Analog Photography in a Digital World
For the last two years, I have been trying to understand why I am often more moved by my handmade calotype paper negatives than by the positive images made from them.
At first, I thought the calotype was only part of the process. It was the handmade paper negative I needed before making a salt print. That is the expected way to think about it. The negative comes first. The print comes later. The print is supposed to be the finished artwork.
But over time, that idea started to feel incomplete.
Most people meet my artwork first. They see a quiet scene, soft tones, and a sense of stillness. What they don’t see right away is the reason it exists at all.
Pictorial Whispers was born from a loss I could not fix or outthink: the death of my youngest daughter, Abby. Grief didn’t arrive as a single event. It came as a long, uneven road that still continues. My work is not an escape from that road. It is the way I walk it.
I make fully handmade 1840s Adamson-era calotype paper negatives and ammonio-nitrate of silver (ANS) salt prints at a single vintage window, using only natural light and 19th-century chemistry to speak about grief and endurance. A typical day for me involves one of two paths. I am either in prep mode or production mode. Today, IContinue reading “A Typical Day for a Calotypist – Acidifying and Iodizing Papers”
When I say my prints are “ammonio-nitrate of silver salt prints,” I’m not just dressing up a basic salt print with fancy words.
I’m using a very specific 1840s variant of Talbot’s salted paper process, built on a silver–ammonia complex that people like Alfred Swaine Taylor, Talbot, and the Hill & Adamson circle actually used.
The single-bath “double-iodide” iodizing method, as described by William Holland Furlong and read aloud by John Adamson on April 3, 1843, made calotypes more reliable and repeatable. That stability opened the door for the Adamsons (and Hill & Adamson) to work at scale, and it changed everything for the calotypists in 1843.
In a previous article, I shared that as of November 1, 2025, I work exclusively with the St Andrews-era calotype: iodized paper, excited with aceto-nitrate of silver (without gallic acid in the exciting bath), and developed in gallic acid. This is the chemistry John Adamson employed in 1843 to stabilize and make the process repeatable. John Adamson was a medical doctor and clearly was an intelligent and critical thinker.
As of November 1, 2025, I now work exclusively with the St Andrews-era calotype: iodized paper, excited with aceto-nitrate of silver (no gallic acid in the exciting bath), and developed in gallic acid. This is the chemistry John Adamson used to make the process stable and repeatable.
I didn’t plan for Bending Toward Silence to mark the beginning of this series. It came from a place of necessity, not inspiration. On that particular day, I needed to do something with the weight I was carrying. Grief has a way of filling the room, whether you speak of it or not.
Pictorial Whispers is a deeply personal series of handmade salt prints from calotype paper negatives, created as a way to process the grief of losing my daughter, Abby. Each image explores the quiet emotional terrain of resilience, transformation, and connection through the delicate life cycle of flowers.
Over the past several weeks, I have been working through the 1851 Le Gray waxed paper negative workflow, which he developed based on Dr. Guillot-Saguez’s earlier improvements in 1847. In this article, I share my motivation for trying the Le Gray pre-waxed version and my results.