Silver gelatin or gelatin silver?

[Trevor Crone]

Remember a lot of this is driven by collectors, serious collectors who want to know what they are buying, be it Pt, silver gelatin, etc.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Quite often when I was selling work at one London gallery quite some years back I would label my work as 'silver chlorobromide or silver bromide print'. Many of my comtempories were doing this as well.

Trevor;

I think that you have hit on the central issue here.

Many prints I see on exhibit say silver bromide or silver chlorobromide or silver chloride. Others will say silver albumen or silver salted gelatin. This is a more apt term in that it distinguishes each from the other. After all, there are many 'silver gelatin' methods around.

In fact, thinking about it I have seen Azo print, or Kodabromide print on some exhibits. This is very useful when the paper type is known as it can 'teach' newcomers about the results of each type of print.

Silver gelatin is so nondescriptive that it can be misleading in some cases.

PE

 

[Vaughn]

Silver jelly, maybe?

In the States, that would be "silver jell-o" prints (our "jelly" is other English-speakers' jam or preserves.) What you call a jelly is really only known here by the brand-name of the gelatin desert, Jell-O.

While I don't put it on the labels or the back of the prints, I often call my carbon prints "Jell-o prints".

PE...sorry for the Kodak remark. While I did assume the UV filtering layer on TMax100 was important to Kodak, it was obviously (from my POV) a misplaced priority. But perhaps at the time, users of UV light sources for the production of prints were not a significant portion of buyers of sheet film.

Vaughn

 

[Jerevan]

While I don't put it on the labels or the back of the prints, I often call my carbon prints "Jell-o prints".

Vaughn

I was thinking along those lines too... Just don't start using mint flavours, whatever you do!

 

[eddym]

IWe, in the trade, used the simple word Photography (B&W or color) to distinguish silver halide crystals precipitated in gelatin from all others which were alternative. We even called a R&D unit the Alternative Systems Lab.

I like that... let's start a movement! Only silver halide photography is really Photography! Digital is just an alternative process!

But then we might be insulting the other alternative processes...

 

[JBrunner]

Auctions aside, you will find the label in most museums as well, and has been in use long before digital. It has been used as a term in the provenance of prints for some time, very much similar to "oil on canvas" etc. It is usually a descriptor of the substrate, with the process comming after, such as "silver gelatin contact print" or "silver gelatin enlargement" FWIW.