Still life (tea cup and tray)
Janina Green’s large hand-coloured photographs explore the notion of a distinctly female sensibility. While the subject matter refers to Green’s love of Dutch genre painting, they are also about the idea of home and ‘a woman’s place’. Because it was cheaper than colour processing, Green photographed each still life on 5 x 4 black-and-white film and coloured the print with inks bought from a woman who painted advertising slides for drive-in theatres. Aside from the economic imperative, Green liked the way hand-colouring converted the otherwise ‘austere and formal’ black-and-white photograph into something that was ‘sensual and emotional’.
(2018)
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
