Bromoil 101 - or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love to Bomb

Bromoils are at once the most fun, and the most frustrating, of the prints I make. Like any strict mistress, they demand your undivided time and attention. And lately I know I am letting the bromoil mistress down – in fact, she’s probably not going to return my next phone call.

I have had early successes and recent failures with this process. This piece above is my last marginal success, one I managed to ink up on a matrix that somehow was the last to get through the tanning/bleaching process before my chemicals rolled over and died. After inking this print with some minor difficulty, subsequent matrices from the same tanning/bleaching session went straight into the garbage – nine of them, in fact. I had bombed - completely! Once the shock of sudden failure wore off, I held the wake for their dead little souls. They looked ugly in death, smeared black ink gone gray and pasty, obliterating the latent image in the paper.



Bromoil 101: When the bleaching/tanning chemistry goes off, the gelatin in the emulsion of a silver-gelatin darkroom paper will neither swell nor harden – a reaction needed in order for the inks to either be repelled off, thus showing the image’s lighter areas, or to be absorbed proportionately, in keeping with the darker tonal ranges of the image. The beauty of bromoil is watching the bleached-away image reappear by the brushed application of lithographic inks. In my case, even using exhausted chemistry, the images still bleached away normally, thus no clue was given that I was about to sit down and turn these matrices into a pile of indistinguishable blobs of goo.

Pretending to have pulled myself up by the bootstraps from this lesson, I went straight out and bought new chemistry, determined to get right back in the saddle, as it were. The chemicals arrived within days, glittering at me through their plastic jugs and waiting for the moment I would mix them up and begin again.

That was last January, and the jugs are now on the shelf in the closet of my darkroom.

I’ve been blaming my busy year on this procrastination, whenever a bromoil-related discussion, sale or comment occurred, and I would needlessly defend my slackness to people who had no clue of the trauma that had secretly frozen me, by babbling on about the workshops I had planned or the backed up film canisters awaiting development. No one knew, and no one cared.

Except for the mistress, of course.

I still am not ready to satisfy her and now I am running out of excuses. My last arts festival of the year is a week or so off, and my last workshop was over a month ago – what stretches ahead for me after the arts fest are the “down” months of winter, when I can hole up and work contentedly for a few months. I always look forward to this time of year, so this stage fright is a weird thing to be facing.

I know the reason I bombed was due to exhausted chemistry, so I have every reason to expect my next session will turn out something good. I still need the benevolence of the bromoil mistress on my side, though. I hope when I get around to making that call to her, she’ll be home.