Chicago Albumen Works

The Chicago Albumen Works offers printing services in many traditional photographic printing media, and we maintain full darkroom facilities for both nineteenth century print-out papers and twentieth century developing papers.

With the advent of digital technology and our ability to produce large format film negatives from digital files, most printing projects can be accomplished without sending original negatives or prints to us. Once we receive a high resolution file, we can output the file to negative with density and tonality characteristics profiled to print easily on any chosen print medium.


Gelatin Emulsions of the Twentieth Century

	Fiber base gelatin silver prints

	RC gelatin silver prints

Historical Processes of the Nineteenth Century

	Photogenic paper

	Salt paper

	Albumen paper

	Cyanotype

As archives are scoured for new images, and requests for photographic prints mount, collections are increasingly stressed. Faithful surrogate prints can relieve much of the danger of over-handling and excessive exhibition of original prints by:

	Reducing the exhibition exposure of valuable vintage prints

	Providing surrogates for exhibition in less secure venues

	Providing a surrogate when a loan of an original is not allowed or impractical

	Providing an exhibition quality print when there is no original print