Salted Paper Printing

A Step-by-Step Manual Highlighting Contemporary Artists

Christina Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351987783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Salted Paper Printing: A Step-by-Step Manual Highlighting Contemporary Artists makes one of the oldest known photographic processes easy for the 21st century using simple digital negative methods.

Christina Z. Anderson's in-depth discussion begins with a history of salted paper printing, then covers the salted paper process from beginner to intermediate level, with step-by-step instructions and an illustrated troubleshooting guide. Including cameraless imagery, hand-coloring, salt in combination with gum, and printing on fabric, Salted Paper Printing contextualizes the practice within the varied alternative processes. Anderson offers richly-illustrated profiles of contemporary artists making salted paper prints, discussing their creative process and methods.

Salted Paper Printing is perfect for the seasoned photographer looking to dip their toe into alternative processes, or for the photography student eager to engage with photography's rich history.

Figure 1.1 Kathryn with Globe, gold-toned salted paper © Ron Reeder 2006

Chapter 1
A Brief History of Salted Paper

Figure 1.2 The Nun’s Warming Room, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, from the Christian Art & Places of Worship series, untoned salted paper salted with ammonium chloride only, no size, from a 12˝ × 5˝ view camera, Cot 320 paper © Ken Keen FRPS 2009. Keen says, “The series Christian Art & Places of Worship has been a mission of mine that has lasted twenty years. Imagination is the key; just think of all those nuns busy warming themselves by the fire.”

Salted paper or simply salt prints share their roots with two other silver nitrate processes, albumen and calotype. Salted paper and albumen are pop or printing-out processes, where the image becomes fully visible during exposure, requiring no developer in the darkroom, just a fixer to make it stable. It generally has two characteristics: exposures are long and it is “self-masking.” As the shadow areas of the image start to darken they begin to shield themselves from the light, allowing the lighter areas to continue and resulting in an image that has a very long exposure scale, differentiating all the tones from highest highlights to deepest shadows. Salted paper and albumen both benefit from this long exposure scale, but the look of the two papers is different. Salted paper is matte, velvety, and soft. Albumen is sharp, finely detailed, with a very fine-grained, delicate sheen. There is a visual crossover between the two processes when some salted paper formulas call for a portion of egg white in the salting step to give gloss and depth and some albumen paper formulas call for a portion of starch in the egg white salting step to make the surface appear matte.

A calotype is normally used to produce a negative and is a DOP or developing-out process. An invisible latent image is formed by the action of light and then a developer brings the image to full strength. The resulting negative is then used to print on salted paper, or less commonly albumen paper.

Figure 1.3 Scholar, untoned salted paper © Megan Crawford 2016

It was common in the 1840s to call salt prints calotypes and this error is frequently repeated today. The calotype process could be used to make a print but these were very rare. While some felt that this process produced more permanent prints, it was far more complicated and resulted in what were considered to be inartistic cold image tones. Salted paper could also be used to make a negative, albeit with very long exposure times, and after 1840 was more commonly used to make photograms rather than in-camera images.

These three processes, though so closely aligned in history, practice, and chemistry, are considered distinct today.¹ Salted paper was the first invention and is the focus of this timeline.

At the time when salted paper was invented, there was no photographic language in existence. Even the word photography wasn’t in the lexicon. Developer, fixer, negative, positive, all these words came after the invention of salted paper, as did the name “salted paper.” In fact, when William Henry Fox Talbot invented salted paper in 1834, he first privately called the process sciagraphy—the depiction of objects through their shadows. Light acting on the silver salts darkened them and thus tonalities were inverted. By the time he made this process public in 1839 he called it “photogenic drawing” because to his way of thinking the light drew the image onto the photosensitive surface.

In his first efforts Talbot used salted paper aka photogenic drawing as what we today call a photogram. Thin opaque objects such as leaves or lace were placed in contact with the light-sensitive paper and exposed outside. This of course produced a negative image as the object shielded the paper from the light, leaving behind a ‘white shadow.’ As he gained more mastery over the process and increased its sensitivity in 1835, Talbot was then able to use the same sensitive paper inside a camera and the first camera negative was born.

After the public announcement of photography in 1839, Talbot continued to experiment with this in-camera paper negative. In September 1840 he discovered a way to make the paper expose much faster. By incorporating an additional chemical, gallic acid, in the paper, he formed an invisible latent image with a short exposure. Then by immersing this lightly-exposed but essentially blank piece of paper into a solution also containing gallic acid the image was made visible through chemical means. This developed-out negative was named the calotype and here salted paper and the calotype diverged. Talbot used his calotypes to print salted paper prints, which he then referred to as “ordinary paper,” a term used from 1840–1850.²

Though the calotype had its chosen name embodied in Talbot’s patent, salted paper did not have a specific name for decades. Other labels were used aside from ordinary paper: positive paper to differentiate it from negative paper; plain paper to differentiate it from albumen;³ sun printing or printing-out paper to differentiate it from developed-out paper;⁴ and mat or matte paper to differentiate it from glossy.⁵

This plain, ordinary, matte process used to make positives started to become marginalized when albumen printing paper was introduced in 1851. The use of egg white had been suggested straight away in 1839 but had not caught on. Albumen was delicate and sharply detailed, whereas salted paper prints were softer, the image being melded into the rough tangle of paper fibers. Even though from the beginning the gloss of albumen was found objectionable—it was thought to be unnatural because the eye didn’t “see” in gloss, and traditional prints such as etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts were all matte—it dominated because it was sharper and more detailed, especially necessary for the smaller cartes-de-visite prints. Salted paper had little cachet. In 1881, it was said, “Silver printing on matt-surfaced paper—‘salted paper,’ as it is more familiarly termed, is a branch of photography rarely if ever practiced nowadays….”⁶

Around the 1890s gloss became equated with commercialism and photographers wanted to be artists and make art, not commerce. Matte pa...