SOLARIZATION
The term ‘‘solarization’’ is used to describe the effect
occurring when a negative or print is re-exposed to
light during development. Although there is continu-
ing debate about the accuracy of this term as com-
monly applied, the effect it describes is a distinct and
recognizable process that results in the tonal range of
the image changing to part positive, part negative
with the divisions of light and shade often bordered
by a soft outline. In the early 1930s one of the most
famous practitioners of this technique, Man Ray,
was the first to use this term, which had previously
been reversed to describe the intentional or acciden-
tal reversal of a negative image by extreme over-
exposure. The Daguerreotypists of the 1840s had
been familiar with problems of partial reversal on
their plates. Highlights had a tendency to record as a
delicate though darker shade of blue, making skies
appear unnaturally realistic on the normally mono-
chromatic image. This occurrence was not limited to
nineteenth-century emulsions. Minor White’s photo-
graph from 1955The Black Sunis a winter landscape
dominated by the strangeness of the sun, visually
reversed to a dark orb through accidental overexpo-
sure. White found poetic symbolism in this unex-
pected portrayal of ‘‘a dead planet,’’ caused by his
shutter freezing through extreme cold.
What Man Ray called solarization had been
known by the term ‘‘Sabatier effect,’’ which had
been in use since 1862 when Armand Sabatier, a
French scientist and amateur photographer, gave
his name to the phenomenon in a paper published
by the French Society of Photography. However, five
years previously the Journal of the Photographic
Society of London had printed a letter from one of
its members, William Jackson, entitledOn a Method
of Reversing the Action of Light on the Collodian Film
and Therefore Producing Transparent Positives,
which informed his readers how he had purposefully
obtained positive images by exposing his glass plates
to a faint light during their development. This is the
basic technique used to produce the Sabatier effect or
as it is often called, ‘‘pseudo-solarization’’ or even
Sabatier solarization to distinguish it from solariza-
tion caused by overexposure. A black and white
negative (or print) during development consists of
silver halide grains darkening as the chemical action
of the developer in time reduces these grains to metal-
lic silver. When exposed to a controlled level of light
in this state of partial development, the clearer parts
of the negative, (what would print as darker shad-
ows), will start to rapidly develop (or reduce) due to
the sudden exposure. Providing the light of this sec-
ond exposure is not too strong, which would result
very quickly in the total darkening of the image, the
highlights will in proportion to the shadows develop
less quickly due to the majority of these silver halide
grains already having been reduced. Where these two
areas of the negative meet, a thin, clear line can occur
due to the desensitizing effect of the action of light on
the developed highlights, preventing the edge of this
region from developing further. It is often inaccu-
rately referred to as a ‘‘Mackie line,’’ which is a
more subtle edge effect occurring during normal
development when unused developing agents within
the shadows of a negative diffuse into the edges of a
highlight causing an increase of development, seen as
a faint, soft outline.
The creative discovery of what is now commonly
termed solarization is credited to Man Ray and Lee
Miller in 1929. Despite his desire to be seen as a
Surrealist artist Man Ray was better known in his
time as a portrait photographer. Miller had come
to him as initially a student but was soon his assis-
tant, lover, model, and collaborator in his photo-
graphy. He would have been familiar with the idea
of solarization in the sense of the overexposure of a
negative but the accidental rediscovery of the Saba-
tier effect inspired him to make some of his most
seminal and original work. Miller was quoted in
1975 on her part in the process, giving a detailed
visual description of the results:Something crawled across my foot in the darkroom and I
let out a yell and turned on the light. I never did find out
what it was, a mouse or what. Then I realized that the
film was totally exposed: there in the developing tanks,
ready to be taken out, were a dozen practically fully
developed negatives of a nude against a black back-
ground. Man Ray grabbed them, put them in the hypo
and looked at them: the unexposed parts of the negative,
which had been the black background, had been
exposed by this sharp light that had been turned on
and they had developed and came right up to the edgeSOLARIZATION