Chrysotype (also known as a chripotype or gold print) is a
photographic process
A list of photographic processing techniques.
Color
*Agfacolor
**Ap-41 process (pre-1978 Agfa color slides; 1978-1983 was a transition period when Agfa slowly changed their color slide films from AP-41 to E6)
*Anthotype
*Autochrome Lumière, 1903 ...
invented by
John Herschel in 1842. Named from the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
for "gold", it uses
colloidal gold
Colloidal gold is a sol or colloidal suspension of nanoparticles of gold in a fluid, usually water. The colloid is usually either wine-red coloured (for spherical particles less than 100 nm) or blue/purple (for larger spherical particles ...
to record images on paper.
Processes
Herschel's process
Herschel's system involved coating paper with
ferric citrate, exposing it to the sun in contact with an
etching
Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio (incised) in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types ...
used as mask, then developing the print with a
chloroaurate solution. This did not provide continuous-tone photographs.
In 2006, 164 years after Herschel's work with gold printing, photographers Liam Lawless and Robert Wolfgang Schramm published a formula based on Herschel's process.
Processes based on ziatype
Following the introduction of Richard Sullivan's ziatype process in 1997, which uses
ammonium ferric oxalate to print out
palladium
Palladium is a chemical element with the symbol Pd and atomic number 46. It is a rare and lustrous silvery-white metal discovered in 1803 by the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston. He named it after the asteroid Pallas, which was itself na ...
images, many photographers began experimenting successfully with substituting gold for some or all of the palladium. Image quality decays rapidly as the printer approaches 100% gold in a ziatype print.
Puckett's process
Richard Puckett, an American photographer, announced in the March/April 2012 issue of View Camera magazine a chrysotype process that uses
ascorbate with ammonium ferric oxalate to print out on dry paper, with no hydration, fine-grained, continuous tone gold images. Puckett presented the process at the 2013 APIS (Alternative Photography International Symposium) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Originally the process was named the Texas Chrystoype; following a major revision of the formula in 2017, Puckett renamed the process the Chrysotype Supreme.
Literature
The modern chemist and photographic historian
Mike Ware published the first books covering the subject of chrysotype in 2006, ''The Chrysotype Manual: the science and practice of photographic printing in gold'' and ''Gold in Photography: the history and art of chrysotype''.
References
{{Reflist
External links
The Chrysotype Supreme Formula by Richard PuckettTexas Chrysotype Formula by Richard PuckettPhotographic Printing in Colloidal Gold
Ware, M. The Journal of Photographic Science 42 (5) 157-161 (1994).
Photographic processes dating from the 19th century