Photographs by Frank

I have been making photographs of trees in winter, showing their “bones” for a a couple of years. Most of these photos are made using my camera obscura.

I decided that these photos might look good as salted-paper prints and thus prepared negatives from six images in this series. I finished making 4×5 inch prints on Stonehenge Warm paper yesterday.

I have many more images in this series, that I think I will print this way in the coming weeks/months.

The end of September 2017… Joan and I had left Yellowstone National Park via the northeast corner of the park and Cooke City. We were headed north through central Montana; our eventual goal was Malta.

After spending a night in Roundup, we continued on our way north. We made an unscheduled and very productive stop at the CM Russell National Wildlife Refuge where US191 crosses the Missouri River. There is a wildlife drive through the refuge on the north side of the river here.

In addition to river access, this gravel road is a hot spot for viewing elk during rutting season, i.e. at the end of September! However, this post is not about those photos!

Rather, this post is about the photos I made of an old river bottom homestead that is a short walk off the refuge road; I wrote about this site and showed the photos I made back in 2017.

Recently, I revisited these photos as I thought they would be good candidates for warm tones of salted-paper prints, an old, so called “alternative” photographic process. Or, in the words of Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer, an “ancient but still unconventional medium”. (Said about cyanotype, but equally applicable here!) I wrote about this process a couple of weeks ago when I made my first salted-paper print.

On Wednesday, I finished making salted-paper prints of nine photographs of this riverine homestead. The prints are 4″x5″ on Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag paper and are untoned. The scans I show here are a inadequate representation of the actual artifacts. The prints really need to be seen and held to fully experience, but in these days of COVID this will have to suffice for now.

I am planning to make a set of larger prints, but I am still mulling over how large. I have the trays needed to make prints on 11×14 inch paper (i.e. an image size of about 8×10 inches. However, I’m not sure that I have the space needed.

I would really like to make 11×14 inch prints but I have neither trays large enough nor a large enough space for all of the trays needed. The cost of the chemicals also becomes a factor in making large prints. An 11×14 image is almost eight times the area of a 4×5 image and thus requires eight times the chemicals.

I’m thinking that I should work out the mechanics of making large prints with cyanotype before attempting prints involving silver! I’ll probably have to also wait for warmer weather when I can set up tables for trays in the garage… we’ll see!

Anyway, here are the 4×5 inch prints:

Here is a scan of a print I made yesterday from the second negative. (An 18 minute exposure.)

This one shows that I have a bit of work to do on the highlights, but it’s not bad.

These two negatives come from a series of photos I made in September 2017 at an old river-bottom homestead along the Missouri River in central Montana. I am planning a portfolio of salted-paper prints of these photographs, I think that the warm tone of salted-paper fits this subject well.

I’m excited!

After much reading and gathering of supplies, I spent this afternoon and evening making my first salted-paper prints*.

Salted-paper printing is the progenitor of all of modern (film-based) photography. The process was invented in the 1830’s by Henry Fox Talbot and announced at the Royal Society in London at the end of January 1839, a few weeks after the Daguerreotype was announced in Paris. Both processes lay claim to being the “invention of photography”.

The salted-paper process is deceptively simple, one begins by soaking paper in salt water. After the paper is dry one makes it light sensitive by coating the salted-paper with a solution of silver nitrate.

When the sensitized paper is dry one exposes the paper to ultraviolet light through a negative. Traditionally the sun is used as a light source. I used the same exposure box containing blacklight LEDs that I use for cyanotype. Upon exposure, an image ‘magically’ appears on the paper, fully formed.

One then processes the paper through a number of solutions to remove the unreacted silver making the print stable to further exposure to light.

The procedure I used is essentially that described in Chapter 5 of Christina Anderson’s book “Salted Paper Printing/ A Step-By-Step Manual Highlighting Contemporary Artists“. I used a 4×5 inch digital negative and printed on Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag paper as it came from the mill (i.e. I did not size the paper.) The prints are untoned.

I made four prints today using two different negatives. Shown below is the very first print I made. The others are still too wet to be scanned, so I can’t show them yet!

* Well, this is not precisely true. I made a few salted-paper prints at a workshop I attended maybe 15 years ago. But that is not anything close to making prints in your own dimroom. I have no idea what has become of the prints I made back then. I must have decided that they were not worth keeping.