[Music] when the albumen print was invented in 1850 they then called salted paper prints plain prints the only difference is one has egg white and one does not it's the same process [Music] so these are examples of albumen prints the albumen print was invented in 1850 by Louis Desiree Blanc art of art and was the most popular photographic process in the nineteenth century this is an example of a pristine albumen print how it would have looked when it was first produced this is an example of a faded yellow to albumin print characteristic of albumin deterioration [Music] the albumen print is a silver chloride process that uses table salt as part of its process all it is this paper that's been floated on a solution of albumin egg white the earliest albumin printing operations literally kept a lot of chickens because it took a lot of eggs to make a lot of albumin friends take eggs and you separate the white from the yolk you beat the white and when it settles back down again you have this beautiful yellow liquid in the liquid there's sodium chloride or soft you float the paper on that and when the papers dry it's a nice shiny surface the papers then floated after it's dry on silver nitrate and when the silver nitrate and the chloride combine you get photographic paper what you finally have is a cheap and comparatively easy way of preparing paper for making a photograph using a negative that may have been produced by any number of processes so a collodion negative could be printed as an albumin print you would have your negative and you would place it in contact with the sensitized paper and exposed in the sunlight the thing that distinguishes an albumin print from a salted paper print or a platinum print is that the image is suspended on a layer above the paper rather than being embedded in the paper fibers creating a much more precise and crisp image this is when we see the rise of the great industrial photographic houses producing popular photographs of tourist sites even then we're beginning to think if you don't have a photograph of it you didn't really experience it it was the beginning of really aggressive mass marketing and mass production of photographs for general consumption and this was the predominant printing paper from 1852 about 1890 people like Freeth produced photographically Illustrated Bibles where he photographed the sights in the 19th century where things that were told about in the bible were said to have happened we begin to see how really as early as the 1870s and 80s the photograph becomes a really important not just conveyor of knowledge and information but a shaper of knowledge and information and it's the album and print that made that possible because it was precise it was detailed it cheap and it could be mass-produced and distributed easily [Music] you