From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 08/17/03-02:15:40 AM Z
On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Christina Z. Anderson wrote:
> .... I can't believe I overlooked in my notes this bit of
> research: in the BJP of April 1908, it was a Mr. C. Wille who demoed gum and
> did the pigment/gum titration stain test, using 1-7 pts gum, so unless
> Anderson's stain test is before this date, Mr. C. Wille is the culprit
> behind the fetishistic stain test, that b*&()!!!.
Actually, I think there was something in the 1905 Gum Bichromate book
along those lines by someone else, so Mr Wille wouldn't have been the
first... but my point isn't who thought it up. My point, or rather points,
are
1. who made a big deal of it,
2. why it became such a big deal,
3. how come it got into the "canon" ...
4. and the fact that it's ABSURD....
You note that Maskell and Demachy addressed pigment stain. I note that
that was 2 paragraphs of a 38-page treatise, or more or less in passing...
THAT was the "importance" (or lack thereof) in the other early works as
well.
I surmise that it became so important with Anderson because he was
printing with 100% saturated sodium dichromate which he used about 2 parts
to one part gum--- as would make a stone give off pigment stain, and is, I
guesstimate, about 100 times the dichromate other printers used.
As for how it got into the canon -- I've said this before: It was the
ZEITGEIST !!! In 1939 (year of Henney & Dudley) Kodak was gaining
ascendancy with its factory materials. Kodak types were coming up with
all these tables and charts and curves and of course when you sell factory
film & paper you *have* to provide the tables & charts & curves showing
how to use them.
The customers/public as well as the "experts" began to expect/demand them.
Henney and Dudley was edited by Kodak types who knew nothing and cared
less about gum printing, which was by then nearly obsolete. The BJP Annual
didn't even include a gum formula in the back of the book after 1936 (or
maybe it was '38). Do you suppose either Henney or Dudley ever made a gum
print? They, like everyone else since then, just loved the "system."
Otherwise they would have had Franklin Jordan, actually better known at
the time & who knew more about gum printing, do the chapter... But one of
the "proofs" of how great this system was, was EXACTLY that it was a
system, or as Anderson put it, "no more by guess and by golly." That the
major variables of pigment stain are the particular gum and the paper size
was not known to him-- tho the importance of the size was known and cited
by other gum printers. (I find the gum a big variable in pigment stain &
warn against making absolutes without citing the gum -- another reason why
gum gets a reputation for being so "difficult." Results often won't match
with a different gum.)
Since Anderson's premises were wrong in many respects, and he himself had
apparently done very little gum printing, and nobody apparently ever
TESTED the great "GPR test" against a control (until I shocked the nation
with that sacrilege), it passed into an astonishing number of texts, with
the discrepancies either ignored or rationalized... Crawford seems to be
the only one who noticed (at least in print) that varying the ratio of
dichromate threw off all those careful calculations, but he said "for some
reason" it didn't matter -- another triumph of belief over reason !!!!
I'm going to go into this at greater length (if you could believe) in
print myself, with examples & illustrations, because I consider the saga a
PRIME & PERFECT example of the stinking "science" in the field of alt...
where plagiarizing previous books without doing the processes let alone
testing, is routine & accepted, even revered, & belief trumps evidence...
Luis Nadeau, BTW, is one of the very few who cited the source when he
included the GPR "test" & its rationale, tho clearly he never tested it.
Others did list Henney & Dudley in a 3 or 4 page bibliography without
saying what in that work was used for what in their text. Bibliographies
of that sort, I might add, are worse than useless -- they manage to convey
lots of authority, but no help to researchers.
Before I stop this rant (& lots more where that came from), I add that so
far as the record shows (a monograph on Paul Anderson that DID surface in
my bookshelf), Anderson did just 3 out of 464 prints in the CCP archive in
gum only, and another ll in gum & other media. By far the majority of his
prints were what we'd call silver gelatin, and at the time he was better
known as an author of novels for young adults.... (Clearly the fellow had
a gift for fiction !)
Thus he became the expert and authority, whereupon the books began to say
gum was difficult or apologize for its difficulty or try to reason it
away...
> In my mind, the problem is, in the large picture, degraded highlights
> or whites of the paper. So it looks to me to be something like this:
>
> I. Degraded Highlights
> A. Insolubilization of the gum/pigment on the paper
> 1. Insolubilization due to light exposure
> a. Fogging or accidental non-image exposure
> b. Overexposure
Did you test these assumptions ? For instance, I dried coated prints for
1/2 hour IN ROOM LIGHT, and found NO extra pigment stain... though more
dichromate stain. Although a too thin negative may well "fog."
As for simple overexposure with a reasonable negative, longer development
will clear it. And in the normal course of printing, unless you've heat
dried or gone to lunch & left the light on, or left a coated paper at room
temp to "age,"there rarely is such a thing as "insolubilization."
Somewhere along the line, BTW, the notion of 1/2 hour as the right and
"correct" development for gum crept in -- this is one I don't think
Anderson can be blamed for, but it does cripple and distort gum printing
(another topic to be sure).
etc.etc.
Judy
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