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Part 7
The great innovation of the dry plate marks the start of this era.
With its invention photographic materials could be purchased off
the shelf and the medium underwent a deep change. The physical
manipulations of photography shifted to the background and con-
cerns with picture content came to the front. Tod Papageorge says
that change opened the door for photography to become more like
poetry than carpentry.
Gelatin silver print. Attributed to Shotoku. Nyoirin Kwannon. c.556. Sculpture in black lacquered wood. Print: Photographer unknown. c.1933. 10¾ x 8¾ in. (27.2 x 22.2 cm.)
Modern black and white photography 7.1 The dry plate The dry plate and its application to paper prints. 7.2 Developing-out gelatin silver paper Neutral print tone in black and white photography. 7.3 The Kodak Number 1 Photography for the masses using roll film and factory processing. 7.4 The hypo problem Fixative and its destructive properties. 7.5 Sepia toning Color toning for black and white prints. 7.6 Professional photography Weddings and such imortalized by photography. 7.7 Family albums Vast numbers of photographs made by amateurs as family records. 7.8 The negative The negative record- unseen but essential. 7.9 Lantern Slides Still photographs projected in the theater setting. 7.10 Contact printing Low sensitivity photographic papers. 7.11 35 mm photography The miniature camera evolves into the ubiquitous amateur and professional camera. 7.12 Enlargments Highly sensitive papers used to enlarge small negatives. 7.13 Black and white Polaroid Instant chemical pictures as a new art medium. 7.14 Resin coated paper Quick and dirty processing using papers that don’t get wet.
Gelatin silver print. Antonio Rossellino. Madonna from the Tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal. c.1460. Marble relief. Print: Clarence Kennedy. c.1930. 11½ x 9 in. (29.2 x 23.8 cm.)
Modern photography 7.2 developing-out gelatin silver paper The dry plate hovers in the background of photographic history because it was only used at first to make the negative materials. These photographic artifacts are never seen by the viewing public or purchased by the traveling tourist. Negatives slide back into envelopes, to be printed later for new orders, or to be simply lost through neglect in the closets of amateurs. When the dry plate chemistry moved over to the printing side of photography things really began to look different. The gelatin coating of the dry plate, put onto a paper support, produced our modern “gelatin sliver paper” (as the museums call it). This material uses the latent image- no more printing out- and it produces an image color that is far closer to neutral than most earlier photographic printing processes. The papers were exposed and then had to be developed, so we can also call the new materials “developing out papers”, or “DOP” (as opposed to the older POP, or printing out papers). It really wasn’t until the spread of gelatin silver papers and dry plate negatives that the darkroom came into its own. Most nineteenth century printing materials could be handled in yellow room light and even the wet plate could be manipulated under a red safelight. The new papers in some cases had a sen- sitivity that rivaled the films and light-tight darkrooms became standard in photographic practice. Early in the twentieth century dry plate materials began to be made with full color sensitivity, and absolute darkness was then required for handling films and plates. The neutral tone of the new papers caused quite a stir. With the exception of rare carbon and platinum, photographic printing was almost always reddish purple. In some way the new neutral prints didn’t seem to be “real” photographs in the way the older albumens had. This problem was similar to the difficulties faced by the Woodburytype, which used purplish pigments to make the viewer think the prints were albumen. It didn’t take too long for the public assessement to shift, and photographers and their clients to accept neutrality as the norm in photography. During the transition period we find prints made the new way that have been toned to look like the old. This pair is a perfect example. Both pictures were made for the tourist trade, and, because I found them together and they are of the same subject, I have always assumed they were made at about the same time. Both are on the modern developing-out gelatin-silver paper, but the lower one has been toned- quite beautifully- to imitate an albumen print. Toning hung around for a while, but later on it tended to be done to make the prints somehow more “artistic”. Although false color from toning was never very popular in photography’s chemical form it has been making a regrettable reappearance in digital printing.
