​Curtis Steele • photographer • digital artist

In the 1970s, a friend living in the wine country of northern California and I visited an abandoned house in which I found several boxes of

4" x 5" and 5" x 7" glass plate negatives. Upon moving to Arkansas, I met a woman whose husband had been a photographer who had recently passed away. He had collected glass plate negatives and she gave me his collection.

Over the years I had made black and white prints in the darkroom from these glass plates. On a whim in 2004 I scanned one of these negatives in RGB and was taken by the arbitrary colorizations. 

I felt admiration for the unknown photographer who had made his own color chart to see how chroma would be recorded in monochrome.

I made all of these prints on an Epson 7600 printed on full-sheets of Rives BFK.