Albumen print

Albumen is the reason the nineteenth century has a look. It was the print paper for forty years, so nearly every surviving photograph from that period carries the same gloss, the same warm brown and the same card mount. A viewer reads that combination as old before reading anything else in the picture.

The gloss is the part people miss. Egg white dries to a smooth layer that sits on top of the paper, so an albumen print shines where a modern fibre print does not. That shine is what separates it from a platinum print of the same scene, and it is the first thing to name in a prompt.

Coat and print. The maker floats thin paper on egg white mixed with salt, dries it, then sensitises it in silver nitrate. The paper is then printed out in daylight under a glass negative in a frame, with no developer at all: the image appears as the sun works on it, which is why it needs a negative the size of the finished print.

Set the colour. Untoned albumen is a red brown that fades badly, so almost every commercial print was toned in gold chloride to a purple brown. Ask for warm purple brown, not for sepia, and ask for the yellowed highlights, because a faded albumen print loses its whites first and loses them worst at the edges.

Mount it. The paper is too thin to stand up on its own, so every print was pasted onto card. Name the format: a carte de visite is a print of about 54 by 89 millimetres on a card of the same size, and a cabinet card is a print of about 100 by 140 millimetres on a card of 108 by 165 millimetres. Add the studio name printed under the image, and fine cracking across the coating.

Use it for a studio portrait, a standing figure against a painted backdrop, or a travel view sold to a tourist. Those three jobs are what the process actually did, and the mount makes all three read straight away.

Leave it alone when you want a clean, neutral, archival looking print. Albumen yellows by nature, and a prompt that asks for both a period albumen print and clean whites gives you neither.

A platinum print is the matte opposite. It has no coating at all, so it cannot shine, and its scale is far longer and cooler. If the picture needs gloss and a card mount, this is the entry. If it needs no gloss at all, take the platinum one.

Cinema publishes Sepia at /techniques/cinema/, a grade that carries a whole image on one brown tone. Albumen is a physical print with a purple brown tone, an egg white gloss, cracked coating and a card mount around it. Ask for the object, not for the grade.

Design publishes Halftone Newsprint at /techniques/styles/. That is the printed reproduction of a photograph, broken into a dot screen for a press. An albumen print is the photograph itself, in continuous tone, with no dots anywhere.

Louis Desire Blanquart-Evrard published the process in 1850, and it held about four fifths of all photographic prints between 1855 and 1895. The carte de visite, patented in 1854, made it a mass product: a studio printed eight portraits from one plate and sold them by the dozen for an album. The cabinet card followed in 1866 with a larger print and room for the studio name below it. Factories in Dresden broke millions of eggs a year to coat the paper. Almost every print that survives is yellowed in the highlights, because gold toning slowed that fading without stopping it.

The model returns a matte photograph with a white border and no card. Say the print is glossy egg white on thin paper, pasted onto a cream cabinet card, with the card showing on all four sides.

The second failure is an even brown wash over the whole frame. Say the fading is uneven, worst in the highlights and at the edges, and ask for fine cracking in the coating.