The Lab specialises in alternative photographic processes, most of which are firmly rooted in photographic history. Photography was revealed to the world in 1839 after an exciting few decades of closeted experimentation by a handful of individuals, and today it is absurdly difficult to imagine our lives without it.
Within the last decade analogue photographic processes – film, minilabs, and picking your prints up from the chemist- have been all but replaced by digital technology in our day to day lives. This heritage of the tactile photograph is a common talking point amongst photographers and public alike, and our aim is to keep the appreciation and understanding of these unique materials and techniques alive. There’s nothing like making a photograph from start to finish.
In it’s nearly 200 years of history photography has been company to some unusual chemistry; there have been literally hundreds of photographic processes invented using all manner of materials from silver to uranium, metal salts to gun cotton. At the lab we are equipped to work with just about anything you can name, but the main techniques we work with are:
- Wet Plate Collodion and Tintypes
- Platinum Printing
- Copperplate Photogravure
- Dry Glass Plate
- Cyanotype
- Albumen and Kallitypes
- Gum Dichromate
- Instant Film (Polaroid type)
We run workshops fairly regularly and collaborate with artists to help them determine the most appropriate medium and realise their work in a unique way. If there’s something sort of crazy sounding you want to do, we want to hear about it.