I don’t buy old photo paper. Like most of the old film cameras these days that are not already in the hands of collectors or users, most of it is trash–and increasingly expensive trash . We’ve all seen the e-bay posts where sellers open the paper pack and fan out the contents to take a photo for buyers. Understandably, for most, the basic knowledge of storing and handling light sensitive material has been lost to history.

That didn’t used to be the case. I used to buy every pack of old photo paper I saw. Sealed, open, part used, it didn’t matter. Most of it worked fine, even for conventional printing. Nearly all of it (unlike modern papers), was also excellent for Lith printing. Failing that, there was always the last resort of Lumen prints (and I hate Lumen prints!).

Anyway, as a result I have quite a collection of vintage papers that I still use on occasion. And being a sucker for all old stuff, I really like the artwork on the packs and looking into the history.

Probably my favourite batch ever was five or six packs of very old photo paper that I got from a very beautiful French girl at a London flea market. She’d pulled them out of a Parisian loft a couple of days earlier and told me she was selling them for the cover art, not the contents (all packs were open and all still contained paper). I think I paid £2 for the lot.

Research dated most of it to somehwhere between 1920 and 1935. Of course, I used it. It didn’t work for conventional printing, or Lith, but the Lumens in my ‘Lith and Alternative Gallery’ are all made using different examples of this at-the-time nearly 100 year old paper….and it produced amazing, vivid colours.

Another favourite was a pack of Kodak Bromesko paper that had an open date hand written on the pack of December 1957. I took it home and printed a Lith. A paper opended by someone more than 50 years earlier produced a beautiful print.

Looking through my collection, it brings home how much choice of printing has been lost. It’s a shame, but the world moves on. Thank goodness we still have the (albeit limited) choice of paper we do!