Alternative ways of printing

Interest in older imaging and printing technologies has grown considerably in recent years. This is proven by the “Kunstkamera” exhibition at the Meglinskaya Gallery at the Winzavod Contemporary Art Center. What techniques you can’t see there: platinum-palladium printing from camera negative or contact palladium printing, litprint, oilprint, temperaprint, humoil. There are more works made in such techniques as cyanotype, platinotype, rubberotype, silver bromide printing, and gummiarbic printing. Some infrequently used techniques include ambrotypes on black or transparent glass, pinhole and Holga photography, infrared photography, monocular, multi-exposure, and panning. We turned to the famous photographer Lyudmila Zinchenko, knowing that she is fond of old printing and shooting techniques, with a request to share recipes and secrets.

Roman Minaev. Portrait of Beuys. Cyanotype. Coca-Cola. Paper.

Lyudmila Zinchenko’s story

I’m going to talk about some of the printing processes that have been called alternative – alternative digital photography or conventional analog. You can get an idea of these things, but you need to prepare more seriously, using special literature and Internet resources, in order to practice. But that’s not the main thing either. Just as it is impossible to learn to play the violin without learning the music notation and scales, learning to print is possible only through regular practice.

It takes practice. To perform, you have to play music all the time. Don’t be upset if you don’t get it right away. I, for example, for about two years, already under the taunts of friends and colleagues, could not master the gumbichromat… The most important thing is to have patience. So we begin.

Cyanotype

Cyanotype is the simplest and probably the most common printing process nowadays. Like most alternative printing processes, it has been known for a long time. If you open a photographic reference book from the beginning of the last century, you will find another name for it: ferrotyping. This is by the name of the iron that is used in this process. The recipe for making a light-sensitive solution is simple.

The first solution:

– 30 g of ammonium iron citrate iron citrate per 100 g of water. From this we get the first stock solution.

Second solution:

– 10 g of potassium ferric blue aka red blood salt, or, in layman’s terms, hemograft per 100 grams of water.

These two reserve solutions are stored long enough, but the working solution, which should be prepared right before the application. The working composition consists of the same amount of the first and second solutions. It is better to use syringes and pour the same amount of iron and blood iron into a flat jar. Then you should take paper or fabric probably other media are also possible and under dim light apply a light-sensitive solution with a brush to the surface. Leave to dry also in low light.

Of course, you’d better start with paper. Its quality does not play a crucial role any thick water-colored paper will do, but you can also use a Watman paper.

To print a photograph, you need a negative. Unless, of course, you are making a photogram. Photogramming is an entertaining process that you can do outdoors, in the woods, by the sea, etc. d. You smear the paper in deep shade, and it’s even better to do it in advance, since the ironed paper can be stored – in a black bag, of course. My “personal” maximum storage time is about two weeks. Then you can put some objects on the paper, say, those found in the forest or at sea or your own straw hat, hold it in the sun for about 10 minutes, and rinse it – and the picture is ready.

In other cases the negative is made. Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t have an analog camera, and you don’t need one. The good thing about alternative methods is that you can make a picture taken with anything: a telephone, a digital camera of any level, a pinhole, etc. d. You can even draw that picture and turn it into a negative.

Get transparent film for the printer I buy it at Savelovsky Market . The negative is made in “Photoshop” by the simple method of inverting. Next, I tighten the curve so that the image was sufficiently contrast and dense enough. An inkjet printer is better suited for printing.

You put the dried black and white negative on light-sensitive paper, put it all in a frame. Its simplest form: a dense backdrop and glass that presses your photographic material on top. You staple it all together with paper clips and expose it. This is called contact printing.

You need an ultraviolet light source for that. It can be either natural – the sun – or artificial – the UV lamp. Of course, it is desirable that the radiation of the lamp covers the surface of the negative as much as possible, otherwise you will have underexposed edges, which will then become too light. The exposure will be 7-15 minutes, depending on the density of the negative. After this time we take out the exposed photographic paper and wash it. It’s better to do it in a cuvette with running water, but make sure that the jet does not hit the picture itself, otherwise you will have a light spot in this place, if not a hole. When the washing is finished, it is better to rinse the photo for 10-15 minutes in a solution of citric acid.

Now you can admire the beautiful light blue picture. This is, in fact, the PAmerican blue, a substance that is obtained after all the chemical processes that have taken place on the paper. If you are still not satisfied with the color that gave the process its name, cyanotype, you can tone the image. As a toner most often used tea – black or green, where the coloring, in fact, the substance entering it tannin, but the field for experimentation is wide, you can even use Coca-Cola! After washing and toning, you dry the image and the print is ready.

