Saturday, January 28, 2012

An Overpainted Solar Enlargement Fragment

Via Flickr:
A small solar enlargement. The mount board is brittle and the edges have crumbled into a ragged, freeform shape. It speaks about the process of painting solar enlargements. When a small negative, likely a cdv, is projected onto photographic paper using sunlight and an enlarging camera, the resulting print will probably be rather soft and lack detail. The photographic retoucher will then, with varying degrees of skill, retouch and paint the print to add back detail. In some cases the result shows little or none of the underlying photograph. If the quality of the negative and the skill of the enlarging are good enough there may still show photographic detail. Close examination of this print shows some of the original photograph in the beard but everything else is overpainted. A faint oval around the portrait shows that it was in a mat for a long period of time.

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