An Albertype is a picture printed from a type of
gelatine
Gelatin or gelatine (from la, gelatus meaning "stiff" or "frozen") is a translucent, colorless, flavorless food ingredient, commonly derived from collagen taken from animal body parts. It is brittle when dry and rubbery when moist. It may also ...
-coated plate produced by means of a
photographic negative
In photography, a negative is an image, usually on a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film, in which the lightest areas of the photographed subject appear darkest and the darkest areas appear lightest. This reversed order occurs because th ...
. The process was invented by
Josef Albert,
a German photographer who owned and directed a studio and photo lab in
Augsburg
Augsburg (; bar , Augschburg , links=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German , label=Swabian German, , ) is a city in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, around west of Bavarian capital Munich. It is a university town and regional seat of the ' ...
,
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...
.
The technique is similar to
collotype
Collotype is a gelatin-based photographic printing process invented by Alphonse Poitevin in 1855 to print images in a wide variety of tones without the need for halftone screens. The majority of collotypes were produced between the 1870s and ...
, but substitutes the gel plate for the
lithographic stone used in collotype.
, invented in 1871 by Edwards, is another similar process.
Albert's innovation was to replace the copper or stone with glass, construct a mechanical press, and cover it with another gel layer, silicate mixed with gelatin, in order to produce about two thousand prints from each plate using etching presses and hand rollers. This new process was presented at the 1868 Photographic Exhibition in Hamburg and “albertype,” was the name given by Joseph Albert.
[The Historical Society of Pennsylvani]
"Albertype CompanyPhotographs (1910-1952)"
/ref> This technique was adopted by publishers creating thousands of postcards and viewbooks.
In 1890 Adolph and Herman L. Wittemann founded the Albertype Company, a postcard and viewbook publishing company in Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
, New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
. This company began to use what were then "new technologies" such as the albertype to reproduce photo-mechanical images. At that time they were able to collect negatives from the cities and towns of the United States and came to create more than 25,000 prints from 1890 to 1952.
References
Photographic processes dating from the 19th century
1869 establishments
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