Interesting topic. Definitely a few of us over in London and the UK, but nowhere near as many as say 20 years ago. I’ve been a specialist black and white printer for close to 40 years and work for some really good interesting and well known photographers. Mostly UK, but some projects for US photographers. All the commercial work went years ago. I used to do a lot for fashion photographers, so that would mean lots of film to process and contact, then 12x16s for the magazine repro.
It’s now mostly exhibition prints, print sales and lots of work for Photobook publishers, working on their special editions, which come with a signed editioned silver gelatin print. Also, some very special editions which will have a folio of prints.
Still in touch with other printers like Pete Guest, Robin Bell, Sebastian Edge, Sharon Easterling and Adrian Ensor. Sadly was at the funeral of Mike Spry last week who was one of the longest serving and most well known of printers, who had been around since the 60s. There’s also some great colour professional darkrooms in London like Artful Dodgers, Labyrinth and Rapid Eye who are still printing colour by hand as well as digital c types. I think most of their work is for fashion and fine art photographers.
Interested to see APP lab in Amsterdam. Certainly know of professional labs in Paris, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Berlin and such. Would be good to know of more. I know there are still some in New York.
I was thinking quite a bit recently about Ilford and Harman with the upcoming launch of their (not so) mystery new product. After the management buyout and formation of Harman, us community of printers were quite involved with Ilford back then . A group of us were doing workshops at Universities and Colleges, also testing new products, sometimes ending up with a joint exhibition or event for launches. I remember having a meeting with two of the (original) Harman directors at a cafe in St Pancras station with toning tests on their soon to be launched Multigrade Classic. (MGFBV) Can’t remember if they were heading off to the Continent by Eurostar or if it was me! Seemed quite normal then.
This was before the rise of Instagram and Youtube as main places for promotion, so appreciate the changes to methods of marketing and publicity these days, so not so much input from us lot. I doubt with my meagre 600+ followers an Instagram I would be anywhere near to being an Influencer, (thankfully), so could not do much to publicise anything! Maybe time to grow my beard back and start wearing a baseball cap backwards!!