The Metallic-Toned Postcard

Along with enjoying today's postcard, we'll continue our discussion of where these crazy colours come from.

Here is the postcard:

personal collection

Ah, you might think, if you paid attention to the last post and disregarded the title of this one--dye toning! I'll admit this is what I thought too, when I first discovered the existence of dye toning. However, there's a few things that stand out. 

First, there's the way this photograph looks quite a bit like a cyanotype. Cyanotypes, if you don't know, are a photographic process popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as throughout the 20th century in their use as blueprints (yes, those are a kind of photograph). Unlike most photographic processes they're based off of iron instead of silver, combined with ferrocyanide to make a lovely strong blue. 

cyanotype, ca. 1910, personal collection

However, there's quite a few ways in which you can tell right away the postcard isn't a cyanotype, but the resemblance in colour is quite strong, no?

Second, there's the fact that all of the postcards I have with this cyanotype blue exhibit a bit of metallic tarnish along the sides. 

No cards of a different colour exhibit this, nor do any of the non-toned ones. Silver gelatin photographs get tarnish ("silver mirroring"), but the dye toning process would prevent this from occurring. 

Finally, the colour can't be applied on top of the print, because, as we say last post with dye toning, the whites are white (or very close to). 

Then I came across this excellent discussion of metallic toning in motion picture film (see also yesterday's list of sources). Metallic toning is common in photography-- it's what's usually just called "toning." In the twentieth century it's mostly been sulfur (sepia) toning or selenium toning, occasionally gold toning with certain kinds of paper. But apparently you can also tone with ferric ferrocyanide... which is what you use to make cyanotypes. Unlike cyanotypes, however, which contain no silver, the final photograph would have a (coloured) silver ferrocyanide compound. Cyanotypes don't tarnish, but silver ferrocyanide? I'd be surprised if it didn't. I'm working on finding actual contemporary references to toning photographs with ferric ferrocyanide, but I'm pretty sure that's what these are.

If you're curious, the toning process is similar to sepia and dye toning, and goes like this: a first chemical bath converts the metallic silver image to a colourless compound (silver ferrocyanide), while a further, coloured material joins the compound in a second bath (in this cased, blue-coloured ferric ferrocyanide). Apparently this can also be done all in one bath as well. [Source]

I promise this blog won't be this technical much longer (I couldn't keep it up if I wanted to!)

We've touched upon retouching already; I find it very interesting so pointing it out in close-up is probably going to be a fairly regular feature of these posts. 

The blue disguises it a little but he's got quite a bit of retouching on his face, when you look closely. Even though he's not smiling, apparently his smile lines were still too marked and have been retouched away. You can see retouching under his eyes and quite a bit to the left of his nose... in fact I think they might have smoothed/straightened the line of his nose a bit, the highlight for the top two-third actually looks like it might have been applied or enhanced. (Retouchers totally, totally did this stuff. I know a terrific book from about 1905 dedicated entirely to the wonders of retouchng; I'll try and get a hold of it. It's public domain, so I could share some, for context.)

The card is dated July 28, 1924, and addressed to "ma chere petite Alice," from "Alphonse." I actually have a card from her to him as well, within a week of this one, but you're going to have to stay tuned for that one. He's writing from Lunéville (though it took me a few tries to decipher and identify that). 

We'll talk more about messages but one thing I have noticed--even in the 1920s, and despite often looking lovely, people's handwriting is messy and full of spelling and punctuation errors. Half the time writers omit periods and/or capital letters (this guy sort of capitalizes but no periods). Trying to read these you find very odd habits of letter formation-- have a look at the "p" in "petite Alice", for instance. These are of course totally personal, but still... I'd rather my boyfriend use the occasional mark of punctuation, wouldn't you?

Finally, this again:

The publishing house is Bleuet, which I have and have seen more of. Bleuet means "blueberry", which seemed to me a totally random name for a romance postcard publishing house. However, cereal box French failed me yet again. "Bleuet" also means cornflower, which I've always thought were rather unappreciated. In France, it's not-- in fact, the cornflower is the symbol for rememberance of the First World War and war generally, like the poppy is for Canadians and the rest of the Commonwealth. Until I find a Bleuet brand card relating to war, though, I'll assume it's not related to that. In terms of flower language, the cornflower represents delicate, sensitive, and pure feeling (source)-- I think this is what they were going for. A lot sweeter than "blueberry", eh?