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RE: Tricolor gum print ( was Gum vs. Kallitype)



Judy,

I am glad to find myself in agreement with almost anything you said.  When
I said that by and large earth pigments work best with gum printing I was
of course referring to earth pigments not to
what-is-frequently-sold-under-the-name-of-earth-pigments.  As you point
out, with the latter you may run into all sorts of problems.  Some vendors
are more helpful than others with labelling their products.  Seems that
www.kremer-pigmente.de is among the more helpful ones (they have a shop in
NYC).

You wrote:
>But I try to avoid "common sense"  -- or the "seems-logical disease in
>gum." Paul Anderson did this and came up with several fallacies which
>suffused gum printing since 1930, enshrined in the canon, from Henney &
>Dudley, cut & pasted (withOUT testing !!) through Crawford, Scopick, and
>now the so-called "Ansel Adams Guide II."

How good of you to make this long overdue point! (BTW, what is AA Guide
II?)  When I started with gum printing I fell into the very same trap:
trying out recipes that were handed down through several generations of
writers.  I noticed that they didnt agree on everything; so I tried to
stick to everything they agreed on.  Wrong!  You gave one example.  Here is
another one:  They all agreed that you should only use the most finely
ground pigments that you can afford to buy.  They don't tell you that the
more finely the pigments are ground the more severe the staining problem
gets.  (Well, that's common sense, isn't it ?-)  If you use such pigments,
then to build up sufficient density you need to coat many many times with
low pigment concentrations.  The best that could be said for this way of
doing gum prints is that it represents only one "school": many coatings in
combination with automatic development results in softish prints eventually
approximating the look of conventional photos.  To be sure, I find e.g.
Livick's prints most impressive, from a technical point of view.  But there
is another school that accentuates more the characteristics of the process.
The idea here is to build up density quickly, ideally with 3 or 4 layers
only.

The Father & Master of this school is Heinrich K"uhn (who invented multiple
gum printing).  K"uhn called for dry, powdered pigments that are not too
finely ground. With such pigments you virtually don't have a staining
problem (well, modulo some other parameters).  He also disliked automatic
development, claiming that a gum print that didn't develop in 5 to 10
minutes (by softly pouring water over it) "ist nicht viel wert".  Those who
are interested (and read German) can download an excerpt from K"uhn's
Technik der Lichtbildnerei (1921):
http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Philosophie/Fuhrmann/themen/kuehn.pdf
To my mind, this chapter is still the best practical guide to gum printing
ever written.  (Incidentylly, it also clears up some common myths about the
pictorialist programme.)

Best! -- Andre