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Re: PIGMENT PRINTS

Judy Seigel wrote:
>
>My recollection is that the Sudek show catalog about 4 years ago was
>titled something like "The pigment prints" -- such was the lack of process
>info by the cataloguers that -- well when I visited the show at ICP with a
>talk by whatsername, the very charming lady who championed his work -- I
>was the one who had the closest idea of what the dickens they were, and
>frankly I sort of made it up. Re-reading the catalog later and from other
>sources, I figured they probably were carbon transfer... but I THINK I've
>also heard carbro so designated, so it may be an umbrella term. Possibly
>even bromoil would be included????

I have the catalog of the Sudek show, caled Josef Sudek (1896-1976), Sixty
Pigment Prints from the Artist's Estate, produced by Salander-O'Reilly
Galleries. According to the catalog (p. 15) Sudek's pigment prints,
produced between 1947-1954, were made by placing a silver-based image in
contact with a treated carbon tissue, thus creating a pigment image. This
is of course the carbro process, not carbon transfer, though in the final
result there is no practical difference. What is apparent from looking at
the images in the catalog is that Sudek worked with rather old carbon
tissue (as we can see from the very high b+f we see in the borders of the
print (and of course in the highlights).
>
>Anyway, thanks for the comment, Randall - I had figured I owed it to the
>muse to try oil printing...  it's in a bunch of the old books & magazines.
>I'll, um, lower the priority. I do recall reading that when xxxxxxx came
>along oil printing was superceded.  Maybe the xxxxxxxx was carbro?

Bromol replaced oi, or at least made it easier to make oil print . Oil
printing was introudced as a photographic printing process in 1904, bromoil
by C. Welborn Piper in 1907. And in spite of Randall's comments about oil
being "boring" it was seen at the time as a great improvement over gum
bichromate because of the extenstive control one could exercise on the
final print.

Sandy King