The process is the same with the cloth. But the exposure is a little bit longer than on paper. A frequently asked question about the fabric is about washability. Not in the machine, only hand-washing with a minimum of soap. As for being able to wear this product, I think yes, you can, because the red blood salt, which is not safe for the body, washes out in the printing process.

Salt Seal

This is the oldest method of printing photographs, invented by William Henry Fox Talbot at the beginning of the century before last. It is based on the interaction of salt and silver nitrate. It has a soft tone, weak contrast and, consequently, a wide dynamic range.

Of course, it is not difficult to buy table salt and gelatin. And silver nitrate is a very scarce material, and it is hard to find of course if you are not prepared to dissolve the silver spoon in nitric acid . For the beginning, it is better to buy a set for salted printing in a photo store. Where print chemicals, toners, and photo paper are sold, there are probably alternative technology kits as well. But in any case, it doesn’t hurt to know what you’re doing.

We start by salting the paper. It’s better to take 200-300 grams watercolor paper with a texture that suits you. You can use a solution like this to salt the paper:

– 25 grams of table salt

– 5% potassium bichromate read the rules for its use !

– 2 grams of gelatin

– water up to 1 liter.

We keep the sheets of paper in this solution for about one minute and then we dry them. Salted sheets can be stored for a long time. But it is better to salt the paper just before printing. Using a brush we apply the solution of silver nitrate 12 g per 100 g of water in a dim light. It is better to take distilled water, otherwise you will have to keep this solution in bright sunlight until the dirt settles as flakes at the bottom of the container. The clarity of the solution affects the contrast, and since the images will already be very soft, this is a problem you will encounter.

Now let’s move on to the negative. You make it about the same as for cyanotype, but much more contrasty. Then you do the same as the first process: put the negative on the emulsion side of a dried sheet of paper, press it against the glass and turn on the UV lamp or put it out into the sun.

Exposures will be about 3-5 minutes. It depends on your light source. The image will change before your eyes: at the end of exposure, if everything is done correctly, it will become dark brown. But do not be afraid of overexposed, because after rinsing it will get much lighter. Then go on to the fixing process. You put the picture in a solution of sodium thiosulfate this is a black and white fixative and keep it there for about 10 minutes. Then a fifteen minute final rinse, and the print is ready to dry.

It will be a light brown color. If you want to give a different shade, you can use toners. I’m not going to give their complicated recipes here, you can learn it on alternative photography sites.

Lit process

Before that we were discussing processes based on printing under UV light from contact negatives. Lit-prints are made with an ordinary enlarger, from ordinary film. Although some students at the Rodchenko School have learned to print from digital files using the same contact negatives made with the printer. I should say that you don’t even need a magnifier for this negative – you can just turn on a table lamp, for example .

And while cyanotype and saltine are more or less predictable processes, once you get into the lith-printing business, you realize that it is impossible to predict how your print will behave in the developer and what it will turn out in the end. It is impossible to make two identical photos even from one negative with the same exposure. But it’s worth it!

The most important thing is to choose the photo paper for your desired effect. It is usually a matte barite paper. You can buy Ilford, Kent Mary, FOMA Bohemia paper, and experiment with them.

Next, the choice of developer. The easiest and most affordable is D-9. You can buy it in a photo store, order it online at Photopharmacy d-76 or make it yourself. By the way, “Fomabrom 112” paper is good for this developer. There are other, more expensive developers, with different characteristics, of course. I have never bought special photo paper for the litho process, and neither have my acquaintances who print all the time.

Exposure during printing is not the most important thing in the litho. It should be two to three times as large as usual. The most important thing is the developer. Have patience! You should process for about 15 minutes., Keep shaking the developer cuvette. If you warm the developer to 25-30 degrees, it goes faster put the flask in hot water . After a while you will see dark spots on your gray print. This means that it’s infectious.

The essence of the process is that along with the usual one comes the second – infectious – manifestation. That is the coarse grain everybody likes, which is what gave the process its name. At the end of development comes the most crucial moment: it is necessary to take the print out of the developer and wash it in time, otherwise your picture will turn into a dark stain in a few seconds. You can’t teach it theoretically, you have to learn it in practice.

After fixing, by the way, it’s better to use a simple fixer made in America, but not “Ilford” anyway, because after that the photos get darker. The tone of photos could be tints of yellow, brown or plain black and white. It depends on the ratio of the photographic paper, developer, and developer time.

