DOI article:
Robert Demachy, The Gum-Print
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.30317#0037
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THE GUM-PRINT.
IT IS wonderful how many experts in gum-bichromate
have appeared in print during the last twelve months.
English, American, German and French papers are
full of gum. The thunderous " Gummidruck" of the
Teutons being, without doubt, the most appalling, not
only because of its terrible sound, but because of its
suggestion of insurmountable difficulty. I have gone
through most of these articles, and though I have
been steadily working with, if not at, the process since
1894, some of them seemed exceedingly strange and new, others a little too
familiar, very few honestly instructive. So much so that I have often been
haunted by a cruel doubt in regard to the practical experience of some authors.
It is but a doubt; and when I look at my wide and deep basket, after having
read of the wonderful and constant results of some new formula (the last hinted
at a solution of bichromate of potash of 50 per cent.!) I feel very sad indeed.
Of course, these numberless formulæ and these conflicting instructions
are confusing, but there is something worse to fear. For the impression one
gathers from the perusal of such articles is that, once a moderately faithful
positive image in gum-bichromate has been obtained, the process has been
so far mastered and that complete mastery consists in repeating the above
result at will. On all that makes the unique and peculiar quality of a beau-
tiful gum-print there is absolute silence. In consequence the beginner, who has
never seen a fine and complete example of the process, will be ignorant of what
he ought to be working for and will take for granted that his own results,
whatever they show, are the genuine results to be expected from gum and
that it can not be carried further. Under the circumstances the utterly wrong
conclusion at which the amateur has arrived is but natural. Give half a
dozen sheets of gelatine-chloride paper, a good negative and a booklet of
instructions to a raw amateur of average brains, and he will turn out a series
of prints amongst which there will be one at least that will give him a truth-
ful idea of the best results the paper is capable of. The same man, if not
forewarned—which he is not by the gum-experts—will expect just as much
from tentative gum-printing. The best print of his first batch will be put
down as the genuine and only style of gum-print. Well, I have noticed
that the earliest complete images one gets by this process are of two distinct
and invariable styles, according to circumstances. Either the beginner, im-
bued with the utterly false and proportionately widespread principle that it
is always safer to overexpose, produces a gritty, small-pox effect of mixed
planes and haphazard values, for which the abrasion of the film, necessitated
by the hardening of prolonged insolation, is responsible—or he follows the
vague and elastic dogma that proclaims an extra thin film indispensable and
makes it so beautifully scarce that his picture, good enough when wet,
dries with sunken shadows, no accents and an unhealthy out-all-night
appearance such as is unhappily quite common in modern gum-work.
33
IT IS wonderful how many experts in gum-bichromate
have appeared in print during the last twelve months.
English, American, German and French papers are
full of gum. The thunderous " Gummidruck" of the
Teutons being, without doubt, the most appalling, not
only because of its terrible sound, but because of its
suggestion of insurmountable difficulty. I have gone
through most of these articles, and though I have
been steadily working with, if not at, the process since
1894, some of them seemed exceedingly strange and new, others a little too
familiar, very few honestly instructive. So much so that I have often been
haunted by a cruel doubt in regard to the practical experience of some authors.
It is but a doubt; and when I look at my wide and deep basket, after having
read of the wonderful and constant results of some new formula (the last hinted
at a solution of bichromate of potash of 50 per cent.!) I feel very sad indeed.
Of course, these numberless formulæ and these conflicting instructions
are confusing, but there is something worse to fear. For the impression one
gathers from the perusal of such articles is that, once a moderately faithful
positive image in gum-bichromate has been obtained, the process has been
so far mastered and that complete mastery consists in repeating the above
result at will. On all that makes the unique and peculiar quality of a beau-
tiful gum-print there is absolute silence. In consequence the beginner, who has
never seen a fine and complete example of the process, will be ignorant of what
he ought to be working for and will take for granted that his own results,
whatever they show, are the genuine results to be expected from gum and
that it can not be carried further. Under the circumstances the utterly wrong
conclusion at which the amateur has arrived is but natural. Give half a
dozen sheets of gelatine-chloride paper, a good negative and a booklet of
instructions to a raw amateur of average brains, and he will turn out a series
of prints amongst which there will be one at least that will give him a truth-
ful idea of the best results the paper is capable of. The same man, if not
forewarned—which he is not by the gum-experts—will expect just as much
from tentative gum-printing. The best print of his first batch will be put
down as the genuine and only style of gum-print. Well, I have noticed
that the earliest complete images one gets by this process are of two distinct
and invariable styles, according to circumstances. Either the beginner, im-
bued with the utterly false and proportionately widespread principle that it
is always safer to overexpose, produces a gritty, small-pox effect of mixed
planes and haphazard values, for which the abrasion of the film, necessitated
by the hardening of prolonged insolation, is responsible—or he follows the
vague and elastic dogma that proclaims an extra thin film indispensable and
makes it so beautifully scarce that his picture, good enough when wet,
dries with sunken shadows, no accents and an unhealthy out-all-night
appearance such as is unhappily quite common in modern gum-work.
33
