Made in Spain Luminos paper

jeffreythree · Feb 9, 2016

Shot in the dark, but I was wondering if anyone knew who was the manufacturer of this paper when made in Spain. Did AGFA have a plant there maybe? The label resembles an old AGFA label on a box of Brovira I have. My understanding is Luminos was a brand and never a manufacturer. I may never find another box of old paper like the one I just opened, but it would be nice to know who made it and keep my eye out.

David Lyga · Feb 9, 2016

I remember this paper being made in Yonkers, NY. Was it made in Spain before or after that? Luminos paper lasts forever and fogs only slowly. - David Lyga

AgX · Feb 9, 2016

Valca had labels quite similar to old Agfa labels.

jeffreythree · Feb 9, 2016

David Lyga said:
I remember this paper being made in Yonkers, NY. Was it made in Spain before or after that? Luminos paper lasts forever and fogs only slowly. - David Lyga

I think it was around for a while; so maybe after NY it became more of a contracted out house brand? The expiration date was marked out with permanent marker. There is also a West German made Luminos paper that seems popular on eBay, and then the last Kentmere rebranded stuff before they sold under their own name. The box of 5x7 I found on here prints great, and liths with lovely colors. Emulsion is kind of fragile and has flaws though.

AgX said:
Valca had labels quite similar to old Agfa labels.

Thanks, I will look into that.

aoresteen · Feb 10, 2016

IIRC Luminos never made anything in NY. They had European factories make all their paper for them.

Ian Grant · Feb 10, 2016

Luminos were originally a UK company who imported and distributed Adox products Films, Papers, Cameras etc, (when they were made in Germany before Dupont closed the factory and sold the machinery and licensed the rights to EFKE). They moved to the US in the early 1960's and sold imported papers etc under their Luminos brand name.

Gevaert had a coating plant in Spain (pre-WWII) which may have become separate by the post WWII period, rather like the way Kodal Ltd (UK) lost their Hungarian coating plant which became Forte. Governments nationised what the perceived to be strategic facilities.

I know that Luminos re-badged Kentmere papers in the US but they may well have been importing from other companies as well.

Ian

goros · Feb 10, 2016

There were two paper and film Spanish manufacturers, Valca and Negra. Valca had a big Ilford support or, at least, I has been told that British engineers were common at Valca plant in Cadagua, some 50 km from Bilbao.

I have never heard about Luminos been made in Spain, but I may be wrong.

Ian Grant · Feb 10, 2016

Some Gevaert materials wee made in Spain by Industria Fotoquimica National S.A. in Barcelona, before WWII - that's from a 1938 Gevaert Manual of Photography. I would guess this is the company that became Negra Industrial, S A.

Ian

GRHazelton · Feb 10, 2016

Back in the day, the late 1950s and early 1960s I used Luminos with great satisfaction. It was inexpensive and excellent tonal scale. No idea who made it.

kreeger · Feb 15, 2016

If memory serves me correctly, Freestyle sold Luminos in the 70s. I have a 5x7 print made on dw fb silk Luminos graded paper, it's the only one like it I had. Looks like it was printed yesterday... A guy who taught me how to properly develop film and made prints bought all his bulk film and paper from Freestyle.

jeffreythree · Feb 17, 2016

I just received a partial box off fleabay with an identical label, other than size and surface, with a 1968 date. Older than I thought this paper may be. Lost out on another box, but the seller would not say whether it was opened. It did not have the same label anyway, but was made in Spain. Maybe before the new and improved label of mine.

FriedLouisStudio · Jun 17, 2023

My folks' studio was just a few blocks away from Luminos headquarters in Yonkers, NY. We did some product shots and graphic arts work for their ads, but our main biz for them was contact printing the tens of thousands of 4x5 paper samples that they gave out at trade shows.

We did this for years and years, printing identical negs lithographer's taped four-up on an 8x10 in a vacuum frame (actually a NuArc platemaker with the vacuum frame facing up at a point source light on the ceiling), then slicing them apart when dried. The red, green, and other colored-base papers, the texturized papers, the metallic papers. We printed hundreds at a time - they'd drop off whole boxes of the various papers - often as a background task when work slowed down.

My understanding was that over the years they sourced their papers from England, Greece, Germany, Spain... a bunch of European countries. For our own work, we eventually used their Flexicon VC more than Kodak Polycontrast - my dad always said, "With the right filter and exposure, this stuff pops more than the Kodak."

Nicholas Lindan · Jun 17, 2023

I used Luminos in the 60's. Made in Hungary/Czechoslovakia and the back of beyond. Curled like a sonafabitch if you looked at it cross-eyed - resembling a drinking straw. The stuff was all fixed grade.

dynachrome · Jun 17, 2023

I bought Negra b&w film in Spain in 1972. It was not bad. The Luminos paper I remember buying in the 1970s was an rc type and made in Greece. It had a terrible curl but was good for solarization.

HowieP · Jun 19, 2023

Proud member of the Luminos Printmaker's Guild in 1996+, collected their newsletters in my Luminos binder, tried all of their papers. the samples of which you can see here. Don't know why I hanged onto it, but here it is.

FriedLouisStudio · Jun 26, 2024

I recently came across and scanned this circa-1967 picture of myself, a 5x7 print on the green-base Luminos paper.

Those colored papers were really fun to fool around with in a b/w darkroom!

Peter Schrager · Jun 26, 2024

I've been using some Luminos SW paper for coating my POP emulsion
this is after I fix out the silver. makes beautiful prints.
If anyone has any they want to let go of please send me a PM

Randy Stewart · Jun 29, 2024

Nicholas Lindan said:
I used Luminos in the 60's. Made in Hungary/Czechoslovakia and the back of beyond. Curled like a sonafabitch if you looked at it cross-eyed - resembling a drinking straw. The stuff was all fixed grade.

That's the Luminos paper I remember. In the early 1960s, I think it was mainly sold though Spiratone in NYC. As a kid, I bought it because it was cheap. I remember buying it as a double weight, fixed grade paper, with contrast grades which were decidedly flatter than the Agfa Brovira I loved but couldn't afford. Spiratone specialized in inexpensive camera accessories and lenses, all pretty good quality, much of which you could not buy anywhere else. They always had the biggest ads in the photo hobby magazines, like Popular or Modern Photography, often running 5 or 6 pages. I think Tamron and Tokina launched the companies selling good, if not great, lenses though Spiratone, using interchangeable T-mounts to adapt the lenses to all brands of cameras. Fred Spira was a legend in the industry for those marketing innovations.

FriedLouisStudio · Jun 29, 2024

Spiratone, of course. I went with my parents to all the Herald Square camera stores, including Spiratone. Their store was just as jam-packed as their ads.

Outstanding collection of Spiratone (and many other) ads:

Camera Advertsements: Spiratone (1960s)

Old camera and photo advertisements

www.jollinger.com

Made in Spain Luminos paper

jeffreythree

David Lyga

AgX

jeffreythree

aoresteen

Ian Grant

goros

Ian Grant

GRHazelton

kreeger

jeffreythree

FriedLouisStudio

Nicholas Lindan

Advertiser

dynachrome

HowieP

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FriedLouisStudio

Peter Schrager

Randy Stewart

FriedLouisStudio

Camera Advertsements: Spiratone (1960s)

Made in Spain Luminos paper

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