U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: Paul L. Anderson

Re: Paul L. Anderson



LOLOL I never thought to check! My husband's name is Tom and when we lived in Minneapolis there were 64 Tom Andersons in the phonebook, not to mention how many Chris Andersons there are. That's why I go by Christina Z. Anderson (operative letter "Z") because that narrows the playing field a tad.
Chris
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Kronquist" <mak@teleport.com>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca>
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: Paul L. Anderson


Is he related?
On Nov 26, 2007, at 8:42 AM, Christina Z. Anderson wrote:

As Paul Anderson authored a number of books on Pictorial Photography (The Technique of Pictorial Photography, Photography, The Fine Art of Photography, Pictorial Photography, Its Principles and Practices, and Pictorial Landscape Photography) and was quite the gum printer, I went online and did a search and found that the Center for Creative Photography in AZ has a TON of his alt work. Those of you who live there can stop in and see it. Here are the holdings:
http://www.creativephotography.org/collection/webbooks/anderson.pdf

It looks like his first book was in 1913, and I am pleased to have one of his early articles before that time on multiple gum printing, from American Photography 1912. Also his 1913-14 articles in the same magazine, a 10 chapter Gum-Pigment Process. Also his articles from 1935. The 1913 article expounds upon the dreaded stain test which he gets, as he says, from Koester's Der Gummidruck book (1904).

It is also interesting to see that in 1912 he was using a gum arabic mix that contained arrowroot or dextrine in these proportions:

12 oz water
2200 grains gum
270 grains arrowroot or white dextrine
mercury bichloride 15grains

But by 1913 he was suggesting not to add anything, though the starch would cut down on the gloss in the shadows. His formula by then for gum Arabic was:

1 lb gum
25 oz. water

which he calls a 60% solution (actually 64% by weight but when mixed it would be more like a 50% solution as a rough guess, as I found that 65g of gum "packs down" to approx 25ml volume when mixed in water by a VERY rough calculation so don't take my word on this one; but still, this is a much thicker gum than we mix today and seems to follow the Germans with their 60% recommendations).

He varies the ratio of gum to sensitizer according to pigment used according to the stain test, too long to go into, but his ranges are as high as 4 gum to 1 sensitizer (permanent blue) and as watery as 2 gum to 5 sensitizer for burnt sienna. In the 1912 article he was not varying his ratio much, but used 1:1 or 1:1.125.

Enough now, back to writing.
Chris


Christina Z. Anderson
Assistant Professor
Photo Option Coordinator
Montana State University
CZAphotography.com
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