[alt-photo] alt archives silly factoid

[Christina Anderson]

Dear List,

Well, I have finished going through the alt archives 1994 - 2005 (the ones that aren't online) and there were some surprising finds. I thought I would make up a quiz on this stuff but it would be way too many "off topic" emails and I'd get reamed.

What I found surprising was the number of emails on certain topics. I was only looking for what I was interested in (e.g. not interested in ever doing daguerreotypes so I didn't look at those messages though they were few anyway). And I have to amuse myself while looking so I play number games. Numbers are VERY approximate.

1900 gum
300 cyanotype, platinum, and Van Dyke brown
100 salt
80 Fresson
50 argyrotype
40 ziatype
40 combotype
40 casein

But what surprised me is that the questions on "which paper for which process" exceeded VDB,Cyano, PT/PD--almost 500 of them!

It illustrated to me how paper specificity is a major concern in our field.

I'm not drawing any conclusions here because it could just be that newbies ask the most questions in certain areas, and certainly the proliferation of gum was due in part to the "chatty kathys" being gummists (of which I include myself) and the most heated arguments revolved around gum and of course VDB and cyanotype are two entry level alt processes where more questions might be asked. 

But paper??

OH, and the top was probably digital stuff, as we saw the change from creating large format negatives in the darkroom to imagesetter where available to finally the ink jet printer negs. But those did not interest me as that information is dated. The good thing about alt is it doesn't become dated as much.

I think the archive would be the best historical "proof" of practice out there if anyone was interested in tracing the movement of a movement.

Just an interesting Sunday morning factoid for all of you :)
Chris


Christina Z. Anderson
christinaZanderson.com