[alt-photo] Chemical Development for Printing Out Processes

[Francesco Fragomeni]

Hi all,

It's been a little while since I've last written and I've been kept rather
busy with my move to NYC but I've been keeping a close eye on the
conversations.

This question pertains to using chemical development for processes that are
traditionally considered printing out processes. The literature tells us
that this was indeed a practiced technique albeit a rare one due to the
preference of the time for non-black toned prints. One practitioner I can
reference was the commercial printing operation of Blanquart-Evrard and
Fockedey outside of Lille, France in the 1850's. They used Albumen with
chemical development rather then as a printing out process in order to mass
produce prints quite successfully.

I'm particularly interested in silver-based POP processes like Albumen and
Collodio-Chloride which make use of silver-chloride as the light sensitive
agent. The presence of silver-chloride allows the possibility for chemical
development and I'm quite curious to hear if anyone has experimented with
this. Apparently, Blanquart-Evrard and Fockedey were able to produce lovely
grey and black tones by developing Albumen paper (exposed much shorter then
normally) with a gallic acid based developer. I'm curious what might result
by developing in modern developers that are established to work quite well
with silver-chloride emulsions i.e. Amidol, Dektol, etc.

I'm inclined to experiment with this but I'd love to hear about any results
anyone else has had.

Best,
Francesco Fragomeni
www.francescofragomeni.com