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Listen: The Assorted Selections ProgramAlbumen Prints
- Albumen prints were the most common method of positive printing during the 19th century, mainly because of their fine detail.
- Albumen printing paper was covered in albumen (egg whites) prior to the application of the sensitizing agent.
- Albumen prints came in two main sizes, the carte de visite, measuring about 4 inches x 2.5 inches, and the cabinet card, measuring about 6.5 inches x 4.25 inches.
History
Albumen prints represent the other half of photographic technology. If wet collodion and dry plate negatives made photographs easier to take, albumen printing made them easy to reproduce. Albumen prints take their name from the key ingredient in their photosensitive emulsion: egg whites. These prints were made on high quality paper coated in a mixture of photo chemicals dissolved in egg whites. Albumen paper was easy for a photographer to make themselves or could simply be bought off the shelf; a sign of the increasing commercialization of photography in the late 1800s.
Albumen printing began as a method for creating negatives rather than positive prints. However, a typical exposure for a direct albumen photo took a very long time. Printing a glass negative onto albumen paper as a second step was much more practical as the subject did not have to be present. Time consuming though it was, albumen printing was able to capture all of the fine details that an ambrotype or gelatin plate photograph was capable of and could theoretically be used to make infinite copies of a single image. As a result, most photography from the 19th century survives in the form of albumen prints of various sizes.
Did You Know?
The popularity of albumen printing did have an unusual side effect - it caused a dramatic increase in the demand for eggs. One German firm, the Dresden Albumenizing Company, reportedly used 60,000 eggs a day in manufacturing photographic paper. Like all photographic processes, producing albumen prints had some challenges. The egg whites used to create the albumen coating degraded over time, causing the image to fade or turn yellow. Sometimes, the negative plate from which the photograph was printed was smaller than the paper, so the final product had a dark border around the edges. Despite these drawbacks, the clarity of the images and the ease with which they could be printed made albumen the first choice of photographers for many years.
Portrait of Mary McLeod Bethune, ca. 1915. (State Archives of Florida)
