Albumen Print Process

International · Albumen Print 1850–1900

The dominant photographic print of the nineteenth century was made with egg whites. Factories in Dresden were breaking millions of eggs a year, and the surplus yolks went to bakeries and tanneries.

Origin

Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard published the process in 1850, and it became the standard printing paper for roughly forty years, used with wet collodion negatives. Production was industrialised on a remarkable scale: the largest German factory reportedly consumed around six million eggs annually, with women employed to separate them by hand. Nearly every surviving commercial photograph from 1855 to 1895 — carte de visite portraits, travel views, architectural surveys — is an albumen print.

Technique

Thin paper is floated on beaten, fermented egg white containing salt, dried, and then sensitised on a silver nitrate solution. It is a printing-out paper: the image forms by prolonged direct exposure to sunlight under the negative, with no chemical development, so the photographer watches the image appear and judges when to stop. It is then washed, usually gold-toned for permanence and colour, and fixed. The albumen layer gives a smooth glossy surface that sits above the paper fibre and holds fine detail.

The palette

Warm reddish-brown when untoned, shifting toward purple-brown and finally to a cool blue-black with increasing gold toning — the toner is a genuine colour control, not just a preservative. The whites are the cream of the paper rather than a true white, and highlights are slightly yellowed even in fresh prints. Almost all surviving albumen prints have yellowed further and faded in the highlights, which is the process's chronic and unresolved failing.

Legacy

It is the visual texture of the entire nineteenth-century photographic record, and its warm-brown tonality is what most people mean when they picture an old photograph. Gelatin silver developing-out papers replaced it in the 1890s because they were faster, more stable and could be printed by artificial light rather than requiring sunshine.

Palette

The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.

Pigments used: Silver