Now we come to an even more complicated process

Gumbichromate

This printing method is based on the property of gum arabic white acacia resin in combination with potassium or sodium bichromate to become insoluble in water under ultraviolet light. Watercolor inks are used for color. If in the previous processes we could only get a certain color, here our imagination can only be hampered by the lack of watercolor. You only need Winsdorf&Newton colors for gumbichromate at least everything I tried to do with other colors was useless . For printing we will also need a contact negative, but with less contrast than in the previous sections.

To begin with we need to prepare paper. If in salt printing and cyanotype the paper is not decisive, then in gumbichrome the right paper is the key to success. I use Rossapino etching paper from Italian Fabriano. Arch Fine paper from France and some Monvale grades give good results.

Before printing we dab the paper with gelatin 3 g per 100 g of water , dry it, and then dab it with a light-sensitive solution. We put it together like this:

We squeeze a worm of watercolor paint out of a tube, about the size of a centimeter. Using a syringe, we pour 3 ml of diluted liquid gum arabic 30 g of dry substance per 100 g of water . Then we add 3 ml of potassium bichromate with a syringe read the terms of its use beforehand ! . The solution is prepared on the basis of 10 grams of the substance per 100 grams of water.

You can, however, vary the ratio of the compound depending on the contrast you need. If you want a fairly soft image, put more bichromate in the working solution. And if you need to increase the contrast, then, on the contrary, more gummiarabic. This way you can print in lights and shadows and, if necessary, in different colors. That means that from one black and white negative you can get either a monochrome image, an image with different colors, or even a color image. It might not be immediately clear, it took me a long time to understand it too. Let me try to explain the printing of a monochrome photo.

You put the first coat on the paper. Suppose it is to be printed on the lights of some cold paint, such as indigo. You make a bichromate-dominated solution, for example 6 g of bichromate, 2 g of gum arabic and a worm of indigo paint. After drying, expose from the contact negative for 2-3 minutes and wash.

Yes, don’t forget to make crosses or notches on the negative and paper so you can combine them later. You don’t wash in running water, but in standing water, in cuvettes. The picture is lying with the image down, and during this washing, the development takes place. That is, the unblown particles of the photosensitive solution, where the light has not reached, will be washed out. And where the light hits, there will be an image. Change the water, the process itself may last about an hour in water.

Then you get the picture. But it’s not likely to be of satisfactory quality, because it’s likely to be too gray and weak. But don’t forget, as long as we’re printing by light. The second step is best done a few hours after the photo has dried. Smear second layer on top of the same image and put for instance twice as much gum arabic as bichromate. And you can use a different color for that, because it’s shadow printing. Like umber or Van Dyke, which are all yellow-brown colors. So we color and expose, develop in water, and dry. If you are not satisfied with this quality, you may add a third coat, better the next day, where you add bichromate and gum arabic in equal proportions. You use, for example, ivory.

Approximately this way I printed my RAYCenter project, though in some cases I did 4-6 layers.

It will not be very difficult to make a color image with this method if you master printing. But I think you have to give up the perspective of getting the right colors right away. In the first stage, it is not possible. But you don’t need the right colors? You can also get them in a minilab!

You can do a color image in RGB or CMYK. In the first case, you make 3 color separated black and white negatives, using the Split Channels menu of the Channels palette in “Photoshop”. You will have negatives for the red, blue and green channels. The next step is very interesting: the layer of watercolor paint for each negative must be the OTHER LIKE. If the negative is red, the color of the watercolor layer on the paper should be blue.

Blue Green Red

correspond to

Yellow Purple Blue

In CMYK printing, you do not use opposite colors, but print correctly: blue negative, blue layer, etc. d.

Have fun experimenting!

Varya Gevorgizova. Body emanation. Cyanotype. Fabric.

Andrey Kunitsky. From the Homeless Project. Salt Seal. Paper.

Kir Esadov. Salty Prints. Paper.

Irina Mann. Ibiza. Lit-process

Kir Esadov. From the Intimate Diary of a Great Kid project. Ilford photo paper.

Kir Esadov. From the project “An Intimate Diary of a High School Student. Ilford photo paper.

Lyudmila Zinchenko. “Bath.”. Lit-process. Photo paper

Foma 112. Irina Mann. Spain. 2009 g.

Lyudmila Zinchenko. From the RAYCenter project. Gumbichromat. Opaque paper.

Dmitry Orlov. NY. Gumbichromat. Watercolor paper.