About my 2nd or 3rd year of teaching, a graduate student in the class,
whom I'll call Susie, could not make a decent VanDyke Brown print despite
her every determined, even frantic effort. She was a woman in her 30s,
about to teach the course herself at a local college and, needless to say,
very unhappy at that state of affairs.
The print would look wonderful, she complained almost in tears, but the
moment it got into the first wash would begin to lighten, in the fixer she
could see it washing off, and by the final wash a lot had gone down the
drain. Ultimate print density was half what it should have been.
Susie was an extremely careful, even fanatically careful worker, and her
pain all the more acute because flaky undergraduates who splished &
splashed while combing their hair and smooching up their boyfriends were
getting great VDBs.
Because of her schedule, she was printing at home, processing in her
bathtub, and although I hadn't supervised her every move, she described
each step, in fact called often to report her bafflements, furious with me
(can't say I blamed her) for drawing a blank and with herself and life.
I, needless to say, was wracking my brains to no avail. Her chemicals were
all from class, paper was what everyone was using. Was her water
different? She tried distilled. We went over every detail and came up
blank.
Fortunately, no other student had the problem and it slipped from mind.
Some 6 or so years later, however, when I myself attempted platinum
printing and read some books on the subject, I came across a note to the
effect that you shouldn't begin drying the emulsion with forced heat too
soon because it would dry in a skin on the top of the paper, and rather
than sinking in, simply wash off.
(That advice actually caused me a problem. My first platinum print, which
I let air dry, was dull and flat. I took it to our platinum teacher at
school, who told me to heat dry after about 10 minutes. That made a big
difference-- although I gather that platinum drying may vary according
to the paper and other particulars.)
As it happened, soon after that I bumped into Susie at a Photo Fair. She
did NOT greet me warmly, or ask how I'd been: her first words were "DID
YOU EVER FIGURE OUT WHAT WAS WRONG WITH MY VAN DYKE BROWNS?" And in that
moment I made the connection. Oh yes, I told her airily. You must have
dried the prints with a hair dryer. As a matter of fact, she allowed, she
had. And the worse things got, the sooner and harder and more
determinedly you applied the heat? Right.
After that I suggested that students all airdry VDB. And then I noticed a
funny thing. Bronzing-out in the shadows had been a common problem. Which
papers didn't bronze out, and which would be OK if they had a starch size,
was always a big issue. Not that bronzing couldn't be pretty if it
followed the shadows, but it often made an ugly, uneven glaze across the
print. Airdried, it seemed almost every paper was fine for VDB -- sizing
was no longer necessary, and bronzing virtually disappeared.
I'd been told that Van Dyke Brown simply didn't work at ICP: they'd
resorted to salted paper. But when I taught a summer course there we had
no problem. I thought at the time maybe the water changed in summer; later
I figured they'd probably been heat drying.
Then we had a brief cyanotype problem at school. I could see the water
turning blue as the print gurgled down the drain. There were two probable
causes: some contaminated potassium ferricyanide and some students heat
drying; with both conditions cured, all was fine.
By then I'd begun testing gum emulsion at home and found that almost any
heat in the drying degraded the print. I also added a course requirement
for students to do 2 variable tests -- two tests made during the semester
with only one variable changed. Since this was science, not art, I told
them, it was *good* to repeat what others had done. One of the more
popular tests was and still is "heat dry" vs. "air dry" (not surprising,
it's a cinch to do). Now, year after year, I've seen the comparisons;
almost always, the heat-dried print -- in VDB or cyanotype -- is lighter.
(Every once in a while it's the other way around, by the way. Whether it's
different with different papers, or simply student error, who knows?)
When I read Mike Ware's and John Barnier's description of the blue in
"old" cyanotype "gurgling down the drain" these events were among the
thoughts that came to mind and I wondered how their prints were dried. The
article in Photo Techniques didn't say.
If I can get ahold of some "new" emulsion and some good fe am cit, I'll
try some tests. Meanwhile, how do other people dry cyanotype?
Judy
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