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Collection, Photography

Historical film archive and darkroom printing – The Cultural Revolution in China

Last month, I received a commission from a thrift collector who wanted me to use traditional darkroom enlargement techniques to help him enlarge a batch of rare negatives taken by a photographer in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution.

These are digital archives scanned from films:

Put the pile of negatives I got into a negative bag. Go into my simple darkroom to get to work.

Contact sheet means to exposure adter laminating film and paper together to produce multiple 1:1 size prints on a single sheet of paper. Just like viewing thumbnails in the file manager.

Make a contact sheet

Although the film is heavily curled due to its age, the contents and shading of the film are well preserved. I used Lekai #3 (medium high contrast) photo paper to enlarge. Here are the results.

Enlarged photo and test samples
Five enlarged photos

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