will differ, and the difference is the most interesting thing in the documentation set: it is the record of what the project turned out to be about. Keep both, dated, and say in one sentence what changed.

The self-assessment against the rubric

Four criteria, four bands, and a named piece of evidence behind every band claimed — an artefact and a page, not a feeling. A band claimed with no named evidence scores as the band below it.

Work it as a table:

Criterion	Band claimed	The evidence, named
Accuracy of the chemistry and the numbers		e.g. “Curve sheets 3–8; uncertainty statement p.11; the disagreement with the maker’s time discussed p.12”
Craft of the objects		e.g. “Works 1–7; the remake comparison p.19; finishing record p.20”
Coherence of the body of work		e.g. “Sequence sheet p.22; the removed print and the reason, p.23”
Honesty of the documentation		e.g. “Declared substitutions p.4; the not-tested rows p.16; the statement of what is unknown p.24”

Then the four failure conditions, checked deliberately rather than assumed:

• An unrecorded number. Read your own report with a pencil and mark every figure. Can each be traced to a notebook entry, a log line or a reading file?
• A formula altered without saying so. Check the formula record against the source.
• A permanence claim presented as measured when it was inferred. Read the statement sentence by sentence and label each one.
• A work that cannot be reprinted from its own map. Demonstrated by trying, which you did in Stage 4.

And finish with the shortfalls. An honest list of what falls short and why, written by you, is worth more than a rubric with four fours in it — and under the honesty criterion it is what the top band actually requires. A capstone that names its own weakest point is a capstone whose other claims can be believed.

Estimated consumables cost

Every figure with a source is the planner’s own dated UK price. The run costed is one testing and presentation session for a six-work portfolio.

Consumed	This session	Sourced price	Cost this session
Unexposed control sheets, already carried through the print batches	2 sheets of 8 × 10 RC	£33.50 for 25 to £96.18 for 100	£1.92 to £2.68
Silver nitrate, for the residual-thiosulfate reagent	1 g, as 100 mL of 1 per cent	£59.95 for 25 g to £112.90 for 10 g	£2.40 to £11.29
Sodium sulfide stock, for the residual-silver test	a few drops of the 1+9 dilution	The price file could not price it. It is a gap the file names, and this test is one of the three uses it names the gap for	—
Conservation mount board, buffered	6 sheets	The price file could not price it. It heads the conservation and presentation gap the file names, buffered and unbuffered separately	—
Conservation mount board, unbuffered	1 or 2 sheets, for an iron-blue work	The price file could not price it	—
Japanese tissue and starch paste, or corners	one set	The price file could not price it	—
A portfolio box or presentation folder	1	The price file could not price it	—
Print and negative sleeving passing the Photographic Activity Test	the set’s total	Named in the price file’s own gap list as unpriced	—
Blade, cutting mat and straightedge	consumed: blades only	Named in the price file’s own gap list as unpriced	—

The priced rows come to about £4.32 to £13.97, and that figure is close to meaningless as a guide: seven of the nine consumables have no sourced price at all, and they are all of the presentation and enclosure materials. This is the stage where the price file is least useful and the planner’s cost band is the only honest guidance, and it is worth saying plainly that the half of the project on which requirement 11 depends is the half the course’s shopping data could not reach. Equipment used and not consumed — the cutting mat, the straightedge, the press if you use one — is in the prose above and deliberately not in this table.

Alternative route

No darkroom is needed for this stage at all. The tests are done in ordinary subdued room light on a bench, the mounting in daylight.

Unable to handle silver nitrate. The residual-thiosulfate test is unavailable and there is no substitute the course can offer: the alternative permanganate reagent in the historical literature needs a blank against oxidisable organic matter in the water supply that this course has not verified, and instrumental methods need a laboratory. Record the row as not testable, with the reason stated as a property of your circumstances, and write the permanence statement’s third part as an explicit absence: “Residual thiosulfate was not tested. The wash record for each work is given at p.N, and the statement below rests on the procedure followed rather than on a test of these objects.” That is a real loss of evidence and the specification says so — the accuracy criterion caps at band 3 — and it is still a defensible document.

Unable to obtain conservation materials. Every one of them is unpriced in this course’s shopping data, and in some places they are genuinely hard to buy. The route is to state what you used and what its packet claims, exactly as you would for a compliant material: “mounted on board whose packet makes no standards claim; the print is hinged with corners so that the board can be replaced”. That sentence is worth more than an unsupported claim to have used conservation board, and the reversible attachment is what makes the shortfall recoverable later.

No space to store the portfolio well. Say so. The storage plan asks for your actual conditions rather than an ideal, and “a closed box on an interior shelf in a heated room, humidity not measured” is a record a future reader can act on. IPI’s own ordering — that improving the climate does more than improving the enclosure — makes that sentence the most consequential one in the plan, which is exactly why it must be true.

Recap

The tests are run on the objects you are submitting or on companion sheets from the same run, they are comparisons rather than quantities, and they answer two different questions: the thiosulfate test is about the wash, the sulfide test is about the fixing. A negative result is bounded by your eye and the record says so.

