5.1.6: The Albumen Print- The Photograph Goes Mass Market

The Albumen Print: Photography Goes Mass Market

While Frederick Scott Archer solved the problem of creating superior negatives, another innovator helped solve the problem of making photographic prints.

That innovator was the French photographer and chemist Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (1802–1872).

In 1850, Blanquart-Evrard introduced the albumen print process, a printing method that would become the most widely used photographic printing system of the nineteenth century. If Archer helped create modern negatives, Blanquart-Evrard helped create modern photographic reproduction.

Egg Whites and Photography

The secret ingredient behind the process was surprisingly ordinary: egg whites.

Albumen—the protein found in egg whites—could be mixed with salt and coated onto sheets of paper. Once dried and sensitized with silver nitrate, the paper became capable of producing highly detailed photographic prints.

Compared with earlier salted paper prints, albumen prints offered smoother surfaces, finer detail, richer tonal values, and a glossy finish that audiences found appealing.¹

For many nineteenth-century viewers, this glossy appearance became what a photograph was supposed to look like.

How the Process Worked

The process began by coating high-quality paper with a mixture of albumen and sodium chloride. After drying, the paper was floated on a bath of silver nitrate, creating light-sensitive silver chloride within the albumen layer.

To make a print, photographers placed the sensitized paper in direct contact with a glass negative and exposed it to sunlight inside a printing frame.

Unlike modern photographic papers, albumen paper was a printing-out process. The image gradually appeared during exposure and could be watched forming in real time.

After printing, photographers often toned the image with gold chloride, which improved both image permanence and visual appearance. The print was then fixed, thoroughly washed, and dried.

The resulting photographs displayed remarkable clarity and a characteristic glossy sheen that became synonymous with Victorian photography.²

The Perfect Partner for the Wet Plate

The timing of the albumen process was ideal.

Archer’s collodion process produced exceptionally sharp glass negatives. Albumen paper could capture that sharpness in print. Together, the two technologies formed the dominant photographic workflow of the second half of the nineteenth century.³

This partnership transformed photography from a specialized practice into a global industry.

Studios could produce hundreds—or even thousands—of identical prints from a single negative. Portrait photography became increasingly affordable. Middle-class families who could never have commissioned painted portraits could now possess photographs of themselves and their loved ones.

Photography was becoming part of everyday life.

Collecting Faces

One of the most important products made possible by albumen printing was the carte-de-visite.

Roughly the size of a modern business card, these small photographic portraits became an international craze during the 1860s. People collected photographs of family members, friends, celebrities, politicians, royalty, and military heroes.

Albums filled with photographs became common household objects. For the first time in history, ordinary people could build personal image collections on a large scale.⁴

Photography had moved beyond documentation. It had become a social activity.

Building a Visual World

Albumen prints also played a crucial role in shaping public understanding of the wider world.

They documented wars, cities, archaeological discoveries, colonial expeditions, engineering projects, and scientific investigations. Through albumen photographs, people encountered places they would never visit and events they would never witness firsthand.⁵

Photography was no longer merely recording history. It was helping construct how history would be remembered.

The Legacy of Albumen

Albumen printing remained the dominant photographic printing process from roughly 1850 through the 1890s. During those decades, billions of albumen prints were produced worldwide.⁶

Today, museums and archives continue to preserve these photographs, although they present unique conservation challenges. Albumen prints can yellow, crack, fade, or develop silver mirroring as they age. Despite these vulnerabilities, many survive in remarkable condition.

The albumen print represents a critical turning point in photographic history. It transformed photography from a specialized craft into a reproducible visual medium capable of reaching mass audiences.

If the collodion negative made photography practical, the albumen print made photography universal.

Footnotes

1. Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, Traité de photographie sur papier (Paris, 1851).
2. James M. Reilly, The Albumen and Salted Paper Book (Rochester, NY: Light Impressions, 1980), 25–41.
3. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 58–61.
4. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
5. Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 81–89.
6. James M. Reilly, The Albumen and Salted Paper Book, 5–8.

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