When the albumen print was invented in 1850
they then called salted paper prints, ‘plain prints’.
The only difference is, one has egg white and one doesn’t.
it’s the same process.
So these are examples of albumen prints.
The albumen print was invented in 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard
and was the most popular photographic process of the 19th century.
This is an example of a pristine albumen print
how it would have looked when it was first produced.
This is an example of a faded, yellow albumen print
characteristic of albumen deterioration.
The albumen print is a silver chloride process.
It uses table salt as part of its process.
All it is, is paper that’s been floated on a solution of albumen
egg white.
The earliest albumen printing operations literally kept a lot of chickens
because it took a lot of eggs to make a lot of albumen prints.
You take eggs and you separate the white from the yolk.
You beat the white, and when it settles back down again
you have this beautiful yellow liquid.
In the liquid there’s sodium chloride, or salt.
You float the paper on that, and when the paper’s dry
it’s a nice shinny surface.
The paper is then floated, after it’s dry,
on silver nitrate, and when the silver nitrate and the chloride combine
you get photographic paper.
What you finally have is a cheap and comparatively easy
way of preparing a paper for making a photograph
using a negative that may have been produced by any number of processes.
So a collodion negative could be printed as an albumen print.
You would have your negative
and you would place it in contact with the sensitized paper
and expose with sunlight.
The thing that distinguishes an albumen print from a salted paper print
or a platinum print is the image is suspended on a layer above the paper
rather than being embedded in the paper fibers.
Creating a much more precise, and crisp image.
This is when we see the rise of the great
industrial photographic houses.
Producing popular photographs of tourist sites.
Even then, we’re beginning to think, if you don’t have a photograph of it
you didn’t really experience it.
it was the beginning of really aggressive
mass marketing, and mass production of
photographs for general consumption.
This was the predominant printing paper from 1850 to about 1890.
People like Frith produced photographically illustrated bibles
where he photographed sites in the 19th Century
where things that were told about in the bible
were said to have happened.
We begin to see how really as early as the 1870’s and 80’s
the photograph becomes a really important
not just a conveyer of knowledge and information
but a shaper of knowledge and information.
And it was the albumen print that made that possible
because it was precise, it was detailed, it was cheap
and it could be mass produced and distributed easily.