something creative: Photogenic Drawing

history:

the idea of photogenic drawings originated with Thomas Wedgewood and his experiments done with images on paper and leather sensitized with silver nitrate in 1802.

Photogenic drawing was the name William Henry Fox Talbot gave to his initial photographic invention. As early as 1834, Talbot was making salt prints by placing lace, leaves and other objects on light-sensitive paper and exposing it to the sun. Although Talbot used photogenic drawing paper in the camera, exposures in the camera often took hours, so most photogenic drawings were made by the superposition of objects.

Talbot's success increased over years as he refined his process. He discovered that it worked best if repeated coats of salt and silver nitrate were given to the paper, and if the paper was exposed before the coating dried.Exposure times required were typically an hour or longer, so the process was not suitable for taking portraits.

Talbot made no formal announcement of his discoveries until he heard that on January 7 1839, that Daguerre had discovered a way of fixing a photographic image.Talbot reacted immediately and wrote a paper on his process that was presented to the Royal Institution, in London, on 31 January 1839.

Talbot later invented and patented his Tablotype or Calotype process. This negative/positive process, was the forerunner to today's conventional photography. Both the photogenic drawing process and the subsequent calotype process enabled multiple prints to be produced from a single negative.

the process. in a nutshell:

- Soak paper in a weak solution of sodium chloride (salt).

- When dry, sensitise the paper by brushing one side with a strong silver nitrate solution. This causes silver chloride to be formed on the surface of the paper.

- Take the photo while the paper is still wet. An exposure of at least an hour may be needed. This will imprint an image on the paper.

- Remove the paper from the camera and wash it.

- stabilise (or 'fix') the image on the paper by soaking the paper in a strong solution of sodium chloride.

- This produces a negative image on paper.

- Treat a second sheet of paper with salt + silver nitrate, as above.

- Lay the negative created above on top of the newly-coated sheet of paper + expose to light.

- Wait for a positive image to emerge then fix as above.

in class: for our own experiment, we each had one type of paper: 100% rag, bristol, watercolor, sketch, and canvas.

my canvas paper

each piece was cut into four pieces, and we decided to test a low silver, low salt, high silver high salt, low silver high salt, and high silver low salt concentration, on pair on each piece of four, repeating this on each of the five types. we started out with the low silver low salt concentration, 5% of each, and brushed on one layer of each solution after we had taped a piece of each type of paper onto a board.

we used the beading method to spread the solutions, by using the eyedropper to dispense a row of beads of liquid at the top of each piece and then quickly spreading it as evenly as possibly over the surface. Once the board dried, we placed keys and some other miscelaneous objects over the paper and placed it in the light box for seven minutes.

After taking it out we noticed some very slight results. The bristol and rag papers showed a faint outline of where the keys had been. we then soaked the images in the salt solution as a fixer.

Trial One: low silver low salt

This same process was repeated three more times with each of the different pairings of concentrations. The high silver was a 12% concentration while the high salt was 10%

results:

in the end we found that the low silver high salt papers produced no results, and the high silver low salt, high silver high salt papers both produced results with the sketch, rag, water color, and bristol papers. The most successful image was on the sketch paper that had been coated in high silver low salt. we came to the conclusion that the best images resulted from paper that had the lowest concentration of salt. Another thing we had discussed was the paper types and how not only their texture and thickness but also the chemicals in the paper may have played a strong role in the success of the image and the paper's photosensitivity.