Albumen Silver Print

An albumen silver print is a photographic print on paper whose image, formed of fine silver particles, rests in a thin layer of egg white coating a lightweight sheet. Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard announced its practical form to the French Academy of Sciences in May 1850 as a refinement of the salted paper print, dispersing the chlorides in egg white instead of the paper fibers. The process matched the wet collodion glass negative, introduced almost simultaneously, whose fine detail called for a sharper printing paper. Albumen was the dominant photographic print from about 1855 until gelatin and collodion printing-out papers overtook it in the 1890s, and the last commercial albumen papers disappeared in 1929.

Paper was floated on egg white beaten with ammonium or sodium chloride, dried, then sensitized on silver nitrate shortly before use. It was contact printed in daylight beneath a negative of the same size, the image appearing without chemical development. After washing, the print was toned in gold chloride, which shifted its native reddish brown toward purple-brown or near black, then fixed and washed. Because the image lies on the surface rather than within the paper, albumen prints show crisp detail and a smooth, semi-glossy sheen, heightened in the 1880s and 1890s by double coating and by burnishing after mounting. The thin paper was usually mounted on card, giving rise to the carte de visite, cabinet card and stereograph. Produced industrially in Dresden, albumen paper served studio portraiture, architecture and survey work, including the American West views of Carleton Watkins and Timothy H. O'Sullivan.

Albumen prints are chemically fragile. Most surviving examples show yellowed highlights, faded images or fine cracking, so the warm brown often associated with nineteenth-century photographs rarely reflects their original purple tones. The Salted Paper Print, its predecessor, has a matte image embedded in the paper fibers, while the Gelatin Silver Print is a developed-out paper with neutral black tones. Albumen on glass, introduced by Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor in the late 1840s, is a negative process. Woodburytypes and carbon prints can resemble gold-toned albumen but carry pigment images. The process survives as an alternative technique, often printed from enlarged digital negatives.