The Color of B&W

[ColColt]

I always take a book to read a little while in bed and was looking over one by Time last night called "Eyewitness-150 years of Photojournalism". I had never much noticed it before but many of the earlier pictures by Joseph Riis and Lewis Hine, not to mention some other books by W.Eugene Smith and Margaret Bourke-White also had a similar look. The "color" of the B&W's just looked different from what you see today.

I don't know if it was the film used back then, the paper or just the way they were printed but they seem to have a selenium tone look about them and blacks looked more black. Whatever it was, I liked it. Has anyone else noticed this in older photos from photographers of the 20's-50's or is it just a figment of my imagination?

 

[Gerald C Koch]

It may be the quality of the book printing at that time. One would have to look at actual prints to determine if there was anything connected to the processing of the film and silver prints.

 

[Tom Taylor]

The "color" of B&W prints had many shades of coloration during the past 200 years. Here is a modern untoned example of the Van Dyke Brownprint which was in use from 1890's to the 1930's:

http://www.spiritsofsilver.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/Bodie_Methodists_VDB_Untoned.331135834_large.jpg

Thomas

 

[Ian Grant]

I remember seeing an exhibition of Kertesz prints at the Barbican in London and the richness of the prints all small and contemporary to the time fisrt made was wonderful, a lot of colour and warmth, no print was larger than whole plate.

A year or so later I saw another exhibition of his work, this time much larger modern prints from many of the same negatives and they were quite bland in comparison.

There was a spell were warm tone papers went out of fashion, all the pre-WWII warm-tone papers disappeared and by the late 70's Ilford no longer made a warm tone paper until the release of Ilford warm-tone in the 90's. The removal of Cadmium from papers like Agfa Record Rapid and Portriga was the end of the really flexible warm tone papers that could achieve rich red/brown tones by development.

Ian

 

[nworth]

There are a lot of steps to make a print in a book, and a lot of decisions that cold affect the color. Most likely, all the black and white prints were printed printed from single plates (printing plates) in a single ink, and were, thus, all the same color. Now, it is not uncommon to make separations for even the black and white photos and to try to capture the tone of the original print. A few years ago this was never done.

When you look at original photojournalism prints from earlier times, they often looked alike as well. The photographers generally made prints that could easily be turned into halftone plates. That generally meant Kodabromide F (white, glossy, smooth) or N (white, luster, smooth) paper, or some near equivalent. Sometimes photojournalists did make display prints. They were more carefully done, but often on the same papers. You do sometimes see one of these display prints on G surface paper (cream white, luster, fine grained) or, rarely, on some other surface, however. Toning was unusual for these photographers.

 

[John Bragg]

Hi, David. An awful lot of the look of vintage prints and books is to do with the paper available back then. Rich warmtone papers like Agfa Record Rapid were commonplace. I notice this with my own printing as well. I prefer the look of a print on warmtone pearl surfaces to one on neutral high gloss. The differences are noticable, with properly separated creamy whites on the pearl paper and deeper blacks on the gloss. It has been a while since I had my darkroom set up properly, but those were my findings.

 

[ColColt]

I once used Agfa Portriga and loved the colors it produced for some photos. Brovira was another favorite as was Oriental Seagull. I once used a lot of fiber base paper as I liked the tones better than with RC paper even though they took longer to process and care for. I found Ilford's Galerie another wonderful paper.I've seen photos like Tom linked to in some of the books I have.

I'm feeling a strong tugging to set my darkroom back up again but would probably need a plumber to replace old seals in the faucets as they haven't been turned on it years and I know they'd leak!