The black-and-white silver print–that luminous hallmark of serious photography–is being pushed aside by the allure of color and computer manipulation.
But don’t sing a dirge yet for the silver print, which made photography as simple as a snapshot more than a century ago. It remains revered by artists, educators, collectors and the consumer who wants an ultra chic black-and-white studio portrait.
The reason is simple: This is an object to love. Light glows in a silver print. Shadows become atmospheric. Everyday activities freeze into street theater. No other technology–past or present–can touch the sheen and sharpness of a silver print.
In the heyday of black-and-white photography, silver prints by the likes of Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Irving Penn spilled across the desks of photo editors. Few people treated the work as high art then, though every one of those prints would sell for big bucks at galleries today.
Great photographers often worked in makeshift darkrooms such as the one Harry Callahan set up in a corner of a Chicago apartment. He washed his silver prints in a kitchen sink, but managed to turn out some of the most maverick images of the 20th Century.
Despite the love that remains for the silver print, the digital tidal wave is under way. Amateurs can scan their black-and-white or color negatives into the computer–just as editors and art directors do. Newspapers, magazines and advertising agencies drop digital images directly into layouts and ready them for production without ever seeing a print.
More and more photographers travel to events such as the Olympics in Atlanta and the national political conventions with digital cameras. On a tight deadline, a digital image could be transmitted in the time it takes to make a phone call.
Eastman Kodak Co. operated six photo-processing labs and 17 Macintosh work stations to process some 4 million images at the Olympics, says Joseph Runde, a spokesman for the company.
“We didn’t make a single black-and-white standard print,” Runde says. “It was all done electronically this time,” whether the picture was on a computer disk or a negative. By comparison, electronic imaging had hardly made a ripple at the games in Barcelona four years ago.
“In 10 years, it will all be digital” for photojournalists and commercial photographers, says John Mulvany, chairman of the photography department at Columbia College Chicago. “We have to change the education of photographers because they won’t just supply photographs anymore. They’ll do everything up to camera-ready art.”
The person, not the color
Digital imaging simplifies complicated darkroom techniques, offers homemade enlargements and the instant gratification of communicating pictures–like words–over a telephone. With all the bonuses, the quality of an amateur digital print seems good enough–and almost miraculous. But pull out the old black-and-white wedding picture of a parent or grandparent from the box in the closet and take another look.
“I’ll always do conventional black-and-white photography–that’s my first love,” says Chicago commercial photographer Marc Hauser, who helped spur a revival of black-and-white photography in advertising.
“I think there’s more color in black and white . . . you’re more likely to be looking at the person rather than the color,” says Hauser, who shoots 7,000 rolls of black-and-white film every year. Hauser’s portraits of Woody Allen, Mike Ditka, Jim Belushi and other clients combine the timelessness of black-and-white photography with a fleeting glimpse of inner self.
The desktop-publishing capabilities of a home computer meant Chicago photographer Bob Thall could deliver editors a mock-up for the layout of his forthcoming book “American Village,” a black-and-white portrait of suburbia.
But Thall sticks to making silver prints and predicts that the tradition will endure. “Everybody was up in arms over color (20 years ago),” says Thall, who teaches photography at Columbia. “That was a kind of civil war” in the arts community.
Ironically, some of his students are using the computer as a bridge between high technology and the arcane photographic processes that the silver print replaced. “It’s a major undergraduate fad,” Thall says. “They take a picture with a pinhole camera made from a Quaker Oats box, output a negative on a $30,000 printer at the college and then print it,” often using processes that preceded the silver print.
Silver prints are still the mainstay of photography collections such as those at the Art Institute of Chicago and the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.
Beginners in photography classes from high schools to colleges to the Jane Addams Center in Chicago still start out taking black-and-white pictures and learning black-and-white darkroom techniques.
Black-and-white printing will continue as an art form in its own right, says Chicago free-lance photojournalist Richard Stromberg. He directs the art and photography program at the Jane Addams Center, an outgrowth of Hull House, where co-founder Ellen Gates Starr organized photography classes in the early 1900s..
“Our photography classes are full. We haven’t seen a dip,” Stromberg says. “It’s a very tactile, hands-on experience, and the computer is a little removed.” He compares the attraction of printing in the conventional darkroom to ceramics: “People still want to get their fingernails in the stuff.”
Before the box camera
The silver print itself triggered a revolution that upended the first 50 years of the history of photography.
William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre invented the medium in 1839 with two competing techniques, but Talbot’s rudimentary positive/negative process couldn’t stand up against the luminous daguerreotype.
People flocked to daguerreotype studios to sit for true-to-life portraits that appeared almost three-dimensional. The picture taken required long exposure times and delivered a one-of-a-kind image, but no negative to make duplicates.
The 1850s brought the glass wet-plate process that yielded a negative image. The glass was hand-coated with chemicals just before use, loaded into cameras the size of TV consoles and developed on the spot. This daunting process wiped daguerreotypes off the map, and the reign of the black-and-white print as we know it began.
Before silver prints, 19th Century photographers used paper that was coated with an egg white and salt base to make albumen prints.
British aristocrat Julia Margaret Cameron set up her darkroom in a converted chicken coop and made albumen prints from ethereal glass plate negatives.
William Henry Jackson carted a makeshift darkroom into the Rocky Mountains and photographed the vistas that beckoned the pioneers. Alexander Gardner stripped any veneer of romance from war with shots from Civil War battlegrounds.
But taking pictures was beyond the means of most people until the dry-plate negative with an emulsion of silver salts and gelatin paved the way in the 1880s for roll film, the first Kodak box camera and the snapshot. Suddenly anyone could use essentially the same materials as Walker Evans or Ansel Adams.
When color photography stole the amateur market in the 1960s, it also eroded the amateur darkroom market devoted typically to black-and-white photographs. Now with the falling price of computers, scanners and printers, digital technology is rewiring the image.
Photographers note, however, that only high-end printers, well beyond the consumer price range, can compete with the image quality of a photographic print.
Meanwhile, darkroom equipment sales have dropped dramatically in the past three years, says Roth Mui, a senior manager at Helix. Earlier this year, Darkroom Aids, a legendary Chicago darkroom equipment store, closed its doors for good. Many photo labs have cut back on black-and-white services as well.
Yet, with fewer competitors in the field, the black-and-white business is actually growing at Gamma Photo Labs, which still hand-prints black-and-white images.
“It’s an old craft and it’s dying but the demand is still there,” says Ben Lavitt, Gamma’s retired president and consultant to the lab.
