The Albumen & Salted Paper Book--electronic edition

(Extended photo media series ; 2) On cover: The history and practice of photographic printing, 1840-1895. Preface Silverprinting has been often doomed, but it still survives. The Albumen and Salted Paper Book is a book about the major photographic printing processes in use during the years 1840-1895, approximately the first half-century of photographic history. These first 50 years of photography established a tradition of individual experimentation and craftsmanship in which each photographer (of necessity) participated in the manufacture of the printing materials he or she used. Hardly naive and primitive, the best prints from this era stand as examples of the beauty and subtle tonal perfection that silver photographic prints are capable of, but seldom attain. Yet few people today have any idea of the rich possibilities for contemporary work offered by the fruits of this long tradition of handmade photographic papers. One important goal of this book is to convey to contemporary photographers an introduction to these traditional methods of silver photographic printing, methods which represent the best that the materials and chemical processes themselves can attain, not what is best for manufacturing economy or darkroom convenience. The albumen print and the salted paper print were not exotic or eccentric processes in their own time, but were the ordinary, all-purpose materials of photographic printing. The salted paper print dominated photographic practice from 1840 to 1855, and the albumen print did likewise from 1855 to 1895. The albumen print is the second most common type of photograph ever made (though perhaps it has already lost this distinction to the chromogenic color print); it accounts for approximately 85 % of the total number of surviving 19th-century photographic prints. The form of the book is somewhat unusual, in that it combines full working directions for the processes (including quite a few variants of the salted paper print) with extensive historical information about their fabrication and use in the 19th century. It also contains recommendations for the identification, storage and preservation of albumen and salted paper prints, whether they be of historical or contemporary origin. Structuring the book to include more than the working directions for the processes seemed a natural outgrowth of my own interest in the subject, which had always seemed to move by turns from admiring historical photographs and wondering how they were made, to wanting to produce my own images in the same manner. Therefore, I have attempted in …