Modern photography 7.3 the kodak number 1 If we think of the development of photography as some sort of evolutionary process taking on the form of a branching tree, then we could say that the tree itself split, and grew a second trunk with the development of George Eastman’s amateur cameras. Eastman cobbled up a system combining his own original ideas with those of others and produced cameras which could be sold pre-loaded with flexible film on a roll. The user exposed a series of pictures and then shipped the camera with its exposed film to the factory for processing. After processing the film, the camera was reloaded and mailed back to its owner, along with prints from the set of exposures. All the user had to do was to aim the camera and click the shutter- other technical chores were taken over by Eastman’s company. These extremely basic cameras used a single element lens with a single speed shutter. Because the simple lens did not cover the corners adequately, a round mask was placed in front of the film, so the earliest Kodak pictures were round in format. The lens was very wide angle, which meant that as often as not the subject managed to be in the picture, in spite of the inaccuracy of the camera’s viewing system. The description of the pictures, made with such a short focal length lens, was very different from the photographic norm. For centuries painters had been structuring their pictures so that figures, buildings and landscapes appeared “normal”, which is to say they were not distorted by a close point of view. We can even go so far as to say that the vision of the traditional painter was that of a photographer using a long lens. The Kodak camera, with its short focal length lens, distorted the perspective of a scene when compared to traditional pictures. We can see this distortion in these two photographs. Feet in the fore- ground turn down and enlarge as they approach the picture edge. Trees in the right hand picture go from very tall to very short as the run from left to right. In that photograph the young woman appears abnormally small compared to the two men in front of her- she is not so small, but her odd size is instead a result of the picture structure. While her head is lower than the men’s, her feet also have risen up in the picture plane; both these shifts of scale are lens derived. In some ways we can say that the history of photography has been one of steadily shortening focal lengths. From the classical, distanced, view of the painter, photographic description shifted to encompass wider and wider angles of view. Eugene Atget, the great French photographer who so often worked in cramped spaces, and George Eastman, the American entrepreneur, each jumped photography a huge step in this direction, through their adaptation of radically descriptive wide angle lenses.
Gelatin silver print. Photographer unknown. Two snapshots. c.1900. each circular image 2½ in. (6. cm.) in diameter.
Gelatin silver print. Photographer unknown. Engine room of a Fall River Line steamer. c.1925. 7⅜ x 9 ½ in. (18.7 x 24.1 cm.)
Modern photography 7.5 sepia toning We simply have to mention sepia toning. It is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to photographs but, like neckties and hair dye, it’s out there and has long been around to make things look silly. Somehow the idea grew in the first half of the century that a photograph could somehow be better if it was brown. I have always assumed this was a nostalgic link to the nineteenth century, when black and white photography was so colorful, but those early processes derived their color from the unavoidable nature of their chemical processes. Intentional toning of photographs is more like putting a veneer on a piece of wood; it provides a false appearance, and is, as often as not, covering up something that isn’t too good in the first place. I am being a bit unfair here, particularly with this photograph made by a western photographer named Frank Jacobs who had a small studio in Montana in the 1920s. He has the glacier, moun- tains, tall fir trees and even the children, in there for scale in this pleasant and dramatic view. Unfortunately, the whole damn thing is brown- not a nice albumeny purple-brown, but instead a heavy yellow-brown that can only make us think of molasses or maple syrup. It is ironic that sepia toned prints tend to be more perma- nent than those that consist of silver alone, since the silver sulfide which produces the brown tone is a more stable compound that metallic silver. Toning has persisted, and it found a truly useful niche when selenium was used to lightly tone prints to give a stronger black and an ever-so-slightly purple cast to gelatin silver prints. Many photographers used selenium toning because it was thought to make the image more stable. If such toning is done to a slow, fine grained, photographic paper, it can cause remarkable shifts of color in selected tones in the picture, which came to be called “split toning”. Some photographers use this color alteration inten- tionally as a way to enhance the impact of their prints.
Modern photography 7.6 professional photography Photography is practiced by the amateur and the professional. The pros, called either “professional” or “commercial”, work in studios, where lighting and sets can be controlled, or out in the field, with cameras, lights, and even assistants along to handle all the gear. These photographers serve a wide range of clients and specialize in a particular version of the truth: reality carefully doc- tored to approach an ideal that can replace our memory of the actual subject or event that has been recorded. The subject might be a wedding, as in this picture, or a bowl of cereal carefully arranged for an advertisement. In either case reality and picture have a strained relationship. There is a third group of photog- raphers- the artists- but it is difficult to categorize them. Some artists know more than the most seasoned pro, but most know embarrassingly less. Some artists are in pursuit of “truth”, while others go after fantasy. This picture was taken on the occasion of my wife’s parents’ wed- ding. It really is VERY good. The photographer knows just how to arrange that long dress, how to move the description to dark- ness in the corners (a painter’s old trick to make a picture look good), and how to hold the attention of each participant in the scene. The photograph was made with a large format camera, and the print was done with a warm toned, pebbled surface portrait paper, perfectly exposed and so well processed that, even today, sixty five years after the event, the photograph is nearly perfect. Teaching in an art school, I often find myself wishing that my students could handle a picture as well as this photographer did. The problem, of course, is that Bachrach- the founder, then son and later just the name of the firm- made this picture again and again. The same pose and technique were used endlessly, to crank out a series of pictures that the photographer knew would never hang on the wall together, so their sameness would never be re- vealed. Believe it or not, the child of this couple born a few years after the wedding, had her wedding picture taken in the very same studio. Her husband (me) refused to pose for such a picture but her mother, who we see here, demanded that at least the bride be photographed. She was, and we still have the picture, in two poses. In one she smiles the false smile brought on to please her mother, in the other (her favorite) she has the same stern look her mother-to-be has in this photograph. We need to be careful about criticizing pictures such as these because, once the years have eliminated most of them, the few remaining won’t be such clichés. The subjects will then stare back out at us freed from the cultural net that directed their interpretation at the time when they were made. Gelatin silver print. Bradford Bachrach. Barbara Mur- ray on the Occasion of Her Wedding. 1966. 10½ x 13½ in. (25.4 x 34.3 cm.) As she saw herself. Gelatin silver print. Bradford Bachrach. Barbara Mur- ray on the Occasion of Her Wedding. 1966. 10½ x 13½ in. (25.4 x 34.3 cm.) As her mother wished her to be.
