Photograph of a printed black and white photo and a sheet of beige marble-textured paper on a wooden surface.

Iron Film Developer

A laboratory workspace with a large bag labeled 'Sodium Carbonate', a smaller bag of baking soda, a brown bottle labeled 'Iron Citrate', a black container labeled 'Experimental Photo Chemistry', a camera, and digital scale on a black countertop with a black brick wall background.

Iron Film Developer

Why it Matters

Abundance. Iron, especially rusty iron requires no special extractive process. It is available all around us. The first iron developer was actually developed in the 1930s but because, at the time, it was hard to play around with exposure due to the cameras available at the time, it was abandoned to history. Curiosolab is researching this area in conjunction with the Sustainable Darkroom.

So in order to use iron as a developer, I had to over expose my images by two stops. My first experiments were quite ethereal and scratchy, but once I got the temperature correct, the results were really surprised me.

A moth resting on the ground amidst leaves and plant debris, in black and white with specks and scratches.

A small wooden cross placed on a rock with grass and small flowers around it.

Black and white image of small flowers with numerous small petals, possibly flowers or plants, with numerous scratches and specks on the photo surface.