Alternative Process Photography: Historical and Experimental Photo Methods

Tim Layton loads a sheet of paper he has hand-coated with silver iodide into a wooden box camera of his own construction. The paper is sensitive to light for only a few hours, so he must expose and develop it the same day. He points the camera at an abandoned building in the Ozarks, removes the lens cap, and waits. The exposure takes several minutes. When he develops the paper in gallic acid and silver nitrate, a soft, ghostly image appears: the building rendered in gentle browns and grays, with none of the sharp detail of modern film. Layton is making a calotype, a photographic process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s. He is, as far as he knows, the only artist in the world making 8x20 inch calotype paper negatives. He does it because the process is slow, difficult, and produces images that look like nothing else.

Alternative process photography refers to photographic techniques that fall outside the mainstream of modern image-making. These are primarily historical processes, developed in the 19th century and largely replaced by gelatin silver and color film in the 20th century, as well as experimental and cameraless methods that use photographic chemistry without a conventional camera. The category includes cyanotype, calotype, salt print, wet plate collodion, platinum/palladium printing, gum bichromate, bromoil, chemigrams, photograms, and lumen prints. What unites these processes is that they require the artist to hand-coat paper or other surfaces with light-sensitive chemistry, expose the surface to light, and develop it through wet processing, all done by hand and often with significant variation between prints.

This entry covers the history of alternative processes, the techniques that define the category, the contemporary artists reviving them, and why these 19th-century methods are attracting 21st-century practitioners.

What Is Alternative Process Photography?

Alternative process photography is not a single technique. It is a category that covers any photographic process outside the standard gelatin silver print (the dominant black-and-white method of the 20th century) and modern color photography. The processes share several characteristics: they are hand-coated, meaning the artist prepares the light-sensitive surface themselves rather than using factory-made paper or film; they are contact-printed, meaning the negative or object is placed in direct contact with the sensitized paper, requiring a same-size negative; and they are variable, meaning each print is unique because the hand-coating process produces subtle differences in chemistry distribution, exposure, and development.

The most widely practiced alternative processes include:

Cyanotype, invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842, uses iron salts rather than silver. The paper is coated with a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, exposed to UV light, and washed in water. The result is a distinctive Prussian blue image. Anna Atkins used the cyanotype process to create Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843), the first book illustrated with photographic images.

Salt print, also called Talbotype, was Talbot's primary process. Paper is salted with sodium chloride, sensitized with silver nitrate, and contact-printed with a negative under UV light. The resulting image is a warm reddish-brown, embedded in the paper fibers rather than sitting on top of them, giving salt prints a soft, matte quality.

Calotype, Talbot's negative-positive process, uses paper coated with silver iodide to create a paper negative, which is then contact-printed onto salted paper to make a positive. The paper fibers in both the negative and the positive reduce image sharpness, producing the soft, painterly quality that distinguishes calotypes from the sharp detail of the daguerreotype.

Wet plate collodion, introduced by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, involves coating a glass plate with collodion (nitrocellulose dissolved in ether and alcohol), sensitizing it in silver nitrate, exposing it while still wet, and developing it immediately. The process produces either ambrotypes (positive images on glass) or tintypes (positive images on blackened metal) or glass negatives for printing. The requirement that the plate be exposed and developed while wet meant 19th-century photographers had to carry portable darkrooms.

Platinum/palladium printing uses platinum or palladium salts instead of silver. The resulting image is exceptionally stable, with a tonal range that exceeds silver gelatin and a matte surface where the image is embedded in the paper fibers. Platinum prints are among the most archival photographic objects, lasting centuries without fading.

Chemigrams, a 20th-century invention by Pierre Cordier, use photographic chemistry applied to gelatin silver paper without a camera. The artist applies resists, varnishes, or oils to the paper surface, then alternates developer and fixer baths, producing images that are part photograph, part painting, part chemical reaction.

History and Origins

Alternative processes are, paradoxically, the original processes. Every photographic technique that is now called "alternative" was once the state of the art. The calotype was invented in 1841. The cyanotype in 1842. Wet plate collodion in 1851. The platinum print in 1873. These were not experimental or marginal methods. They were the primary ways photographs were made for decades.

What made them "alternative" was their replacement by industrialized photography. The gelatin silver print, introduced in the 1870s and perfected by the 1890s, used factory-coated paper with consistent emulsions, replacing the variable, hand-coated surfaces of earlier processes. Roll film, introduced by Kodak in 1888, replaced the glass plates and paper negatives of earlier methods. By the mid-20th century, the processes that had defined photography's first half-century were obsolete, practiced only by hobbyists and historians.

The revival began in the 1970s, as part of a broader interest in historical and handmade processes among photographers who felt that industrialized photography had become too uniform. Photographers like Jerry Uelsmann, who used darkroom compositing, and William Henry Jackson, who revisited 19th-century techniques, helped reframe alternative processes as artistic choices rather than technological limitations. By the 1990s, workshops and specialized suppliers had made alternative process materials available to a new generation of photographers.

Key Artists and Masterworks

Anna Atkins (1799-1871)

Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843) was the first book illustrated with photographic images. Atkins placed seaweed specimens directly on cyanotype-coated paper and exposed them to sunlight, producing white silhouettes of the specimens against Prussian blue backgrounds. The work is held in the collection of the New York Public Library and the British Library. Atkins's practice demonstrates that cameraless photography is as old as photography itself.

