Least Toxic Alternative Process

Hello,

 

What are considered the safest of the alternative processes?

 

TIA

Albumen

Albumen or Salt print are good candidates, but Cyanotype is chemically safer. Silver Nitrate is a lot more toxic than Potassium Hexacyanoferrate.

I might consider an azotype even "safer" than cyanotype. The "emulsion" is plain starch, and it's developed with ammonia -- commercially, anhydrous ammonia is used, and that's pretty nasty stuff, but in small quantity one could use ammonium hydroxide. IIRC, there's not even a sensitizer needed on the starch, it just has to be applied from solution under subdued light (exposure to light makes it less susceptible to staining by ammonia). You can buy prepared azotype paper, as "blueline" paper for making blueprints. It's slow, requiring a few seconds of contact exposure under very strong light to produce an image, and it can be handled briefly in white room light.

 

In terms of getting a "photographic" result, though, I'd tend toward salted paper. Silver nitrate isn't as toxic as all that; you'd want to keep it off your skin anyway because of the black stains it produces. And if you can salt the paper with iodide and bromide as well as chloride salts, the resulting paper can be sensitive enough to use for pretty conventional contact prints.

I think that anthotype is the safer as sensitizer is made of flower's petal.

Christian

Cyanotype is considered a fairly safe technique, and there are even pre-treated sheets sold for school use in primary schools, etc. Anthotype is theoretically the safest since it only uses flower petals but, I suppose, you could find some deadly coloured flowers and that would be that... The book 'Overexposure' by Shaw and Rossol covers every chemical that I've come across and helps you evaluate your own risk as well as the toxicity risks.

 

An alternative, depending on why you are asking the question, might be to use POP.

 

Cheers, Richard

VanDyke is very nice and is as safe as the silver nitrate it contains, so don't drink it. Don't add contrasting agents, use contrasty negs. Chromium is very toxic and hard on the enviroment.