Walter Woodbury and the Woodburytype

Other names: photo-relief process, photoglyptie (France), and woodburydruck (Germany).

The woodburytype is a very unique process because it combines photography and the printing press. The final result is not a photograph at all, but a print with slight reliefs. This innovative new process made photo-like images cheaper then ever before and easy to produce.

Inventor: 

 The woodbury process was invented by a man named Walter Bently Woodbury (1834-1885) in 1864. He was born in Manchester, England and spent much of his life abroad. As a young boy he was fascinated with photography.

Woodbury c. 1870

"my greatest pride, at the age of twelve, was to take by boyish companions to the garret, at the top of the house, where I had, by means of an old magnifying mirror, from which I removed the mercury backing, and a sheet of looking-glass, been able to throw a two-food image onto a table beneath... The idea that such a picture could be fixed was too wild to be even dreamt of in my young philosophy" - Woodbury, from his unpublished memoir.

As a young man, Woodbury began to train as a civil engineer but was motivated by the Austrailian gold rush and moved to Melbourne in 1852. Disappointed by gold prospects, Woodbury managed multiple manual labor positions. He eventually saved up money to purchase a camera and started to study the art of the collodion process. Fed up with manual labor, he wrote his mother...  

"the only work to be done in Melbourne is either stone breaking or shepherding neither of which I feel inclined to take so I am going to turn photographic artist."

Woodbury began a few business endeavors with fellow photographers at various studios in the Melbourne area, and soon met photographer James Page. Page and Woodbury decided to travel to Asia to look for better business opportunities. On the Indonesian island of Java, they found an abundance of wealthy of Europeans. Here, Woodbury shot panoramas, stereographs, portraits and experimented with different photographic processes and techniques. In 1863, because of ill health, Woodbury returned to England.


Invention:

Woodbury was searching for a print that would be more permanent than albumen prints and had a better half tone than carbon prints. Barret Oliver's book on Woodbury gives a great account on Woodbury's invention process:

"...From the time of Woodbury's return to England until 1864, he worked sporadically on the developments that would later become the Woodbury type. His experiments started with two observations. On his trip to England in 1859, he saw a window transparency hanging in a friends home and was fascinated by the different opacities it possessed. Then, in Java, while making prints by the carbon process, Woodbury noticed the distinct relief in these pictures. He put the two ideas together thinking a carbon print used as a mechanical plate should be able to produce different opacities like the window transparency...."

On March 17, 1865 Walter Woodbury announced his new process of photo-mechanical printing.

Process:

Three main steps to this process:
1) A gelatin relief is made from a negative.
2) The relief is then pressed into a sheet of lead forming a reverse matrix.
3) A print is made by pressing the lead plate mold onto paper with a coat of gelatin on it.

This diagram is from Oliver's book.

1) The negative is printed onto a sheet of bichomated gelatin (a mixture of potassium bichromate and gelatin) and exposed to the sun. Collodion negatives are preferred because they have a high contrast. The gelatin hardens when exposed to light and the unhardened gelatin is washed away. The gelatin relief is in reciprocal proportion to the density of light on the negative.

2) The gelatin relief is then imposed onto a sheet of lead by a press. The relief is now reflected in the lead.

Pigmented gelatin. 500x

3) Pigmented gelatin is applied to the lead relief and a smooth, coated piece of paper is placed on top of the gelatin. The pigmented gelatin is unique to the woodburytype process and used in no other photomechanical method. It is not opaque, but semi transparent which allows the white paper base to show through to give the image a better half-tone. The gelatin sandwich is then placed into a special woodburytype press and put under slight pressure. Early models of woodburytype presses were similar in appearance to a printing press. After five minutes, the gelatin sets and is removed from the press. The paper with the gelatin image on it is submerged in a chemical bath to make the image permanent.


The result is a gelatin relief image--the tonal range is directly related to the thickness of the pigmented gelatin--the thicker the gelatin, the darker the tone. It is important to note that the mold is made by the photographic process but the print is made by a press and is not actually a photograph. Most prints come out brown to purplish brown because of the gelatin color. The final prints are most often framed or mounted to cover up the excess gelatin remaining on the outside of the printed area.

These images were commonly used for illustrations in books, in publications, cabinet cards, and portraits from 1866 to 1900. Woodburytypes were not frequently used for landscapes because the gelatin had a hard time setting in a relief where the corresponding negative had large patches of white, such as sky.Woodburytypes are always found mounted on cardstock for cabinet cards or tipped-in to publications or books.

A Mountain-Dew Girl:Killarney

The first published woodburytype print appeared in the January 1866 issue of the Photographic News, A Mountain-Dew Girl:Killarney. The photo was taken by H.P. Robinson and a copy of the journal is now at the Clark art institute in Williamstown, MA.
  
Woodburytype identification:

• Only printed between 1866 and 1925.
• Usually are printed with a description identifying them as such. 
• Always mounted, never loose prints and never printed directly onto a publication. 
• Usually have a purpulish brown tint. 
• The contrast of Woodbury types is softer than other processes, such as carbon prints.
• High-gloss surface. 

Resources:

Oliver, Barret. A History of the Woodburytype: The First Successful Photomechanical Printing Process and Walter Bentley Woodbury. Nevada City, Calif: Carl Mautz Pub, 2007. Print. 

Ritzenthaler, Mary L, Diane Vogt-O'Connor, and Mary L. Ritzenthaler. Photographs: Archival Care and Management. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006. Print. 

http://www.graphicsatlas.org/identification/?process_id=38

http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/photographer/Walter_Bentley__Woodbury/ABCDEF/

http://maca.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p1325coll1/id/138/rec/38