Albumen printing is a Bryan Type One Experience

My friend Bryan proposes that everything we do can be put into one of three categories. A Bryan Type Zero experience is something that you never need or want to do -- be in a serious car accident, fall from a high place, etc. A Bryan Type One experience is something that it is necessary or pleasant or useful or illuminating or amusing to do once but that's enough. (Barbara says that seeing the plays "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "Waiting for Godot" are each a Bryan Type One.) A Bryan Type Two experience is everything else.

Albumen printing is a Bryan Type One.

I've enjoyed learning how to do it with some skill. I'm looking forward to having these glass negatives printed in a way that is appropriate to their age. When I'm finished printing them my firm resolve is never to do albumen printing again.

There are two reasons for my resolve. First (and most positive) is that my own photographs are not well suited to the look of albumen prints. The albumen print is a beautiful, rich brown/black with a slightly soft image and veiled highlights. For my own photographs I prefer a sharper-edged, cooler image. The second reason, more pragmatic, is that I regard the albumen printing process as a pain in the neck. Allow me to describe it.

Albumen printing is a "printing out" process. That is; the image is formed on the paper by the light that strikes it -- sort of like an apple darkening after it's cut. As such it is "self-masking" -- the darker areas in the image form relatively quickly but then the darkened image itself limits how dark it will get by blocking the incoming light. A printing out process is ideal for dealing with extremely contrasty negatives (such as vintage glass plates). However, it is definitely a contact printing process since the exposure times are minutes to tens-of-minutes in sunlight (thirty minutes with my CF studio lights). This, of course, implies that the negative must be the same size as the print you wish to make. Ah! That's the first complication. I wanted to make small prints but not as small as the 4"x5" negatives. In this digital age the solution is to make a digital negative from the scans of the glass plates. I've done this for a couple of other projects so all I had to do was to get 'calibrated' on how dense and how contrasty to print them. Several further complications are not so simple to untangle.

The first step in albumen printing is to coat high-quality water color paper with an emulsion of albumen and chloride salts. Thankfully, Bostick and Sullivan stand ready to sell you pre-coated albumen paper. [As an aside, Bostick and Sullivan is one of the more pleasant companies to deal with that I've ever found. Their materials are excellent; their shipping is quick and reasonably priced, if you call with a question you will reach a human -- likely one of the co-owners or their family -- who will track down an answer.]

However, as it comes from B&S the paper is not light sensitive -- it must be sensitized and dried immediately before it is used. It is sensitized by brushing (and brushing, and brushing, and brushing) a coat of silver nitrate on the albumen-coated paper. The silver nitrate doesn't soak in -- it reacts with the chloride salts in the surface of the albumen to form silver chloride -- which is more-or-less light sensitive. After the surface of the paper becomes dull instead of shiny (by the way, this all must be done in very dim light) it must be dried with a hair dryer --- and then a second, lighter coating of silver nitrate applied and dried again. Theoretically you can keep the paper for a day or so before you use it -- not my experience; even a couple of hours is enough to visibly fog the highlights.

Now the intrepid printer puts the negative and freshly sensitized paper into a contact printing frame and put it to bask in the light for an extended time. Being an organized type of person, I established the exposure required to make a good black/brown in the darkest areas without fogging the highlights enough to bother me. Good -- now I know how to expose the negative and how to adjust the tones in the negative to produce an attractive print. Ah, if it were as easy as I make it sound.

After the exposure is completed the print must be washed thoroughly (six two-minute water baths) and then languish for 15 minutes in gold chloride toner. The toner step changes the tone of the print from a nearly foxy red to the beautiful brown/black and plates a layer of very stable gold chloride over the image. Then a quick wash and the print goes into two sequential fixer baths (five minutes each), another quick wash and five minutes in a wash accelerator (helps get the fixer out of the paper) and finally, sports fans, into the archival washer for a half hour.

As the print sits in the fixer bath it is alarming how much it appears to bleach lighter. Don't fret -- it will darken again as it dries and (slightly) more when it is heated to flatten. However, the result is that you don't know exactly how the print will look until it is dried and flattened.

This is not a process for one who craves instant gratification.

There is a sort-of Zen component to any darkroom process -- even with modern materials and processes -- but this two-hour vigil is over my tolerance. It has increased my admiration for my photographic ancestors for which this process was their everyday experience.

The few prints that I have so-far made are very satisfactory and look a lot like I hoped they would.  That said, if and when I get the fifteen or so prints for this project done and matted on unbuffered, acid-free mats (another complication is that the normal mats I use will cause the albumen prints to fade) I have no intention of starting another project that is best done with albumen.

