It’s really difficult for anyone looking at a sample book to understand what it’s about. They’re going to see goofy images of very posed models and funny-looking dogs. And that’s not what you should be looking at. What these are meant to illustrate are all the different attributes of the papers, the physical attributes of the papers, the texture, the gloss, the color—trying to help a photographer make a good decision. And also trying to help a photographer sort out this hugely diverse world. When we think of a black-and-white photograph, we sort of conjure up this monolith, right? It’s a black-and-white photograph. It’s ubiquitous, right? It’s everywhere. But within that universe, there really is this language that we don’t really know how to speak anymore.
Robert L. Shanebrook:
I worked at Eastman Kodak Company from 1968 to 2003. Prior to my time at Kodak, I don’t know the exact numbers, but Kodak in the 1940s and ’50s probably made 10 or 15 different emulsion types. They were Medalist, Kodabromide, Illustrator Special, Azo, and so on. Those are just the emulsion types, all of which were graded, meaning they were able to provide a range of contrasts. In the darkroom the photographer chose the desired contrast, ranging from zero to perhaps five or six. In addition, Kodak had large numbers of different paper surfaces. The paper surfaces were made in two very different ways. One, Kodak would do things to the pulp so that the paper pulp was actually different depending on which type of paper they wanted to make. Two, they would emboss it, either by changing the rollers or by using a different blanket on the paper-making machine, to give a different pattern on the surface. So the photographer could choose from different textures. There were smooth surfaces, matte surfaces, as well as different kinds of tweeds, or silk or embossed patterns. The surface selected depended on the application and what went well with the photograph’s subject matter. The surfaces were identified by letters. There were more than 26 surfaces, so some of the letters were reused after they had been retired for a few years. Back then, there was a wide variety of papers available. That started to go away in the ’50s, as black-and-white paper volume started to go down and color paper started to go up.
Alison Rossiter:
I have been a photographer since 1970. I woke up one morning and realized that materials were disappearing so quickly, and I wanted to use an old 5×7 view camera I had. It dawned on me that I couldn’t buy any film for it new, and this was terrifying. So that sent me to eBay for the first time, and I decided that I would collect expired sheet film. Initially I wanted to use it as a photogram project, but I started buying whatever film I could find. One person from North Dakota sent me the contents of an old studio, 8×10, 5×7 film, and in it was one box of a Kodabromide paper that had expired in 1946, and I thought, well, let me test it. So there were 250 sheets inside the pack that had never been opened, and so I pulled one sheet out from the middle of that pack and sent it through the chemistry. If it was viable as a printing paper, it would turn out white at the end of the process. I processed the sheet, and what I saw amazed me. It looked like someone had taken graphite and rubbed it over a rough paper surface. It was the failure of the emulsion. The silver halides couldn’t stay light sensitive for all those years, and this very simple image…to me, it was just astonishing. And I knew from that moment that there was something to go look for in expired papers, found work that had been latent. These are latent images that are made by atmospheric damage, or light leaks when opening the package, mold, shock, all sorts of things. So really it began with an accident…just by chance. I was buying film and someone sent me paper.
Photographers who came later in the century have never seen what [photographic paper] was available. I’m completely in awe of what was made before, and wish that I had been able to use them when they were still viable printing papers. There were so many choices: warm tones, warm tones on a cream base, warm tones on a cool base. The colors were astonishing. The contrasts were amazing. I was sad that these things were gone, sad to find out that so many beautiful materials existed long before I was a photographer, and so those are gone to me. And then the sadness disappeared, and I realized that I’m using these with a new purpose.
My expired-paper prints are titled with three bits of information: the type of paper, the date it expired, and the date I sent it through the chemistry. So it will be Acme Kruxo, exact expiration date unknown, circa 1940s, processed 2012. That will be it. And it’s a long one, it’s a real mouthful of a title, but I want that to be all the information. It tells you everything about the paper, particularly the time span between expiration date and processing date. That way, comparisons can be made, and even if there was nothing but black—black sheets framed all the way around the room in an exhibition—the blacks would be very different, the sizes would be very different, and they would be individualized by their titles. They need nothing more from me.
These prints do point to the history of photography, do point to a time period that is so far behind us, but we’re getting to see it. Some of it’s like finding dinosaur DNA. It shouldn’t be here. All of these old papers should’ve been thrown out a long, long time ago. That they have survived is incredible.
Howard Hopwood:
We are virtually the last man standing in the black-and-white paper market.
I’ve been with Ilford for 39 years. I’ve become chairman of Harman Technology. The company was established in 1879 by a gentleman called Alfred Harman, and he moved to a plant in Ilford, which was in the middle of the countryside in those days, in 1879, and hence the name of the company.
Well, the strategy of Ilford was quite clear in the late ’90s, particularly. The idea was that we would use the black-and-white photography business, which was profitable, and also was relatively stable. It had been declining since, I think, 1960, so we’d gotten used to the idea of it declining between 5 and 7 percent a year; that was what we expected, and all of our plans were built around that. Inkjet offered us the opportunity to get a growth dimension to the business, and so the idea was that we would grow inkjet as black and white declined, and then the two lines would cross; we would become an inkjet company with a small black-and-white business. It was all happiness. Unfortunately, around 2003, 2004, instead of black and white declining by 5 to 7 percent, it suddenly declined in the high 20s—25 to 27 percent—as the digital camera became easy to use, and people started to be happy with the results. So there was a big step change. And probably, the company could’ve withstood one year of that, but there was a second year, in 2004. And that meant that the growth in inkjet was not sufficient to outstrip the decline in the black and white. So the idea of gaining money from black and white to put into inkjet growth, the equation just didn’t work anymore. So at that point, the two parts of the business became separated during the receivership process, or Chapter 11, as you call it in the US. Myself plus five other ex-managers of the Ilford Group then bought the company out of receivership, and we established a company in February 2005, Harman Technology. We used Alfred Harman’s name when we bought the company. So we’re now just about five years old, and they said it wouldn’t last. But we saw the potential in the continuation of black and white. We’re just monochrome, black-and-white Ilford products, and we only have the Ilford brand for use with black-and-white photographic products.
When we got to the point of receivership, there were a sufficient number of people, particularly here in the UK, who had a strong belief that black and white was different. It wasn’t the case of digital or analog. It was a case of these people seeing that black and white in particular gave them something that digital didn’t. Anyone who sees a black-and-white picture, no matter who they are, is always astonished by how beautiful it is. One of the things that always drove us on was the fact that black and white gives you a very beautiful image, and it is not a recording of an event; it’s an interpretation of an event. I think that’s what made the difference