COLOR DIRECT POSITIVE PHOTOGRAPHY (RA4 REVERSAL)

I have to admit, I haven’t been this excited about anything photographic in a long time. I’ve been focusing on printmaking and illustration for the past few years but recently I started to feel the photography itch again. This color direct positive process has put me over the edge and now sure enough, I’ve started pulling cameras out of storage and restocking on darkroom supplies.

Without getting overly technical, a traditional photograph is generally made (I say generally because there are actually a number of different variations of the traditional photographic process) by exposing light-sensitive film in a camera. The film is then processed in chemicals to develop a negative image. That negative image is then transferred to light-sensitive photographic paper via a second exposure. The exposed photographic paper is then processed in chemicals which produces a final positive photograph (which is an inversion of the negative image). All of this is done in a darkroom. Using this process, the photographer can produce many identical copies of the photograph from the film negative.

The color reversal process that I’m describing here is quite different in that it does not use any film negative and allow the photographer to produce a one-off color positive image straight out of the camera, leaving behind no negative from which additional photographs can be made. This means that the resulting photograph is the only one of it’s kind, much like an original drawing or painting and tipping its hat to polaroid photography. This sense of rarity is fairly uncommon in photography, being a medium that typically celebrates multiples.

With no film being used at all, the final photographic paper is placed directly inside the camera and exposed. The paper is then removed and processed first in chemistry for black and white photographs, which produces a black and white negative image on the paper (by reacting with the metallic silver in the paper’s photographic emulsion but not the color dyes). The negative image acts as a built in mask which does pretty much what a separate film negative would do. Re-exposing the paper to light forms what will become a positive image through the black and white negative image. The paper is then processed in chemicals that develop the color positive image and bleach away the black and white negative image. It’s all quite magical and sounds more complicated than it is.

Below is a short summary video of my first go at the process.

Check out Ethan Moses’s YouTube video for a well explained summary of the process.

Special thanks to the late Ron Mowrey (Photo Engineer (PE)) for planting the seeds of this process in my mind some ten or so years ago. And thanks to Ethan Moses and Joe Van Cleave for sharing their experiments with the wider community so others can continue to see and get excited about processes like this.