Modern gelatin-silver papers develop slowly, as the gelatin emulsion controls the action of the developing chemicals. Once exposed (for five minutes or so in good sunlight), the print is placed face up in a tray and a developer is poured on top of it. After the sheet is dry it is exposed to the negative, by contact, using either sunlight or some short-wavelength lamp. In the print shown on the previous page we can see the marks of the watercolor brush extending past the image area. Almost all of them show a straightforward, workaday approach to the medium that can be a great relief if we have spent too much time wandering the halls of proper, refined photographic art. When we look outside the sphere of the well-known early photographers, though, we find a wide range of marvelous pictures printed this way. Only a few serious artists used this medium, and then only sparingly. We can accept the world turned into neutral gray, and even into the range of purples and reds that characterized early silver printing, but the blue does become tiresome after a while. These prints had just one serious drawback: they were brutally blue. Many photographers working out in the field, or with severe financial restraints, used the blueprint as their primary process because it was simple, cheap, and permanent. The blueprint has a beautiful photographic tonal scale, never seen in the engineering drawings that the process reproduced those are chiefly composed of solid lines without intermediate tones. In some cases gum was printed on top of a platinum print, which allowed the smooth rendition of the latter process to support the heavy blacks that gum could produce while simultaneously covering up the graininess inherent in gum bichromate prints. The rubbing that developed the image was done by hand and could strongly affect the way the picture looked. The retention of gum and pigment was haphazard, and since the toothy paper itself was the matrix that defined the tonal particles, the images were grainy. Unlike all the other processes we have examined, gum bichromate did not produce a fine scale of tones. A “toothy” sheet of rag paper was used, and the coating was designed so that, after exposure, it could be wetted and rubbed manually to loosen the soft gum while leaving the hardened gum and its pigment stuck to the paper fibers. In this case the colloid used was gum Arabic instead of gelatin, and it was heavily pigmented and coated on a sheet by brushing it on while warm. Both woodburytypes and their parent, the carbon print, sometimes show relief in the images when viewed along their surface in a hard light.Ī lot of work went into finding a way to make pigment prints that did not require such a transfer, and one method that survived and enjoyed some popularity was the gum bichromate process. Woodburytypes were most often used for theater bills and popular magazines the one on the previous page is from Galerie Contemporaine, a Parisian publication that was more or less the People magazine of its time. The technology didn’t allow prints much bigger than eight by ten inches, but these beautiful little prints never had to go into a hypo bath so they are remarkably permanent. Most of them were colored to imitate albumen prints, so the viewers believed they were seeing a “real” photograph. The prints were also never wet, so all the complex handling of wet paper was avoided. The woodburytype used no silver, which saved money, and it could produce monochromatic prints in any color, according to the pigment used. They curled terribly and the borders were always a mess, from the excess gelatin squeezing out, so they were always mounted. The woodburytype plate was hard to make, but once done it could generate a lot of inexpensive prints. The gelatin, bearing its pigment, then varied in thickness in exactly the same way that it had in the original carbon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |