Photography

My first real-job was in a graphic arts repro shop, pre-digital. We often mounted very large pieces, like blowups of crime evidence for trials or installation work, up to maybe 4' x 6'. At the time they used a big vacuum press, and they also had a large heat press for dry mounting. This wasn't for museums and archival work of valuable stuff, for the most part.

The photo labs I used in the film era used large dry mount presses; the Seal Magnapress was 4' x 8', it used heat and vacuum for the pressure. D&K still sells a press of about 4' x 6', it's like 12 grand. With a 20x24 dry mount press, you can do fairly large pieces if you plan them right - the top of the press has very wide, offset hinges so the work can be moved around under the hot part. I have an 11x14 dry mount press and I can mount 20x24 with it. Most of the lab work was done on acid free foam board with claimed-to-be archival mounting tissue.

"Supposedly", high-quality dry mount tissue is removable, I'd guess you re-heat it and remove it when it's softened, but no idea if then you have adhesive residue to remove? Never tried it.

While people talk about hinge-mounting with a mat as being the most archival and only "acceptable" way to mount fine art prints, many photographers preferred the perfect flatness of dry mounting, and galleries have been happy with it - the prints are usually better presented when dry mounted, unless you like the aesthetic look of ripples. I'll hinge mount prints in deeper (almost shadowbox) frames without a mat and have curves and ripples - IMO, sometimes a print is a print, and sometimes it's more of an "artifact", a physical object that happens to be a photographic print. But shadowboxing is a more difficult and expensive way to frame, as you need the glass to be set in the frame, and then a sub-frame of some type to separate the art from the glass.