I don't recall whether I reported it here or not but this past fall I
spent quite a lot of time recovering wedding and other photo albums for
friends of mine. Their house had been flooded by the Susquehanna River
after torrential rains caused by two successive hurricanes turned
tropical storms.
But there must have been thousands of people local people so affected.
One of them recently made contact with Becci Manson who is a
photographer in NYC. She had heard that Manson, along with a group of
volunteers, had spent considerable time in Japan after the recent
tsunami helping people recover flooded photos. She convinced Manson to
come to our area this past weekend and give instructions to people on
how to best treat their flooded photos in hopes of eventually getting
them scanned and restored. Several of her volunteers also showed up and
were scanning some of the prints which had been separated, washed and
dried. But actual repair must await the good luck of the future.
I knew that this event was going on and had previously volunteered to do
scanning and restoration work. I attended the event for about an hour
and conversed with people who were washing and trying to separate their
piles of prints. I also had a chance to talk with Becci Manson for a
while. I didn't learn much that I didn't already know but did pick up
one important tidbit that I don't know how to make use of.
Becci said her experience in Japan had shown that many prints that are
stuck together can be easily separated if they're first frozen. She
says ice crystals form in between the prints and push them apart. But,
she continued, there is one big cavaet... don't do that with RC papers.
If you do, instead of pushing the prints apart, the ice crystals will
push the emulsion of the RC print right off the paper and thus totally
destroy it. That's apparently a side effect of the paper's base being
unable to absorb water. That may be a clue to the answer to my question
which is: Does anyone know how to definitively identify an RC print?
Finally, maybe it doesn't matter if you're presented with a thick stack
of different kinds of prints all stuck together. I wish I'd thought to
ask her at the time.
Chuck Norcutt
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