Albumen and Salt Printing Workshop

Overview

Join artist James Tylor for a special two-day course to learn the basics of two early photographic printing processes from the 19th century: albumen and salt printing.

An albumen solution made with egg whites and silver nitrate is coated onto paper and printed out in the sun under a negative. This early photographic process has its origins in the 1850s when it was invented by Louis Desiré Blanquart-Evrard. It became one of the dominant forms of photographic printing into the early 20th century and was used by photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugéne Atget, and Alexander Gardner, among others.

Salt printing is a similarly related process that involves coating paper with a silver-salted gelatin emulsion, which is also printed out in the sun under a negative. The process was discovered by William Henry Fox Talbot in the mid 1830s, making it the second oldest photographic process after Niépce's heliographic View from the Window at Le Gras from c. 1826, which would later evolve into the Daguerreotype process.