c1950 farm chickens and eggs
Toronto. In the early days of photography, the idea of paper prints took hold. Thus the albumen print came into being. At its peak, photography was a major user of eggs.
Albumen (or raw egg whites) was (were) used to stick the light sensitive emulsion coating to the paper and give the print its slightly glossy look.
The thin paper, ‘glue’, and emulsion coatings with the emulsion coating sensitized, made the resulting photo-sensitive print extremely curly. This was solved by gluing the paper to a cardboard backing, a practice that continued on with CdVs and other sizes of studio prints (popular in the mid to later 1800s).
Note. The photo is that of my father’s sister on her farm. The sale of eggs gave my aunt ‘pin money’. The photo was taken with a Kodak camera – most likely my dad’s folder, but it may have originated in my box camera (also a Kodak). Of course, albumen prints had long passed into history by then.