 

 

Throuh a glass (negative) darkly.

A while back -- to be truthful about it, 40 plus years ago -- we stopped at a yard sale in the rural countryside near Lockport in western New York. We often stopped at a yard sale when we were driving around the quite new to us area. Everything was so old there compared to the west coast from whence we had moved.

Since we had a good sized Dodge family van at the time we even sometimes bought things when we stopped at a yard sale. I bought a small oak bookcase along with (at the insistence of the seller) the books that were in it. Most of the books were of the likes of Readers Digest condensed books. Among them, however, was an album of several hundred photogravures of England, Scotland, and Wales collected in 1903 by one Maude Grant Kent. It seems that when a well-to-do young person took the tour to Europe that collecting photogravures as souvenirs was the thing to do. With only a little detective work (some years later when Professor Google was available to help) we found that Ms. Kent lived in Chautauqua, New York.  But I digress. 

I also kept my eye open for cameras and old photographic equipment. Over the several years we lived near Buffalo I accumulated twenty or so box cameras and folding cameras of varying ages and pedigrees and a kerosene darkroom safe lamp. Most of the cameras were (of course, being so close to Rochester) Kodaks but I did catch a couple of Ansco 35 mm cameras, an Ansco half-frame 35mm camera, and on the day in question an Imperial Camera Company 4"x5" glass plate box camera.

 

Last fall I decided that it was time to unload a couple of good-sized boxes of photographic mathoms (mathom: an object that you don't need but is way too good to throw out). Professor Google was very helpful in dating and even estimating prices for all the cameras except for the Imperial. I could find the company -- short lived from 1898 to 1904 before being bought out by Conley View Cameras. However, I have yet to find even a mention of their 4”x5” glass plate box camera (but I know they existed -- I own one).

The Imperial has a handy compartment behind the slot into which the two-sided glass plate holder fits.  It allowed the user to transport a box of glass plates or a couple of extra pre-loaded plate holders. There was a box of unexposed glass plates in the camera but they had long since been light struck and were no longer useable. However, at the same garage sale I had also bought two boxes of glass plate negatives, doubtless taken with this camera. I looked at them briefly -- they were family pictures from a farm home, perhaps the house in the yard of which the sale was held. It's a pity I didn't take a photograph of the house. The negatives are a bit soft and of varying quality (as you would expect from a box camera) but all but a few of the 16 or so are quite printable -- maybe. I had passing thoughts of trying to print them but the thoughts passed before I did so and soon forgot about them. But last fall there they still were, languishing in my boxes of photographic mathoms, and I decided to try to print them.

Well, being in the digital age now I decided to scan these glass plate negatives and take a really good look at them. My friend, Craig, volunteered his scanner that will scan a 4"x5" negative (mine won't) and we spent a Saturday morning doing so. We also scanned three other glass plate negatives -- obviously taken with a much more sophisticated camera -- that I bought at another yard sale later. These three I had contact printed at the time on Velox paper. [For the uninitiated, Negatives as old as these are notoriously difficult to print on modern materials even if you have an enlarger big enough to carry a 4"x5" negative (I don't).  However, as late as 40 years ago you could buy Velox, a Kodak paper specifically coated for "contact printing" -- that is; sandwiching the negative directly on the surface of the paper under a piece of glass and exposing the sandwich to light. Of course, that means that the print of a 4”x5” negative is also 4”x5” -- big enough to inspect but not much else. Contact printing papers are, of course, long gone now.]

When I am in an antique (or junk) store I will often see a box of photographs labeled "instant ancestors" -- family photographs with no family, mostly without even a name. I find them sad.  Somehow I find these negatives even sadder. They were important enough that they somebody had kept them together and in the family home since the early 1900s – or maybe just never were noticed in the attic.  In either case they should belong to the great-great-grandchildren of the people shown in them -- not to some photography enthusiast that lives 2725 (I looked it up) miles away. Moreover I have no idea who these people were and not a prayer of finding out anything about them.

I decided that I am going to adopt these photographs -- print them and write the story of who these people are.  Just to make it more interesting I'm going to combine the two sets of negatives into one story.

But wait! "Print them" is another issue. In a sane world (not mine, obviously) I would make digital prints of the scans that Craig and I did -- carefully toning them to take on the look of 1900-vintage prints. Professor Google and my library of books of photographic history told me that they were likely to have been printed on albumen paper. Yes, "albumen" as in the protein in egg white and blood serum. The photograph above is a scan of an albumen print that (a little foreshadowing of an upcoming blog post) I made from one of them.
　

