"Mädesüss"

gelatin silver print on baryta, hand colored with protein-based dye

signed, numbered, and dated on mount recto

Photographer Martin Waldbauer deals with analog photography techniques and processing methods that are slowly being forgotten. He deliberately set this botanical study against a white background and used natural light and an 8x10 inch view-camera. The print was made as a contact print, whereby the negative is placed directly onto the photographic paper and exposed. The size of the print thus corresponds to the size of the negative and therefore to the original image in the camera. This very direct way of producing photographic prints has a long tradition and goes back to the first photographs, such as William Henry Fox Talbot's The Leaf of a Plant from 1844 from the famous book The Pencil of Nature, 1844-1846, plate VII.
To give the plant a special character, Waldbauer coated the exposure with a protein-based dye. Hand-coloring with protein-based dyes requires great skill, is very time-consuming and does not forgive mistakes. The gelatine of the photo paper is able to completely absorb the dissolved dye components of the protein varnish. As a result, the color "melts" into the gelatine coating of the photographic paper in such a way that the color application is barely visible after drying.¹
The photographer, who lives near Passau in Bavaria, chose a Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) as the plant. The plant in the family Rosaceae is a typical representative of nutrient-rich damp and wet meadows in large parts of Europe. As early as the 3^rd millennium BC, meadowsweet was an ingredient in beers in England and Scotland. In Scotland, the plant was also added to graves at this time. Later, in the later Iron Age, it was used as a dye for fabrics, among other things. Beekeepers rubbed their new beehives with the honey-scented herb so that the bees would accept it. Meadowsweet is still often added to mead today to give it a more pleasant taste. In early modern England, the flowers were boiled in wine to be drunk as a mood enhancer.² The English common name meadowsweet dates from the 16^th century. It did not originally mean 'sweet plant of the meadow', but a plant used for sweetening or flavouring mead.³
(Christoph Fuchs)

1
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiweißlasur (German, 2023-11-15)

2
see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echtes_Mädesüß (German, 2023-11-15)

3
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipendula_ulmaria (2023-11-15)