The threats are worked out per object, because a portfolio containing an iron-blue print contains two incompatible storage requirements — buffered board for the silver prints, unbuffered for the Prussian blue — and finding that out is the point of doing it per object. The qualifying test for a material is the Photographic Activity Test with ISO 18902’s additional requirements, passing is not a guarantee, and the words on most packets are marketing terms. The attachment stays reversible, which is the course’s default and IPI’s recommendation, and it is what lets a board you chose wrongly be changed.

The permanence statement keeps its four parts separate and classifies every sentence, including at least one that says what you do not know. The set is reduced in three passes, sequenced as an argument, labelled so that a reader can find the negative and the map. The portfolio statement says what the work is about without a word of marketing. And the rubric is filled in with named evidence and an honest list of shortfalls, which is what its top band actually asks for.

Check your understanding

Question 1. You ran a residual-thiosulfate test in June on a print from batch 2 and it showed no colour difference. Your portfolio contains four prints from batch 2 and three from batch 5, made in September. What may you claim?

• That all seven prints are adequately washed, since the same sequence was used throughout
• That the batch 2 prints met the course criterion on the day, and nothing about batch 5 — which needs its own companion sheet tested, because a fixer's state and a wash's effectiveness are properties of a run
• That the process is validated, so no further testing is needed
• Nothing, since a negative result is not evidence

Show the answer and why

Answer: That the batch 2 prints met the course criterion on the day, and nothing about batch 5 — which needs its own companion sheet tested, because a fixer's state and a wash's effectiveness are properties of a run

The requirement is to evaluate the permanence of the objects you are submitting, and a run is the unit the evidence attaches to: a fixer three months older, a different sheet count against capacity and a different day's wash are three reasons batch 5 could differ. That is exactly why Stage 4 asks for an unexposed control sheet carried through every batch. The last option overstates the limit — a negative result is real evidence, just weaker than a positive one and bounded by the eye, the light and the control, which is what the record has to say.

Question 2. Your portfolio contains five gelatin silver prints and one cyanotype. What does the conservation evidence require of the mounting and enclosure materials?

• Buffered board throughout, since it is the conservation standard
• Unbuffered throughout, since it is the gentler option
• Buffered board for the silver prints and unbuffered for the cyanotype, kept in separate enclosures — because the Library of Congress recommend buffered paper for silver prints and unbuffered at pH 6 to 7 for cyanotypes, Prussian blue being destroyed by alkali
• It makes no difference provided both materials pass the Photographic Activity Test

Show the answer and why

Answer: Buffered board for the silver prints and unbuffered for the cyanotype, kept in separate enclosures — because the Library of Congress recommend buffered paper for silver prints and unbuffered at pH 6 to 7 for cyanotypes, Prussian blue being destroyed by alkali

This is the clearest case in the whole course of two works in one portfolio needing incompatible storage, and it is a genuine chemical conflict rather than a preference: the alkaline reserve that protects the paper attacks the pigment, and it is the image you cannot replace. Passing the PAT does not resolve it, because the PAT screens a material for chemical reactivity against its detectors and says nothing about whether an alkaline reserve suits the particular image material beside it. The practical consequence is two kinds of board and two enclosures, and a line in the storage plan saying why.

Question 3. Which of these sentences may appear in a capstone permanence statement as written?

• "Selenium toned for archival permanence."
• "Toned in [product] at 1+20 for four minutes, the dilution and time the maker gives where the primary reason is protection of the image. The makers recommend toning as protection against oxidising gases; the degree of conversion achieved here was not measured, and no claim is made about how long this print will last."
• "Museum-quality fibre print, processed archivally."
• "Expected to last at least a century under normal storage."

Show the answer and why

Answer: "Toned in [product] at 1+20 for four minutes, the dilution and time the maker gives where the primary reason is protection of the image. The makers recommend toning as protection against oxidising gases; the degree of conversion achieved here was not measured, and no claim is made about how long this print will last."

Only the second keeps the four parts apart: what was done, at a stated dilution and time; the published procedure it follows, attributed to the maker; and the boundary of the claim, stated rather than implied. The first states an outcome where the evidence supports a mechanism at best. The third uses two terms IPI identify as marketing rather than standardised. And the fourth is the failure condition in its purest form — no source in this course's corpus attaches a figure in years to a print on the strength of its processing or toning, and the one standard written to measure conversion effectiveness explicitly prescribes no criterion a print can meet.

Question 4. IPI state that "enclosures cannot overcome deficiencies in the storage climate" and that improving the climate is more effective overall. What does that mean for the order of a capstone's permanence work?

• Buy the best enclosures first, since they are the part you control
• Fix the wash and the fixing first because nothing later undoes them; then get the prints into a stable interior room; then buy better enclosures; then consider toning
• Toning first, since it changes the image material itself
• It applies to institutional collections and not to a domestic portfolio

Show the answer and why

Answer: Fix the wash and the fixing first because nothing later undoes them; then get the prints into a stable interior room; then buy better enclosures; then consider toning

The ordering follows the layers an attack passes through and the cost of each intervention. What the darkroom left inside the print needs no oxidant to arrive at all, and no enclosure or climate can remove it later — so it comes first and it is free. The room is the layer with the largest effect on every reaction above it, and moving a box from a loft to a heated interior room costs nothing. Enclosures matter and can become a source if they fail, but they act after the climate. Toning acts on the image material and is genuinely useful, and it is last on the list because it is the intervention with the most cost, the most hazard and the least measurable benefit for your particular print.

Check my answersClear