 

Water Music

Sorting and filing color slides was never my favorite activity; especially since I don't do it very often and it gets ahead of me.  Let’s be honest about it: I hadn't done it for about 20 years and it was really ahead of me.  However, the digital age was upon me and I really wanted to scan the (no kidding) five or six thousand color slides then residing in various cassettes, notebooks and boxes.  It took me about a year and a half to do.

It was sad to see how much many of the vintage slides have faded.  If only I had stuck to Kodachrome.  If only Kodak had stuck to Kodachrome.

There is nothing like a photograph to bring back a rush of memories.  Most of these slides were family snapshots and it was fun to see my children, now all grown, at age five or so splashing in the Hoh river.  Among the small fraction that were not family snapshots was a still-bright slide featuring the Fremont Bridge yawning open into a genuine pacific northwest azure sky for us to pass.  Handel’s “Water Music” floods into my mind and I don’t need a slide to see Louis, baton flailing and hair flying.  The chamber orchestra was new then and full of vigor – just as baroque music is supposed to be. 

Bob’s wife was on their fledgling board and invited us to come on their water music cruise and fund-raiser – me to take color slides for their publicity.  Most of the slides I took (all of the best ones) went to the orchestra but a few of out-takes were still in my hoard. 

The pre-restoration mosquito fleet steamship Virginia V pulled away from fishermens’ terminal and took a right into the ship canal towards Lake Union, orchestra playing lustily in the main salon, polished brass whistle commanding the Ballard bridge, the Fremont bridge, the University bridge to open before us, moustachioed captain at the wheel, sun pouring down on the Texas deck where I stood next to the wheelhouse blissfully going into sensory overload. 

Fast forward to early fall of that year; fund-raising successful and we were invited to a celebratory party.  The site was Bob’s A-frame cabin on a steep slope somewhere in the Issaquah Alps.  Built on the cheap as a weekend cabin he bought it in bad need of repair and worked his usual miracle on it; kitchen and living area with sleeping loft above; bathroom below the kitchen along with a soundproof room for the generator that ran the pump and the stereo; a circular stair made by his madman Mexican iron-wright replaced the ladder to the loft; and a wood-fired hot tub just off the deck that he wrapped around three sides of the cabin.

The cast of characters was most of the orchestra and (less Bob’s by then ex-wife) their board, Bob, his girl-friend Suzie, and a gaggle of hangers-on like us who had helped with the fund-raising.  Virginia brought her two-manual harpsichord and we schlepped it up the slope to the cabin where she was cheerfully tuning it.  I brought my projector and had the slides from the cruise running continuously. 

It was another sun-drenched afternoon.  Bob scored several cases of just-ripe beaujolais that tasted like drinking sunshine.  Lots of people brought cheese and bread.  No color slides are needed to recall semi-clad (well, some of them were semi-clad) figures dashing to and from the hot tub or Suzie, Vernal, a couple of musicians and I, all half drunk on music and sunshine -- the other half on beaujolais -- lying in the meadow while the swallows darted above us.  At dusk winding up with the entire mob in the cabin while Virginia played the cadenza from the 5^th Brandenburg concerto with me and two others sitting under the harpsichord. 

Louis has left for other musical pastures, Suzie dropped out of sight when she and Bob split up, Vernal is dead.  The orchestra is well established and, well, a bit staid – as am I.

Regular Customer -- quick update

Lucy Almeleh Spring (daughter of Pinhas Almeleh to whom my book "Regular Customer" is dedicated) died this week at 80.

I am so grateful for the help she gave me and I'm so glad that I got a copy of the finished book to her while she could still enjoy it (which she did).

Adio, Lucy.

(I hope I got that right -- Farewell, Lucy)

Regular Customer -- finally done

The long silence about my book was caused by three more months of flailing about followed by a very satisfactory launch of the finished book. The short version goes like this:

I went through it and changed all instances of "The Pike Place Market" to "The Market" -- that's ok by me; nearly everybody who has any interest it knows where The Market is. The director of the PDA had the gall to tell me that he "really didn't want me to have to do that" but wouldn't relent on the trademark license.

The 5th draft turned into the 6th draft and my friend Joe (a retired art director) went over that one with #000 sandpaper and turned it from pretty good to polished. Draft 7 went to Snohomish Publishing (good guys) for a proof and then 200 copies. It looks good -- not at the quality of Lenswork or the Vivian Maier book but still good.

