Photo students’ work is golden: MSU chrysotypes featured in Alternative Photography
BOZEMAN – A brief conversation between Royce W. Smith, dean of the Montana State University College of Arts and Architecture, and photography professor Christina Z. Anderson about images processed in the MSU school colors led to a recent feature in the leading website dedicated to alternative photography.
Smith had learned that prints processed in gold metal, a process called chrysotype, could result in blue-hued prints, among other colors. As an art historian, he grew fascinated about the alternative process, so he reached out to Anderson to learn more.
Anderson, a professor in MSU’s School of Film and Photography is an international authority on hand-processing art prints with alternative materials, ranging from salt to palladium. She had already written the book, literally, about a type of blue photo processing, called cyanotype.
Anderson explains that in the 1960s and even before, photographers had a desire to quit being beholden to large corporations that controlled the photographic market and found alternatives to silver gelatin printing. Processes such as Vandyke brown, cyanotype, palladium, and salted paper were referred to as alt(ternative),” Anderson said.
“Today alternative process photography (also called alt process, alt pro, alt) references hand-crafted printing as alternative to digital ink jet, though these boundaries are not so—forgive the pun—black and white,” Anderson said.
At the time she and Smith talked, she had not yet tried the chrysotype process but was encouraged when Smith thought it would be both fun and fitting to make a blue print out of gold at MSU.
Anderson said the chrysotype process uses gold chloride in solution combined with two other solutions, a ligand and ammonium ferric oxalate, to make a photo-sensitive solution. The sensitizer is brushed onto paper, dried, exposed to light under a negative, and then processed in a series of chemical baths. When the processing is done the image is composed of nanoparticle gold. Anderson signed on to teach a class about chrysotypes for fall 2021.
“Usually, I know alt processes inside out, but this time I had to learn along with the students,” Anderson said. “We had to research the process together.”
The result was a class project featured in an article about chrysotype processing that Anderson wrote and published in the Dec. 16 edition of Alternative Photography, a leading website for the art form. The article is accompanied by illustrative photos from several of the MSU students and one recent graduate who took the class: Fran Browne, Kirk Cochran, Jake Culbertson, Alex Glenn, Caden McCullough, Max McDonough, Alyssa McKenna, Joren Nelson, Charlie Parrott, Nick Sramek and Thomas Callahan, who is an MSU graduate.
Anderson said the technique of using the precious metal to process photography originated in 1842 but fell out of favor about three decades later when platinum and palladium came onto the scene. Then Mike Ware, a chemistry professor in England, developed a user-friendly method of chrysotype. Still, now only a few dozen people in the world practice the technique.
Anderson first saw a chrysotype in 2015 when she attended a symposium in Australia taught by Leanne McPhee, a leading expert in the technique. McPhee is also featured in the MSU Alternative Photography article.
“I have since found the process to be addictively engaging, due to its wide range of color possibilities and surprises,” she wrote in the article in Alternative Photography.
She said that while the chrysotypes are processed with pure gold, the resulting prints are usually shades of blue or pink-tinged brown. She plans to add the technique to her large quiver of alternative processing techniques. Anderson has published six books about alternative process photography with one more coming soon. She has co-authored two more and edited six other books.
Alyssa McKenna, a senior from Denver, Colorado, who took the class, said she was captivated by the process.
“It creates such beautiful coloring and split-toning that other processes aren’t able to. What surprised me the most was how the absolute slightest change in humidity or thickness of the coating solution could completely change the print’s color outcome,” McKenna said. Her photo of an arbor-rimmed tunnel was used in the article to demonstrate bronzing, or bronze tones in the images “This process really made me appreciate that very historic photographic practices are still being taught and evolved such as the chrysotype process.”
Jake Culbertson, a senior who is also a wedding and portrait photographer, said he wasn’t interested in the process at first, especially because of the technical, mathematical and scientific knowledge needed. He later fell in love with it.
“It can be very time consuming to just make one print; however, the results that one can achieve are immaculate and beautiful,” said Culbertson, whose aerial of downtown of New York also accompanied the article. “Chris Anderson's infectious love for the alternative processes has spread to not only myself but to my classmates, as well.”
Culbertson said he was surprised that there are so few people in the world that practice the historic form of processing. “The class made up almost a third of the chrysotype practitioners in the world!”
He added that he is grateful to Anderson and Smith for making possible the passing on of alternative processing, which also includes cyanotype, palladium and gum printing.
“Across the country, so many universities have gotten rid of their darkrooms and the alternative labs,” he said. “Having these facilities allows students to explore different avenues of photography and work with different mediums within the arts.”
Smith concurred.
“Professor Anderson’s published article and her deliberate, impactful integration of teaching and scholarship are testaments to the global reach of our college and its sophisticated scholarship,” Smith said.