Gelatin silver print. Louis Fabian Bachrach. The Wedding Party for Daniel Murray and Rita Callan.
- 8⅜ x 11⅜ in. (21.3 x 28.9 cm.)
Gelatin silver print. Photographer unknown. Three men and an eagle. c.1950. 5¼ x 3½ in. (13.3 x 8.9 cm.)
Modern photography 7.8 The negative The negative tends to be ignored, but behind almost every black and white photograph (and many color ones too) there is a glass or film negative. These hold the actual record of the light that came out of the world into the camera. A properly exposed and developed negative is a smooth and uninterrupted analog of the intensity and distribution of that light. Ansel Adams used to say that the negative was comparable to the musician’s score; a tonal record that waits for the photographer to work in the darkroom, playing out an interpretation of it in a print. He had a good point, because the negative- when correctly made- holds neither black nor white, but instead a long scale of grays. They are made this way because those extremes of tone are actually informational voids. The photographer prefers to make a darkroom printing decision about what parts of the picture will be black and white, rather than having that decision made irrevocably in the negative. The negative does two extraordinary things that are often over- looked. One is that it can provide a record of the passage of light over time. The one illustrated here was exposed for about a half hour, in the dark recesses of an old fort. The heaviest silver depos- it is in a window, through which brilliant sunlight shown, but in the negative itself that area is still not black, because I restrained the development of the negative. The upper parts, showing the brickwork around a ventilation passage, hold clear information that was hardly visible to the naked eye- only becoming clear after I had avoided the bright window for a minute or so and allowed my eyes to accommodate to the darkness. A negative, properly handled, can make a record of an extreme range of il- lumination. A second miracle of the negative is that it can make a record of something that is simply invisible to the naked eye. The clearest example of this is its ability to record faint light, in such work as astronomy when exposures are routinely many hours long. But silver salts are also sensitive to electromagnetic radiation far out- side the small window of frequency that our eyes use. X-rays and infra-red can be gathered and turned into useable silver deposits in a negative. The extraordinary thing that happens then is not so much that something invisible is translated for our use, but rather that the technology of photography can go somewhere that the human being cannot. As we expand our understanding of the physical world we increasingly find that our machines interact and interpret it with far more capacity than we can ourselves. A three frame section of a roll film negative, exposed in a camera using a square format.
Modern photography 7.9 lantern slides In its early years the audiences for photography accessed it through books and pictures hanging on walls. The medium eventually migrated to museums and galleries, but even before that happened movies were invented, and photographic images, linked into time based sequences, began to appear in theaters which had thus far only been inhabited by living actors or musi- cians. This book is not about moving pictures, which lie outside the field of printing, but there is a powerful dynamic that occurs when groups of people sit close to each other in the dark and look at some brilliantly illuminated scene. The power of this was adapted to education through the invention of the lantern slide, and ultimately led to the widespread use of color slides by ama- teur photographers. The lantern slide was largely replaced by the 35mm slide, but in old universities we can still find those larger glass slides occasion- ally being used, cherished by the older faculty for their tendency to stay in better focus than the newer, flexible, film transparen- cies. They were always made on thin 3¼ x 4 inch glass plates, which were usually exposed from copy negatives made from photographic prints or drawings. A cover glass was attached with black tape, to prevent the image from being scratched as it was moved into the projector, and there was almost always an infor- mation label stuck on this border along with a red dot to indicate which orientation should be used when the slide was placed in the projector. Lantern slides have nearly disappeared, but still turn up at junk shops, often in perfect condition packed away in boxes. The quality of these positive images tends to be surprisingly low. In the first place they are almost always two generations away from the original photograph: a negative was made in a camera, out in the world, then printed, then a copy negative was made of that print and that copy negative printed onto the glass slide material. Every time a photograph is copied by chemical means the information contained within it is eroded. Another difficulty with the lantern slide is that the tonal range was usually made very light, so the image would be adequately bight when pro- jected. This results in washed out images which have lost much of the beauty that we come to expect of photographic prints. Lantern slides were used by a few artists- notably Alfred Stieglitz- for the public presentation of their photographs, but almost every other application in which we find them has to do with educa- tion. They were instrumental in establishing the copyright status of “fair use”, which says that an image can be used for educa- tional purposes without the owner receiving compensation. That practice is being challenged for today’s digital imagery.
Lantern slide. Photographer unknown. Port Nelson at Low Tide. 1925. 3¼ x 4 in. (8.3 x 10.2 cm.)