The curator at MOHAI was enthusiastic about the finished product and did, indeed, want a copy of the 20 silver-print portfolio for their collection.

One of the first copies went to Lucy (daughter of Pinhas Almeleh to whom the book is dedicated) who helped me a lot with names and places. She is now on hospice care so I'm so glad that I got her a copy of the finished book while she could still enjoy it. Another early copy went to Sol at the fish market (his father opened the shop -- his grown grandson now is behind the counter.)  After I gave it to him he flipped it open and I could see tears welling up in his eyes. When I wandered by about 15 minutes later he was still leaning against the stairs up to the shop office going through it. Those two copies paid me back for the effort.

Between copies sold and given away the press run is about half gone. Since you only have to sell about 5 books to get your Lulu or Blurb book into the top 10% I'm going to consider it a best-seller. It's placed in a small local book shop where it is selling well. I've done two book signings and two show-and-tell programs. The copies keep dribbling out so pretty soon my out-of-pocket expenses will be paid and I'll stop even caring -- in fact I already have.

Now I need a new project.

Remembering Dutch Schultz

 

While looking for something else I found this portrait of Dutch Schultz.  When I took it in 1985 he was 75 – my age now.   He died in 2006 and was working in his sculpture studio until shortly before that.
 

I met Dutch (actually Elias) Schultz in the late 70s and we somehow hit it off and were immediately friends.  He was a cantankerous, opinionated, outspoken, perceptive, very smart, vigorous, talented guy.  We didn’t see each other very often but when we did we pretty much took up where we had left off the previous time.  There were a lot of people that had that relationship with Dutch.
 

He was born in Harlem – son of Austrian Jews.  As an adult he worked as a longshoreman on the NYC waterfront where he picked up the nickname “Dutch”.  It was a tough job in a tough world, especially for a Jew.  Dutch was a rabid anti-fascist so when the Spanish civil war began he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fought there until the fascists, with the help of the German nazis, won.  He came back to the waterfront until the U.S. entered World War II then he enlisted and served as a ski-trooper with the mountain infantry.  He fought in Italy and then in the Aleutians.

After WWII ended Dutch used his GI bill benefits to study woodcarving in Switzerland, Italy and finally with a master woodcarver in London who was working on restoring bomb damage to the houses of parliament.  When Dutch was ready to come back to the U.S. his master was ready to retire and sold Dutch his vintage tools.  Most of the handles were walnut and the steel was legendary Sheffield. 
 

Back on the waterfront, Dutch found himself blacklisted by the unions because of his service with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – the McCarthy-era zealots had declared it a communist organization.  (It was still on that list when I filled out my first security clearance application in 1961.)  After a couple of years doing the longshoreman jobs that nobody else would do – like unloading wet animal hides from reeking ship holds – Dutch moved to the west coast and wound up in Seattle where he continued to work on the waterfront until 1973.  After retiring Dutch spent full time and extra on his sculpture, mostly wood carving but he later also took up metal.  Many of the pieces had a strong social or political flavor and many had a touch of humor.  My favorite is a carving perhaps two feet wide and three feet high.  It shows heads and shoulders of three men (his in profile and two longshoreman friends almost full face) one friend has a fist prominently stuck under the other’s nose.  It is titled “Three Longshoremen Discussing.” 

 

To his great pleasure he was asked to do a major piece for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s memorial museum.  He also did a lot of commissioned pieces for government buildings and many liturgical carvings for major churches around Puget Sound.  While doing an altar piece, one of the church’s staff came in to watch and imprudently started making some suggestions.  Dutch said that it was about time for him to come down for lunch so he scrambled down off of the scaffolding, handed his mallet and chisel to his critic, said “Here – you do it.”, and stamped off to have lunch.  When he returned from lunch a new sign on the sanctuary door stated “Do not disturb the artist.  He is very temperamental.”
 

My favorite “Dutch” anecdote, however, dates from when he was about 85.  The preceding time we had met he complained that he might have to give up carving because the thumb joint in his right hand was worn out from decades of pushing on a chisel handle.  He was going to have a joint replacement (who knew that you could have a thumb joint replaced) but he was anxious about the success of doing so.   When we met this time I asked Dutch how his new thumb joint worked and he waggled it at me cheerily.  In his still-strong NYC accent he said:  “Yaaaah, they put in a teflon ball and socket and it woiks as good as new.  Told the surgeon that if he’d installed a teflon dick while he was at it I’d be good for 30 more years!”
 