Sally Mann (b. 1951)

Mann's What Remains (2003) and her ongoing work with the wet plate collodion process represent the most prominent contemporary use of alternative process photography in fine art. Mann coats glass plates with collodion in the field, using a large-format view camera and a portable darkroom in a customized truck. The resulting images, including her series of landscapes at Civil War battlefields, have a physical and chemical presence that modern film cannot replicate. The collodion process produces artifacts, streaks, and uneven coatings that Mann incorporates as part of the image's meaning rather than treating them as defects.

R. J. Kern (b. 1978)

Kern's Ethereal Echoes project (2025) consists of forty silver gelatin chemigrams made during an artist residency at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. Kern uses Chromoskedasic techniques, altering silver gelatin prints with chemicals to produce shimmering, mirror-like surfaces that reference 19th-century daguerreotypes. The works are gold-toned, float-mounted on museum board, and framed in reclaimed wood. The project explores themes of mortality and remembrance through a process that is itself about chemical transformation. Read about the project at R. J. Kern.

Takeshi Shimizu (active from 2000s)

Shimizu, a Japanese photographer, has spent twenty years experimenting with antique cameras, vintage lenses, and 19th-century processes. He makes calotypes using the original 1840s recipe: paper soaked in iodizing solution, sensitized in silver nitrate, exposed in a handmade box camera, and developed in gallic acid. Shimizu describes the process as a connection to the history of photography: "I imagine that the early pioneers also repeated the same kinds of failures." Read his interview at Lomography Magazine.

Ki Seul Ki (b. 1983)

Ki Seul Ki's Liquid Light exhibition, shown at Chapter II in Seoul from May 30 to July 3, 2026, uses cameraless photography to question the conditions of photographic image-making. The artist applies liquid photographic emulsion (gelatin and silver halide in fluid form) to paper, then uses bleach and ink remover directly on the surface, adjusting their concentration as they react. The chemicals flow and interact across the surface, and the forms that remain are traces of the conditions under which the image came into being. The exhibition demonstrates how alternative process photography can be a conceptual practice, not just a historical revival. Read about the exhibition at Chapter II.

Dakota Mace (b. 1991)

Mace, a Diné artist, uses the chemigram process to create abstract portraits of the night sky, embellished with beadwork of traditional Navajo silver-smithing designs. Her work Náhookos Bika' II (2022), meaning "Central Fire" (the North Star), was exhibited in the 2026 group show Locus of a Gesture at Filter Photo in Chicago. The exhibition, curated by Kristie Kahns, brought together three artists working with chemical and reactive processes on gelatin silver paper. Read the review at New City Art.

Why Alternative Processes Now?

The revival of alternative process photography in the 2020s is driven by several factors. First, the dominance of digital photography has created a counter-movement toward physical, handmade processes. When anyone with a smartphone can produce a technically perfect image in seconds, the imperfections, unpredictability, and physical labor of alternative processes become valuable precisely because they cannot be replicated digitally.

Second, alternative processes produce images with specific material qualities that no other method can reproduce. The Prussian blue of a cyanotype, the soft matte surface of a salt print, the mirror-like quality of a daguerreotype, and the embedded image of a platinum print are all visually distinct from anything produced by modern film or digital sensors. These qualities are not aesthetic defects. They are the reason artists choose these processes.

Third, alternative process photography is slow. Tim Layton makes no more than three calotype exposures in a day, and sometimes none of them turn out. This slowness is not a limitation. It is the point. In an era of algorithmic perfection and infinite digital reproduction, photographers are choosing processes that require physical presence, chemical knowledge, and acceptance of failure. The slowness and variability of alternative processes create a relationship between the photographer and the image that is fundamentally different from the relationship created by digital capture.

Alternative Process Photography Today

The field is supported by a network of specialized suppliers (Bostick and Sullivan, Alternative Photographic Supplies), workshops (Penland School of Craft, Maine Media Workshops), and exhibitions. The 2026 exhibition Locus of a Gesture at Filter Photo in Chicago, reviewed in New City Art on July 29, 2026, demonstrated the range of contemporary alternative process practice. The show included David Ondrik's chemigrams using unconventional development techniques to produce violets and ochres from gelatin silver paper, Dakota Mace's chemigrams combining photographic chemistry with Diné beadwork traditions, and Daniel Hojnacki's cliché-verre prints, a historical technique where images are etched into glass plates coated in smoke soot and then printed photographically.

These artists are not making historical reproductions. They are using historical processes to make contemporary work that addresses themes of identity, memory, environmental crisis, and cultural continuity. The alternative process revival is not nostalgia. It is a recognition that these 19th-century techniques offer expressive possibilities that the dominant photographic technologies of the 20th and 21st centuries do not.

See Alternative Process Photography in Person

Alternative process prints must be seen in person because their material qualities, the texture of hand-coated paper, the tonal range of platinum, the blue of cyanotype, the mirror surface of a daguerreotype, cannot be reproduced in digital images. Look for Sally Mann's collodion work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Anna Atkins's cyanotypes are held at the New York Public Library and the British Library. For contemporary practice, watch the exhibition programs of Filter Photo in Chicago, the Center for Alternative Photography in New York, and Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.

For more on photographic processes, read our entries on film photography, digital photography, and cyanotype, or explore our blog post on how to read a painting to learn more about analyzing visual art across mediums.