Bromoil with the Master

One of my favorite forms of “antiquarian” photographic printmaking, the bromoil process, is also one of the scarcest. That may be because of the difficulty in getting it right. Bromoil seems simple and direct—no need to make enlarged internegatives, for one thing—and that was partly why I was inspired to try it myself some years ago. I struggled with it, made a small group of pictures, then gave it up.

The other thing about bromoil that appealed to me, and this was long before the advent of photo-quality inkjet output, is that it replaces the silver image on a conventional black-and-white printing paper with ink—the same ink used by printmakers, lithographers in particular, for their work. After bleaching out the silver image with a solution that also hardens the gelatin in proportion to how much silver it contained, you apply ink to the paper surface. Most stipple the ink on with special brushes, though I tried rollers too. The harder the gelatin (and the darker the original image’s tone), the more ink it accepts. The softer the gelatin (and the lighter the original tone), the less ink it accepts. You keep the print damp while working on it so that the gelatin swells up enough to resist the ink proportionally. The image here, which is about as good as I got at it, is made up entirely of hand-applied ink.

Used mainly by turn-of-the-century Pictorialist photographers such as Linked Ring member Robert Demachy, the bromoil process has no greater living master than Canada’s David Lewis. I only wish I’d had Lewis’s bromoil handbook, The Art of Bromoil & Transfer, when I was doing my experiments. (I did have a fine general reference by nonsilver authority Luis Nadeau, Lewis’s countryman.) But bromoil is a process best learned with the aid and input of more experienced practitioners.

This September photographers will have the opportunity to learn bromoil with the master, David Lewis, at the Maritime Photo Workshops on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Among the topics covered will be the ways Lewis uses digital technology to make the process more controllable and less labor-intensive. If you want to speak to someone about the program, call workshop director Linda McCausland at (902) 659-2559.

My complaint about the bromoil work being done today is that in terms of content it’s often not much different than it was in its Pictorialist heyday, with pastoral and woodsy scenes—images that contain no indication that they were made in our time. So I hope some of you out there will sign up for the workshop, and bring a modern sensibility to this intriguing technique.
—Russell Hart