One of Dutch’s long-time pals and Abraham Lincoln Brigade comrades, Abe Osheroff, wrote in a tribute to Dutch:  “Above all, Dutch was a mensch, an authentic human being, whose thoughts, words and deeds were cut from the same cloth.”
 

I miss him and will not meet his like again.

 

Photographing Fremont

(I wrote this post just after the summer solstice and put it aside until I got around to finding the photograph I wanted to use with it.  Of course, I promptly forgot about it until looking for something else today – sigh.)

 

 

I photographed at the Fremont Solstice Parade yesterday.  This hardly qualifies as a news flash since I do so nearly every year.  The photograph above, taken a couple of years ago, pretty much sums up the ecstatic, even manic energy of the event.  This mob, accompanied by boisterous music, broke into a full-scale, whooping and yelling charge for no apparent reason about fifty feet before they reached where I was standing.  Fifty feet beyond where I was standing they were back to a normal pace, still laughing and yelling.  There are a few photographs from the parade on my website, www.ronfstop.com. 

[Digression:  Just in case there is somebody reading this who is not from the Seattle area; Fremont is a Seattle neighborhood on the north side of the ship canal that connects Puget Sound to Lake Washington.  Formerly a blue-collar neighborhood of ship chandlers, boat builders, and mill workers, it morphed into an arts/crafts neighborhood and is in the process of morphing again into a high-tech live/work neighborhood.  This year was the 25th Fremont Solstice Festival -- an arts/crafts/music street fair and a wonderfully goofy parade.  The parade allows no motorized vehicles, no commercially-sponsored entries, and no text.  The entries all have a home-cooked flavor to them, whether a ragtag marching band, the entire student body of Salmon Bay School -- a Seattle alternative elementary school -- riding unicycles or (my all time favorite in the year that the theme was "fertility") an elaborate float that was a veritable mountain populated by a bevy of beautifully costumed and ostentatiously pregnant women.  The official start of the parade is traditionally but unofficially led by a posse of bicyclists wearing elaborate and beautiful body paint but little or nothing else.  Some even skip the body paint.  Here endeth the digression.]

I staked out a place on the curb about an hour before the parade started and struck up a conversation with the guy on my left.  Before long a youngish couple, man and woman, strolled up and joined us on my right.  The man was shirtless and, less expectedly, she was too.   I must have done a bit of a double take because she laughed.  I complemented her on getting into the spirit of the parade.  I sure meet some interesting people.

The festival organizers were expecting 20,000 or so visitors but I'll bet there were more than that present for the parade alone.  It was a zoo.  I'm a big fan of a huge, cheerful crowd but enough is enough, already.  If there were, in fact, 20,000 people there then about 5000 of 'em had one or more high-end digital SLR's, fully outfitted with oatmeal-carton-sized zoom lenses, strung on their necks. My friend Doug says that they are not photographers but PWC's (people with cameras).  They were everywhere, popping up like jacks-in-the-box or standing in the middle of the street filling up one memory card after another.  Even more numerous and intrusive were the camera-phone contingent, holding their smart phones above their heads and effectively occluding the view of anybody behind them. 

I took four rolls of film -- standing at the curb and getting in nobody's line of sight.  The parade organizers provide (for a modest fee) a "press pass" that gives you the privilege of being in the street with a camera.  Next year maybe I'll get one and walk the parade route backwards, keeping moving so I won't materially get in anybody's way – at least not for very long.  (But I digress once again.)

Of the 140 or so negatives I work-printed 14 and of those there are three or four that I will print.  That's pretty slim pickings partly because I have photographed the parade many times and it takes a pretty good image to make it into the boxes with the 80 or more that I already have printed.  The other issue is that the Fremont parade is the hardest situation I have ever photographed.  It must be a lot like photographing a sporting event from the sidelines -- you have to be able to anticipate the action and even then a lot depends on luck tobring the action down your sideline.  Even at that, in a sporting event there are usually pauses; there is a set of rules to help you predict where and when things will happen; and only the most foolhardy PWC will leap onto the field and block your line of sight.  The only rule at the parade is that the participants are mostly (but not necessarily) moving from west to east.  The only pauses come when the parade stalls and then you can guarantee that some impromptu performance will spring up.  Perhaps it's more like being a war correspondent without the explosions.   I love it but photographing it is very hard work.   I can hardly wait until next year.