image was exposed to the sun in the early 2000s.
It was a sheet of window pane I had been bringing from location to location since about 1986. I was living in Somerville MA and whenever people upgraded the windows in their home, this is “street glass”.
I pulled the lites out of the sashes. This pane still had putty on it from when it was pried out of the wood. the 11x14ish glass was coated with a foam brush under a dim red light. The emulsion was melted in a cup from a bottle stored at room temperature. when it was melted I brushed it on.
I brought the glass outside and left it in the grass. It was a spring day, the grass was greener and the sun travelled higher. I didn’t have reflected light from the snow. I went about my daily routine. I shuttled people from place to place, did laundry made meals. After dark I brought the glass plate in and put it aside.
I could almost feel the glass buzzing as I went down the basement steps to the darkroom. The plate was warm to the touch and felt nice as I dropped it off and scaled the steps again. I washed my hands and then the dishes. I continued with my daily stuff – helped with homework and got people settled to saw some logs and bag some zzzz’s.
The plate sat there on the counter. I fell asleep and forgot all about it for days.
the multi hour impression continued its work in the cool dark basement.
When I remembered and got a chance. I put a nitrile glove on and opened the 2 gallon vat of caffenol I had been ladling from and dumping the developer back in ( I reuse it for 6-10 months). It was a few months old and probably had maybe 500 things developed in it. It wasn’t instant but Sumatra coffee and it was lasting … it was also cut with caffenol that was very used, I always season the batch with half old, so some of it was very old.
I ladled out some developer into an 11×14 tray and put the plate in it clean side down so I was looking at the emulsion as I rocked the tray. then my stomach sank when I realized I had been developing one of “those prints” …
I had been experimenting with sun exposures on photo paper. contact prints that took hours to make in the sun. and images from a camera left open so you could see the visible latent image. I learned that if you fix the images vanish and if you develop, the paper turns black. I had been told by photo engineers there was no way to stabilize these images and they offered no help, no suggestions just discouragement.
I rinsed the print and it wasnt’ black. I put it in some fixer and the image didn’t vanish. I rinsed the plate in cold running water and set it on the drying rack until later and went to bed.
I expected the worst since I had experienced the worst.
to my surprise the image was still on the plate and the caffenol didn’t degrade it but allowed the fixer to stabilize the image. I hadn’t told the photo engineers but I had made hand coated sun prints that I didn’t over the years and they looked perfect undeveloped and unfixed. the liquid emulsion images always had bright colors on the paper ( reds greens yellows and blues ) that were visible and still years later are still intact. Maybe it had something to do with how the liquid emulsions dont’ really have any additives, kind of like real food that’s not from a box. And it was the additives that were degrading the images, not the plain emulsion.
I learned that caffenol made with the table spoon method made strong had enough sodium carbonate in it to stabilize the image and the caffenol is slow enough to develop anything you put in it.
getting back to the image …
when I scanned it there were fire and wind. I adjusted the levels, and got what you see.
