Oh gosh, A couple years ago PBS ran a fascinating documentary on just how dangerous Victorian/Edwardian era homes were due to naivety about household chemicals, indiscriminate bottle labeling, the toxicity of common colorants even in wallpaper, the arrival of electrical hazards, etc. It's hard to imagine that houses in Paris in Atget's era didn't have comparable risks. Even earlier, some surmise that the premature death of Napoleon during his exile was due to the toxicity of the curtain dye where he was confined. And look at what kinds of nasty chemicals many early photographers were routinely exposed to. It wasn't just hatters who went mad from mercury fuming. Even surgeons didn't wear gloves or sterilize anything; do you want to return to that? People live longer on average these days for a reason, at least during peacetime.
I develop my prints for three minutes in Dektol 1:2. I’m using those blue gloves.
I do this to avoid future contact dermatitis.
I don’t often get poison oak but one time I was helping coastal cleanup day with a bunch of scouts (several are Eagle now, one just had board of review two days ago -congrats).
One tree was being strangled by poison oak and I decided that would be my assignment. I was very careful. Wore gloves and used tools to take it down.
But then we went camping and I stayed in the uniform and next day sure enough a rash developed on my right arm.
It didn’t hurt or itch but the redness lasted a couple months.
The problem with cotton gloves is that you need to get all the free lint out of them before handling prints. A cold water wash by hand, then air drying, helps. And finger oils will eventually work through them; you want to clean your hands before putting them on.
I'd lug around a big black museum case with a handle, with mounted prints inside. Once open, there was a neatly fashioned little side compartment too, with a clean pair of white gloves in it, along with my business cards. That always impressed the gallery owners, that is, back in the pre-lazy days when they actually looked at real prints and not just digitized facsimiles.
Did AA use gloves?
Did AA use gloves?
Were there ever Picker-modified Zone gloves, y'know to equalize sensitivities?!
During my time in teaching photography, I had a throughput of 1000s of A-level students, none of which wore gloves. We did use tongs, But am sure hundreds dipped their hands into print dev, stop and fix without any ill effects I ever heard of.
Some years back I switched to single-tray processing, so I require neither gloves nor tongs; dry paper goes into the tray and isn't touched until after the post-fixer rinse. It's simpler, cleaner, and requires a lot less bench space. I'm surprised more people don't do it.
I switched to single-tray processing
a nuisance for ... big 16x20 or 20x24"prints.
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