Franz Fiedler (1885-1956)

TWO PHOTOGRAPHS

1910s - 1920s
Portrait of a Lady in Profile: Kallitype, 1910s. 23 × 17.2 cm. Upper left corner bent, traces of mounting at the top on verso. View of Nördlingen: Gelatin silver print with soft focus, early 1920s. 20.5 × 16.2 cm. Provenance: From the estate of PhDr. Antonín Dufek. Kallitype is an early noble photographic process used approximately between 1889 and 1915 as a less expensive alternative to the luxurious platinotype. Drawing paper was coated with a layer of ferric citrate and then silver nitrate, creating a complex compound sensitive to UV light. Since the chemicals were usually applied by hand with a brush, brush marks are often visible along the edges of the photograph. The image was contact-printed from a negative in daylight, then developed and fixed. Kallitypes were often toned in a solution of gold chloride (HAuCl₄) – the so-called "gold toning" – during which part of the elemental silver in the image was replaced by metallic gold. This shifted the color tone and, more importantly, significantly increased the archival stability of the photographs. Given the brown-violet tone of the offered photograph, it can be assumed that this particular example was not gold-toned.