Making new old, one brush stroke at a time

Nineteenth-century photography techniques are making a comeback

Photographer Ankit Chawla is not too picky about his workspace. It's hard to find a darkroom in his second-floor sun-lit studio-cum-home in Delhi's Gulmohar Park neighbourhood. So the 27-year-old turns to his washroom. Inside a pitch-dark cubbyhole, a washing machine and toilet jostle for space with a six-rack shelf and a bathtub overflowing with paint brushes, wooden frames and photo gear. The daylight-free cramped space allows Chawla to pursue his newest photographic adventure: he uses 19-century techniques that make the images look straight out of a sepia-tinted historical document.

Only, it takes anywhere between 24 hours and three days to achieve the old-world effect that an Instagram makeover would yield in less than a second.

"Getting your pictures printed from your home printer is easy. But people want something special, something that cannot be duplicated," says Chawla.

After having spent four years photographing expectant mothers and newborns at his studio called Giggles, Chawla attended a workshop last year in Delhi by a Goan photographer, Edson Berry Dias, who co-founded Goa Centre for Alternative Photography. A curious student, Chawla always had a lot of questions to ask about the tedious process and the results, to which Dias would say: "I don't know. It's for you to try it out."

The instructor had a point. "Each print is a limited-edition print," says Chawla, adding that the finished product depends on how strong the sun is. "The results are never the same."

Chawla has tried his hand at two techniques. The first method, called cyanotype, involves mixing two chemicals - ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide - with distilled water. The orange-ish solution is brushed across a medium - which could be anything from a water colour paper to a cotton cloth. Chawla then dries the surface using a hair dryer, puts the negative on top of it, and rushes to his terrace to expose it under the sun. "It takes 20 to 25 minutes for exposure, if the sun is strong," says Chawla, who sometimes has to wait in anticipation on his terrace for two to three hours on wintry, sunless days.

Next, he removes the negative and washes the image with water. At times, he dips the image in tea water or a saffron mixture obtained from palash flowers to add a vintage tint to the photograph.

The other method involves coating the medium with albumen mixed with silver nitrate, a harsh chemical that Chawla uses only after wearing gloves.

"The results are magical," says Chawla, who sells a 4-by-6 inch print prepared using the cyanotype technique for Rs 1,000-1,500.