Originally Posted by
Michael_Fuller
A quick note about a 1940's darkroom, compared to the later 35mm era:
The more I got into the darkroom project, the more I began to see how the "boom" of 35mm film in the last decades of the film era affected a lot of things.
When I got into into B&W printing in the late 1970's...enlarging was simply how you made a print.
In the 1940's, you could make enlargements, BUT the first thing you thought of was to use the light-box type contact printer. (The 1948 US Navy film, "Printing the Positive" didn't even show an enlarger.) When I was in school and first printing... except for 35mm index prints, made on the enlarger with a piece of glass for weight, contact printing had all but disappeared. The 35mm negs, laid directly on a piece of photo paper, would only make a postage stamp-sized contact print. The cameras of the 1940's generally made large negatives like 4"x5" or 6x9cm.
I probably had limited exposure to different darkrooms at the time, but I don't even remember seeing a contact printer in the... admittedly few... darkrooms I used back in the 1970's & 80's. Of course, in the Alabama's darkroom, the contact printers are back.
So many paper names disappeared with the passing of the contact print, like Kodak AZO paper, Ansco CONVIRA, and the FIRST paper to use with artificial light...VELOX...invented by Leo Baakeland, who later invented Bakelite plastic! Eastman Kodak bought the rights to Velox from Leo Baakeland. I read that Velox...reportedly a slow paper...was made into the 1960's. If so, that is roughly the time when 35mm film was on the upswing and contact printing larger negatives...was on the way out. I don't think I have ever heard this discussed.
Thoughts from any (older than me) printers out there?
Bookmarks