An orotone or gold tone is one of many types of

photographic Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many ...

print which can be made from a negative. An orotone photograph is created by printing a positive on a glass plate precoated with a silver gelatin

emulsion An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally Miscibility, immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation. Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloi ...

. Following exposure and development, the back of the plate is coated with banana oil impregnated with gold-colored pigment, to yield a gold-toned image. Alternatively, the developed glass plate can be gold-leafed by hand with a 23-karat gold leaf. Being printed on glass, orotone images are extremely fragile and often require specialized frames in order to prevent breakage. Other types of prints can be made with the same negative used to make an orotone. Consequently, silver gelatin prints and

platinotype Platinum prints, also called ''platinotypes'', are photographic prints made by a monochrome photographic printing, printing process involving platinum. Platinum tones range from warm black, to reddish brown, to expanded mid-tone grays that are ...

s (platinum and palladium prints) are also made by those who produce orotone prints.

Then and now

The making of orotone prints was a contemporary art in the early twentieth century. Orotones are often to be seen in interiors associated with the

Arts and Crafts movement The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America. Initiat ...

. Many of these orotones are by the

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

photographer

Edward S. Curtis Edward Sheriff Curtis (February 19, 1868 – October 19, 1952; sometimes given as Edward Sherriff Curtis) was an American photographer and ethnologist whose work focused on the American West and Native American people. Sometimes referred to a ...

, who produced hundreds of orotone photographs of Native Americans during his career. Curtis developed the "Curt-Tone", using techniques which he claimed were superior. Curtis promoted his process as follows:

Sally Larsen Sally Larsen (born 1954) is an American artist and photographer. Early life Larsen was born in 1954 in of mixed Apache and Aleut people, Aleut descent. Career Larsen exhibits photographs, videos and paintings in San Francisco, New York City, Lo ...

(who gold-leafs each developed plate by hand)Rexer, Lyle (2002). ''Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde, the New Wave in Old Processes''. New York: Abrams. pp. 78–79. . and Ryan Zoghlin are modern practitioners of orotone photography.

References

External links

A Virtual Exhibition on Orotone Photographs, Created for the University of Washington Special Collections Division by Christy Hansen, Class of 2011 Museology Graduate Program
{Dead link, date=April 2020 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes
A Curtis orotone.

A second example.

Photographic techniques Contemporary art