to make a photograph. So you would start with a plain piece of paper that you would sensitize and process yourself. Relatively soon thereafter, around the mid to late 1850s, and certainly by the 1860s, a lot of different manufacturers of photographic papers appeared. And these would be albumen papers, the papers that were used to record the American Civil War, for example. And those were by and large all commercially prepared papers. For silver gelatin, the black-and-white papers, you really don’t see those appear until the latter part of the 19th century. George Eastman really believed in them, except the trouble was that he was one of the few people who really believed in them. They were very hard to use and they were not widely embraced by either amateur or professional photographers.
It was really the introduction of Velox by the Nepera Chemical Company, in the latter years of the 19th century, that pushed it over the top. It was a paper geared for amateurs primarily, but it had the right combination of all kinds of different factors to make it a commercial success. It was not too fast, and that was one of the big problems with the early-generation gelatin silver papers. They were too fast and they required a photographic darkroom. Printers didn’t print in the darkroom in the 19th century; the papers weren’t fast enough. You could very easily print in a well-lit room, and check the progress of the print as it developed without exposing the paper and ruining the print. So those papers were too fast. Velox was right. It was the right combination of speed and enough attributes of the earlier generation papers, but it was also forward-looking enough technologically, and it was a huge success. And George Eastman bought the company and popularized the paper, and soon thereafter many manufacturers started getting involved.
By the mid-teens, late teens, we start getting away from pure contact printing, and photographic printing really then fully moves into the darkroom, and you start getting enlarging papers that are specifically designed both for professional use and for amateur use. At that point you start to see the diversity of papers come in. Really around 1915, 1917, you start seeing more manufacturers in that space, you start to see them competing. And by 1925, you have this incredible diversity available to photographers that probably only increased until around World War II. The photographic manufacturers kind of devoted their efforts more to the war effort, devoted their innovations to making things faster, a little bit cheaper. And then color came in after World War II.
In retrospect it’s easy to identify that as the beginning of the end for what we conventionally know as black-and-white papers. The heyday was between the wars; that period really was the peak for the diversity of the different papers, what papers were out there. Today, we are down to a very few manufacturers and a fairly limited range of surfaces, textures, and paper varieties.
The first papers that I bought were from a little camera store in a small town in Massachusetts that was going out of business. They had a lot of Agfa sample books from over the years, and I thought, we need this in conservation. We need the materials-based understanding of 20th-century photography, and yet we were actively losing it, really quickly, with the transition to digital.
I have 5,200 or so catalogued pieces of photographic paper. But what was available at the peak—I would really love to know myself, because it would give me a benchmark that I could kind of collect against. Anytime I get a feeling that the diversity cannot increase, it increases exponentially. I discover different manufacturers that might have come and gone. I discover a sample book that shows me that I only have maybe 10 percent or less of a manufacturer’s papers for a certain period. So it keeps opening up for me how diverse it was, and I wish there was a census of, at the peak, how many manufacturers there were, how many brands, how many surfaces that were put out onto the market. I really don’t know.
It’s really difficult for anyone looking at a sample book to understand what it’s about. They’re going to see goofy images of very posed models and funny-looking dogs. And that’s not what you should be looking at. What these are meant to illustrate are all the different attributes of the papers, the physical attributes of the papers, the texture, the gloss, the color—trying to help a photographer make a good decision. And also trying to help a photographer sort out this hugely diverse world. When we think of a black-and-white photograph, we sort of conjure up this monolith, right? It’s a black-and-white photograph. It’s ubiquitous, right? It’s everywhere. But within that universe, there really is this language that we don’t really know how to speak anymore.
Robert L. Shanebrook:
I worked at Eastman Kodak Company from 1968 to 2003. Prior to my time at Kodak, I don’t know the exact numbers, but Kodak in the 1940s and ’50s probably made 10 or 15 different emulsion types. They were Medalist, Kodabromide, Illustrator Special, Azo, and so on. Those are just the emulsion types, all of which were graded, meaning they were able to provide a range of contrasts. In the darkroom the photographer chose the desired contrast, ranging from zero to perhaps five or six. In addition, Kodak had large numbers of different paper surfaces. The paper surfaces were made in two very different ways. One, Kodak would do things to the pulp so that the paper pulp was actually different depending on which type of paper they wanted to make. Two, they would emboss it, either by changing the rollers or by using a different blanket on the paper-making machine, to give a different pattern on the surface. So the photographer could choose from different textures. There were smooth surfaces, matte surfaces, as well as different kinds of tweeds, or silk or embossed patterns. The surface selected depended on the application and what went well with the photograph’s subject matter. The surfaces were identified by letters. There were more than 26 surfaces, so some of the letters were reused after they had been retired for a few years. Back then, there was a wide variety of papers available. That started to go away in the ’50s, as black-and-white paper volume started to go down and color paper started to go up.
Alison Rossiter:
I have been a photographer since 1970. I woke up one morning and realized that materials were disappearing so quickly, and I wanted to use an old 5×7 view camera I had. It dawned on me that I couldn’t buy any film for it new, and this was terrifying. So that sent me to eBay for the first time, and I decided that I would collect expired sheet film. Initially I wanted to use it as a photogram project, but I started buying whatever film I could find. One person from North Dakota sent me the contents of an old studio, 8×10, 5×7 film, and in it was one box of a Kodabromide paper that had expired in 1946, and I thought, well, let me test it. So there were 250 sheets inside the pack that had never been opened, and so I pulled one sheet out from the middle of that pack and sent it through the chemistry. If it was viable as a printing paper, it would turn out white at the end of the process. I processed the sheet, and what I saw amazed me. It looked like someone had taken graphite and rubbed it over a rough paper surface. It was the failure of the emulsion. The silver halides couldn’t stay light sensitive for all those years, and this very simple image…to me, it was just astonishing. And I knew from that moment that there was something to go look for in expired papers, found work that had been latent. These are latent images that are made by atmospheric damage, or light leaks when opening the package, mold, shock, all sorts of things. So really it began with an accident…just by chance. I was buying film and someone sent me paper.
Photographers who came later in the century have never seen what [photographic paper] was available. I’m completely in awe of what was made before, and wish that I had been able to use them when they were still viable printing papers. There were so many choices: warm tones, warm tones on a cream base, warm tones on a cool base. The colors were astonishing. The contrasts were amazing. I was sad that these things were gone, sad to find out that so many beautiful materials existed long before I was a photographer, and so those are gone to me. And then the sadness disappeared, and I realized that I’m using these with a new purpose.
My expired-paper prints are titled with three bits of information: the type of paper, the date it expired, and the date I sent it through the chemistry. So it will be Acme Kruxo, exact expiration date unknown, circa 1940s, processed 2012. That will be it. And it’s a long one, it’s a real mouthful of a title, but I want that to be all the information.
