Gelatin Silver Photographs

My friend Eric took these gelatin silver photographs of me a couple days ago. He has a set up to develop them built into a suitcase so that it's portable but we did it in his apartment. The photographs are on 4x5 glass plates and are even more crisp and clear than these scans. Also, the dark parts on the scans are actually clear on the glass plates, the scans are done with a black background. The light parts on these scans look dark when the plate is held up to light and the image is then negative.

The photographs have to be developed within a few minutes of the plate being exposed and the images slowly appear on the plate, cloudy at first but within a few minutes they clear up a lot.

To prepare the plates he starts with some egg white glue on the edges to keep the image from peeling away later. He then puts on a layer of a combination of cotton and ether to help the silver stick to the plate. Next, the silver is put on inside a dark box because this is the light sensitive chemical. The camera he uses is from the 70's and is about a 1' cube, though it can expand more since it has bellows. Once the plate is exposed he pours the developer on by hand and then stops the development with water. The whole process takes about 15 minutes. The boomerang shaped hole in the second image is a place that didn't get any of the cotton-ether bonding agent so the light sensitive chemicals didn't stick.

The texture of my skin in the images is because the silver shows some of the ultra-violet spectrum that is invisible to the human eye so you can see under the first layer of skin.