Laminating kills the dmax in your prints. It makes them look dead. The high gloss varnish looks plastic.
I have found that varnishing large prints other than canvas is not only a major pain but also significantly effects the surface and tonal range. I've never been able to make any of the canvas varnishes work for me on paper. The Breathing Color is supposed to work on paper but it looks horrible to me, bumpy and plasticy. You can use the Hahnemuhle UV spray but that doesn't really protect very well for an exhibition, but maybe that doesn't matter in some cases.
Plexi is the thing to use, not glass. Any affordable glass I've seen has a green cast and kills your warm colors.
You know you don't hear anyone talking about using L pins over plexi anymore. When I worked at the Center For Creative Photography in the late 70s early 80s that is the only way they hung exhibitions. The prints were not dry mounted but were matted between 4 ply rag board with photo corners ( but they could just be mounted ) and four tiny little L Pins held the plexi in front of the print. We hung big shows of Ansel Adams, Eugene Smith, Frederick Sommer, Paul Caponigro, and dozens of great American photographers that way. We also had a large gallery in the UA photo department and we hung shows that same way, many of the prints were 30x40 color prints I remember. I never saw one fall off the wall.
I bought some of these L pins recently and I'm going to start using them myself. I haven't personally tried to hang a print with plexi larger than 20x24 but as long as you aren't mounting on something heavy like aluminum I don't see why 30x40s or even 40x60s couldn't work that way too. You might need 6 pins at the most instead of one on each corner but that is not a big deal. These things are almost invisible after they go into the wall. For moderate and smaller sized things you could probably just use a sheet of foamor, then the print, then the plexi and they could look very clean and nice. Then you wouldn't even pay for mounting, framing, or varnishing. I've found people are usually paying more to have their work framed than I charge them to produce it. I always liked this presentation for photography much better than even nice frames. It's very clean. This used to be a standard way to show highend photo work in big galleries and museums all over the us. Somehow things reverted back to frames. I hear gallery owners now say, "people won't buy work unless it is framed" and that just sounds so bizarre to me. You could have one on the premises that framed to show the collector if they have no imagination.
Not all galleries might want you to put 4 small holes in the wall for each print, but most of the ones I know fill their holes after each show and they would be easy to fix. We did it for every show, once a month. The holes are tiny, not much bigger than a push pin hole.
john
