Digital BW, The Print

On 04/09/2012 David Kachel wrote:
> Plastic papers are wonderful, 
> Eastern Bloc
> films and papers are just as good as Kodak, Agfa and Ilford, magazine
> articles singing the praises of B&W papers from Outer Slobovia that 
> were so
> incredibly bad 

Well, here I agree with you. Most papers produced at most times were 
mediocre at best.

There was a brief period in the 1970's when Agfa made a few downright 
beautiful, sensual-to-print on papers (Brovira, Portriga, Record Rapid). 
My personal favourite being Record Rapid. There were a few others too, 
notably Oriental Seagull and Kodak Royal Bromesko. But a combination of 
economics and environmental concerns wiped them out. Agfa ruined RR by 
taking out all the noxious cadmium c.1979. Oriental went out of production 
and the new owner formulated a new paper with the same label but was 
nothing special. Royal Bromesko was discontinued.

The Bunker Hunt crisis made this all worse. Silver content was pared to 
the bone to try and hold down prices, which almost trebled in UK. Agfa UK 
drove me mad by stopping import of any New Unimproved Mk2 RR except 
G2,3,4, before deciding we didn't need G4 either, then finally deciding 
we'd have Classic and Classic Multicontrast instead - papers utterly 
unrelated to the sensual ancestor.

Agfa Multicontrast and Ilford Multigrade, both RC, were capable of OK 
results, for many purposes. Practical and fast but no pleasure. I used 
hundreds of boxes and never once enjoyed it, it was just a means from A to B.

Then we had the designer label print materials, Galerie and so on. I found 
those underwhelming too, compared to the earlier silver-and-toxin rich 
antecedents. Selenium obligatory if you wanted a proper black.

And then we had Forte etc purporting to have the traditional values  that 
the new papers had lost. And, unmentioned, the manufacturing defects 
(pinholes, blisters, instability etc), agonisingly low sensitivities and 
wayward inconsistency between sheets, never mind batches.

It wasn't that you couldn't use these later materials to make nice prints, 
but every step of the way the materials fought you. Nothing ever came 
close to original Record Rapid which leapt voluptuously from the packet 
"so you want to make a gorgeous print, let's have fun together". It was 
just impossible not to love the way that paper worked. The blacks! The 
tones! The surface! The later materials were like making love with a 
foul-tempered hooker whilst wearing Marigolds. Not that I have any 
experience behind the metaphor, but...

I think the paper manufacturers fed the flight from the darkroom. Perhaps 
it was inevitable as the pollution of chemical photography became 
intolerable. But it made the switch to digital much easier, since the best 
of silver gelatine had long gone. What sort of surprises me is how any old 
crap on bromide now commands a mystical "hand made" reverence, as if none 
of this decline ever happened.

But all that's just a personal viewpoint.

-- 
Regards

Tony Sleep
http://tonysleep.co.uk