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The End of the Darkroom Monday, May 1, 2006 | 12:55AM

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After this weekend, I can finally understand most everything on this page. I attended a workshop at the Harry Ransom Center at UT by Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman. They are the masters of the wet-plate collodion process, and actually the people who managed to bring the process back to the forefront of the fine art photography world. It’s a process from the mid-19th century that had long been considered dead to anyone other than Civil War Re-enactors and Art Historians. But through their tireless research and experimentation, leeches like myself are now able to learn the process and exploit it artistically.

We were each allowed to create an ambrotype, which is essentially a thin wet-plate collodion negative, backed by something black (velvet, paper, etc.). The image appears as a positive because the silver particles are so fine that they appear yellowish-white instead of black, which you find in modern black and white films. As a matter of fact, Mark informed us that areas of the ambrotype can be rubbed, causing the silver particles to lay down in the same direction and reflect light, creating the appearance of a metallic sheen.

(Ok, so at least I think all of that was right.)

A decent portion of Mark’s remarks (during both the workshop and the lecture the night before) concerned the end of the traditional wet silver darkroom as many of us know it today. (If I reference something he said, please consider it only paraphrasing.) He said he hears college students claiming things like, ‘some Eastern European factory will always make my enlarging paper’, but that the real problem isn’t even coating paper with an emulsion. It’s that the papers used in the the silver-gelatin process contain a layer between the paper itself and the emulsion called baryta. It is this somewhat clay-like surface that really makes the paper work, and it’s apparently not something you can just do in your basement, or even in some moderately-sized factory for that matter. It seems that there are only a few (or perhaps only one?) huge factories that can coat paper in this way. And when that last factory goes out of business (which, he contends, it will in the next 10 years) it might still be possible for a company to make the emulsion, but with no paper to coat, they too will go out of business. Another example he used was that recently a major maker of the paper backing for 120/220 film shut down. ‘Someone has to make that, right?’

But to those of you die hard get-your-hands-wet-with-chemistry darkroom people, I propose hope and not despair. We could always hope some innovative way is invented to create enlarging papers for the future. Or we could come to terms with the likely reality that the end is near for one medium, yet we still have an unbelievable array of options available to us. There is the obvious answer of digital, which I know will hardly pacify many of the film/darkroom purists out there. But there is always the option of what most consider “alternative processes”.

As the Ostermans pointed out numerous times, most people are referring to secondary processes when they broach this topic. But with collodion, we’re talking about (usually) an in-camera process. Either a negative, ambrotype (positive, final) or tintype is created… not even including all the other surfaces which could be printed on. So the idea of making your own negatives with a 150+ year old process on glass doesn’t seem so absurd, does it? And suddenly using POP (Printing Out Paper) in a contact frame with some humongous negative would be worth the investment. I mean, if you can develop an image in minimum chemistry, you’ve got it made, right?

I mean, come on… Ilfochromes are no more, and the earth is still spinning, right? Slides are obviously close behind. You could freeze some paper now (and I’m not saying I won’t), and/or you can embrace whatever the future holds. But we have to realize that all of the companies that produce the materials we’ve taken for granted all these years have a commercial/financial bottom line. They’ve never really been in it for the art, and I could hardly say I expect that they would be. Heck, the commercial aspect of it is what’s caused them to create some of the paper they’ve produced over the years. Otherwise we might’ve always been stuck with some mediocre product instead of Kodak Medalist and Agfa Portriga Rapid. And no, I’ve never used either, but some people never stop talking about how unrivaled certain papers were and how their world nearly ended when they were discontinued for whatever reason.

And finally, let’s keep in mind that all this technical stuff doesn’t really matter anyway. I’ve seen more bad images on great paper in the last few years than I’ve seen good. So the image is still really the most important thing. I don’t care if it’s from an Epson professional inkjet. I’d buy that over a mediocre fiber-base print any day (obviously, I hope).

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Chris Loudermilk | Monday, May 1, 2006 | 8:08AM

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