From: Carl Weese (cweese@earthlink.net)
Date: 03/26/02-06:30:06 AM Z
Christina,
In the traveling show a couple years ago called something like
"Stieglitz, O'Keefe, and their Circle"--a wonderful show with a bad and
even misleading title designed to bring in the tourists--there were a
number of 'platinum prints' by both Strand and Stieglitz that were dark
and partially solarized/bronzed. A large plaque of curatorial babble
treated this almost as though it were a separate medium, or at least a
particularly complex and difficult technique that these artists worked
hard to achieve. In fact, they did look like another way of making a
moody print, like the gravures and the gum-over-platinum and other
interesting prints in the show. These included some by Kuhn that had
lovely tone and quite normal detail. The curators certainly weren't
going to let a bit of bronzing diminish the monetary value of the prints...
"Christina Z. Anderson" wrote:
because I have asked the question on solarization/bronzing to the list
> in the past and the usual recommendation is to use platinum in the palladium
> brew to prevent this, and hence a full on platinum print should be immune,
> more often than not.
A little platinum added to a palladium mix will often eliminate bronzing
(so, too, will a minor increase in workroom humidity--I print
all-palladium nearly all the time and never get bronzing), but an
all-platinum print introduces a whole host of difficulties in addition
to dark tone reversals. Bear in mind that platinum prints 100 years ago
were almost all made on manufactured paper and we don't really know what
was in them. It could even be that "impurities" were helpful and modern
pure chemical ingredients are trickier to work with...one of the
resident chemists might know more about that.
---Carl
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