1847: The Art of the French Calotype with Alan Greene

1847: The Art of the French Calotype with Alan Greene

Date: September 29 & 30 | Saturday and Sunday
Time: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm (1 hour lunch)
Location: 36 East 30 Street, New York, NY 10016
Price: $395 + $100 materials fee

French paper-negative practitioners are often said to have improved upon Talbot’s original patented calotype procedure.  Here, we will use one of earliest and most influential of the French techniques, a paper-negative method pioneered by the husband-and-wife team of Amélie Saguez and Jacques-Michel Guillot in the mid-1840s, and later known as “the Roman Method.”  The Guillot-Saguez procedure, rather than Talbot’s or Blanquart-Evrard’s more celebrated accounts, actually served as the template for the two main negative processes that were to follow: the dry, waxed-paper negative and wet-collodion (or wet-plate).  Contemporary calotypists like Le Gray, Flachéron, and Humbert de Molard all borrowed from the Guillot-Saguez procedure.  Starting with uncoated paper, we will cover all of the steps employed: iodizing, sensitizing, exposure in the camera, development, and fixing–with special attention being given to flotation and the difference between bromide stabilization and fixing with hypo.

Limited to 8 participants

Instructor Biography

Alan Greene took up the calotype process in 1998 as a reaction to digital photography. This led to his writing a technical manual, Primitive Photography, published in 2001. In 2003-2004, his paper-negative photography was featured at the Palazzo Caffarelli and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, as part of their collaborative exhibit, Roma/Rome 1850. Since then, he has contributed to Etudes photographiques, the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, and the Vocabulaire technique de la photographie. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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