A brief history of printmaking in photography

In 1839 the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot became the first successful printmaker in the history of photography. For the first time, photographic images of the natural world were fixed onto paper. However, many of these images faded away in a matter of days or even hours. And so with the invention of photography was born the problem of image permanence.

Fox Talbot and his successors embarked on a quest to perfect the photographic print. These inventors attempted to improve the quality of photographic capture, as well as to make a beautiful print that would not fade. Experiments with iron, silver, mercury and gold led to finer images, but a truly permanent print remained elusive.

In 1855 a Frenchman, Alphonse Louis Poitevin succeeded in creating a new and permanent photographic printmaking process. Poitevin mixed a pigment made of carbon black into an emulsion of gelatin and dichromate. After exposing this emulsion to light through a negative, the pigmented gelatin was washed in a warm water bath. There, unexposed gelatin areas would dissolve and wash away, and an image, formed of inert and permanent carbon pigment, bound in the exposed gelatin areas, would remain. This technique was named the Carbon Process, after the carbon black, which was used as its primary pigment.

For several decades in the late 1800's the process thrived. Not only were the prints permanent, but they also exhibited a long and beautiful tonal scale. By combining several emulsions containing different colored pigments in the same print, photographers achieved wonderful nuances of tone and color. In 1869, Louis Ducos du Hauron made the very first color photograph using the carbon pigment process. Three separate emulsions of red, yellow and blue pigments were combined in careful registration onto the same paper support to make a full color view of the Seine River in Paris.

While prized for their beauty, carbon prints were always extremely difficult and expensive to make. When easier photographic processes came along these were readily embraced, and by the early 1900's the art of carbon pigment printing was all but lost.

In the 1920's the process was reinvented (with variations) as the Carbro Process. This process made some of the printing steps somewhat more repeatable, and enabled the very first flowering of color photographic printmaking. In 1946 Kodak developed the Dye Transfer Process. Another descendant of Carbon printing, in this technique the exposed and processed gelatin was used to transfer dyes to a sheet of paper to make an image. While still technically demanding, this process improved further the repeatability and control of printmaking, and fostered further growth in the use of color photography for art as well as advertising. Until Kodak discontinued its production of dye transfer materials in the late1980's, this modern variation of the Carbon Process was renowned as the ultimate process for quality printmaking.