[pure-silver] Damage to old negatives and prints

I'm wondering whether I might solicit some feedback about old negatives, their 
condition, what happens as they age under unfavorable conditions, what can be 
done 
about problems that arise.

When my father died this summer, I had the privilege of gathering together his 
life's 
collection of negatives and slides, and shipping them here to Phoenix. They 
date back 
to his first shots as a teenager in 1947. Among them I also found packets of 
original 
negatives shot by my mother's father in the early- and mid-1940s. All of these 
negs and 
slides spent 50+ years enduring the weather of Illinois and Nebraska - summer 
temps in 
the 90s and 100s, humidity far beyond the tolerance of tolerant human beings. 

One of my concerns has been their physical condition.

(His ektachrome slides from the 1950s and 1960s surprised me. Many have 
undergone 
considerable shifts in color, which looks to me like it's actually a fading and 
loss of one 
color layer, usually the blue, since these now lean toward orange or magenta. 
Inexplicably, however, other rolls from the same period are in perfect 
condition, with no 
loss or change of color at all. Weird.)

Regarding his black and whites: I've encountered three issues so far.

(1) what looks like bronzing of the emulsion side of certain negs. Is this a 
problem? I'm 
trying to guess what might have caused it, and the only thing that occurs to me 
is 
inadequate fixing. But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me: these are 50 and 
even 60 
years old. Inadequate fixing should have killed them outright years ago. Note 
that I have 
not yet tried printing any of these, so I can't say what influence this 
bronzing will actually 
have. Scans (done in color) do produce some interesting colors; but they scan 
fine.

(2) An odd condition in a number of my grandpa's negs. These were snapshots 
only, 
and the negs were carelessly stuffed into paper Walgreen's sleeves (Walgreen's 
photo 
finishing in 1952! Shows MY lack of years....).  A number of them show two 
different 
densities across the neg. There is a diagonal line, and on one side the neg is 
denser by 
half or even a stop. Like half of it faded in the sun. The effect is exactly as 
if you printed 
it to paper as a test print, and did the neg at one exposure, then did only 
half of it for 
another exposure. I've never seen anything like this. What could possibly have 
affected 
the neg itself like this?! 

(3) Prints: One packet of prints (done in the late 1940s) were simply pasted to 
the pages 
of a photo album - all pages being black construction paper, presumably with 
Elmer's 
glue or some equivalent. Many of these have come away from their page, taking 
paper 
with them. I'm thinking of resoaking these prints to remove some of the paper. 
While it 
would NOT remove glue that had seeped into the print, it would get rid of the 
patches of 
black paper that remain attached. Is there a problem with doing this? Is there 
a reason 
why a 60 year old print cannot simply be soaked and re-dried? BTW, all of these 
were 
ferrotyped. Would soaking undo this effect, or did this treatment permanently 
alter the 
physical properties of a print's surface?

My dad also left some 30 rolls of 35 mm b&w film unprocessed, which he shot 
from 
about 1965 to 1970. I'm going to have to float a few questions about these, 
too. But for 
now, I figure that another six months won't be their undoing after all these 
years!

Any thoughts or insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Mike Healy
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