I had never encountered this type of print equipment before my internship at TYPA. A giant large format camera (from Wikipedia) immediately before the mainstream introduction of computers to the process, much of the industry used large-format cameras to make emulsion-based (film) copies of text and images. This film was assembled (planning (UK) or stripping) and used to expose another layer of emulsion on a plate, thus copying images from one emulsion to another. This method is still used; however, as digital prepress technology has become less cost and less labour intensive, more efficient and reliable digital automation has been introduced to almost every part of the process.
You have the front-end of the camera and scanner bed from one room, which you can adjust to photograph your composition or work. During this internship so far it was used by artist Haruka Yamada to create intricate copies of paper sketches, exposed onto high quality films and then used in the Carbon Print Process.
THE HISTORY
This prepress camera came from a company in Leipzig, called VEB Polygraph. The ruins of their factory still stands, from what I can see online. Before VEB, the company had been Hoh & HahneThe History: This prepress came from a company in Leipzig, called VEB Polygraph. The ruins of their factory still stands, from what I can see online. Before VEB, the company had been Hoh & Hahne, founded in 1899 as a manufacturer of consumer goods for photography.
The ruins of the VEB factory https://www.lipinski.de/polygraph/
It has been hard to determine much more about the camera's origins, and TBH I am not sure how much purpose it would serve except my own curiosity. Its exact date of production. Coming from the GDR, it makes sense that equipment of this kind spread across the Soviet Union. Its schematics, which are in German, English, and Russian, can be found here, and will be updated and organised as time goes on.
SOME WORKS CREATED
The Observatory at Tartu donated a part of its archive to TYPA, well donated is a stretch – it was more like scrapped its old books. Included in these documents and journals was the negative films of the Atlas of Star of the Northern Hemisphere in 1855, F. W. A. Argelander and others, Atlas des nördlichen gestirnten Himmels für den Anfang des Jahres 1855. Atlas der Himmelszone zwischen 1° und 23° südlicher Declination für den Anfang des Jahres 1855 : als Fortsetzung des Bonner Atlas der nördlichen gestirnten Himmels -- --, 1951, /z-wcorg/.
These were A2 size negatives, used in the lithographic reproduction of these drawings. I was inspired to explore the potential of scale which this camera could offer. Creating small negatives from these, in a series of 42. The negatives were placed into a photo album and later digitally scanned and used in the ‘Digital Lasercutting Project’.
The second experiment was to create portraits of the staff using the camera. These were made with the gum bichromate process, which involves a coloured gum dichromate solution painted directly onto the paper and exposed in UV against the negative. It took a great deal of experimentation to get the correct images. Clearer instructions can be found in the link above – as I am not a photography specialist. I did have the idea to use this process to create large prints of the night sky, but the hazardous nature of dichromate put me off.
With the gum bichromate process, you are able to mix any pigment with the gum solution. It would be exciting to add certain ‘smart pigments’, such as the thermochromic pigments, which could give some interesting results. This will definitely be explored in the future should a less toxic process become available.
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