#photographic processes

[facethefool]

cianotype mixed with agar in petri dish

[hagleyvault]

Say cheese! August 19th is World Photography Day! On this day in 1839, the French government purchased the patent rights to the daguerreotype process, the first publicly available photographic process, and then relinquished its claim and published complete working instructions, declaring the technology a “free gift to the world”. In exchange, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), the inventor of the daguerreotype, was provided with a lifetime pension. A lifetime pension was also extended to Isidore Niépce (1805–1868), the son of Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), an inventor who, in 1822, had produced the world's first heliograph, a photographic process used to create the world’s oldest known surviving photograph from nature.

While the 19th century would see a proliferation of new photographic technologies, the development of a reliable means of capturing stable colors would have to wait until the early 20th century, despite the best efforts of many. Until the introduction of the autochrome process, patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France, the vast majority of photographers that wanted to see color in their photographs had to add it themselves by hand. You can see a selection of images produced using the autochrome process in the Hagley Digital Archive by clicking here. While autochrome photography constituted a massive step forward in photographic history, its colors were not exact, and its limitations were often most apparent when photographing people. While new methods of reproducing color in photographs were introduced over the next few decades, this remained a persistent problem.The circa 1950s photograph shown here was taken at the DuPont's Photo Products laboratory in Parlin, New Jersey, where company scientists were working on experimental films that could more accurately capture skin tones. DuPont was not alone in this effort; it had many competitors, most notably the Kodak Company. Beginning in the 1950s, Kodak began issuing photographs of employee and studio model Shirley Page to photo labs processing Kodak film as a reference image for correctly developing skin tones on film. As the decades passed, the original Shirley retired, but the Shirley card, featuring new models, continued. One thing that did not change was the race of the model; as in the image above, Kodak’s Shirleys were all white women. By the 1970s, however, Kodak had begun to face criticism over the lack of racial diversity in its Shirley cards, which did result in poorer quality photographs of non-white subjects. In 1977, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film stock while filming in Mozambique, declaring the product to be both inadequate for the job and a product of racism. By the 1980′s, Kodak and other photographic products manufacturers that had also adopted the Shirley card method had responded to pressure and were issuing cards showing multi-racial group photographs. This photograph is from the Hagley Library’s DuPont Company product information collection (Accession 1972.341). To view more digitized material from this collection, visit its page in our Digital Archive by clicking here.

[hisourart-blog]

[:en]Black and white[:]

[:en]Black and white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, and hyphenated black-and-white when used as an adjective, is any of several monochrome forms in visual arts.

Black-and-white images are not usually starkly contrasted black and white. They combine black and white in a continuum producing a range of shades of gray. Further, many monochrome prints in still photography, especially those produced…

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[aimprocessbook]

Week 1

Week 1 Images, Photographic Processes Pt. 2

This class was one I was a little hesitant about in the beginning, only because I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was however, excited to have you two as teachers for a class, so I figured I’d be in safe hands.

We got right down to it the first week too, wasted no time blowing through the syllabus to get to the good stuff. You asked us to pick a subject matter that we’d want to work with for an entire semester. I immediately went to the two topics that i’m always partial to working with; mental health and color. We then had to create a petcha kucha presentation using found reference images from the library. I decided that for my sake, mental health would give me more choices to work with in terms of image making. I then proceeded to do the photographic processes for the week after renting a DSLR camera and ‘attempting’ to learn how use it for the week.

[aimprocessbook]

Week 1

Pecha Kucha Images

[fromthemoteoftheday]

Darkroom lith printing with D.

[carbootymcr]

NORTHERN ART CARBOOTY STALL HOLDER: SUSIE TSANG

Selling: Susie is a Photographic Artist based in Manchester. She is fascinated with photographic processes and uses this to experiment and create work. She will be selling prints and postcards of her work (and maybe some little bookworks too if she has time before the big NAC day!) 

Price range: £1.50 (postcards) - £35 (various prices and sizes for prints) 

For more information check out: www.susietsang.co.uk

Or follow here on https://www.facebook.com/susie.f.tsang and susietsang  on twitter! 

[conservethis]

Photograph Conservator, Gawain Weaver, has made available these handy and well-designed identification charts of 19th century photographic prints and photo-mechanical (lithography, collotypes, etc) processes! A great addition to any conservation lab, special collections reading room, or archives processing area!

They are available for download as PDFs.