Frank Remembers Strippers!

[Dave Hughes]

Memories from Frank Romano of this obsolete skill.

Remember film—and film strippers? The switch from letterpress to offset litho brought us into the world of graphic arts cameras, darkrooms, and chemical processing. Workers were hunched over light tables cutting goldenrod and rubylith sheets. Ah, memories.

https://d3a577syzx0or3.cloudfront.net/video/2024-09-frank-film.mp4

https://whattheythink.com/video/121316-frank-remembers-strippers/

[Ted Lavin]

It makes my wife crazy when I say I used to be a stripper and a lot of guys liked my work lol

[Tommy]

I absolutely loved being a "stripper". I started as a cameraman shooting 20x24 Kodalith negatives for burning plates for text books.

We tray developed and many days had brown hands from the Kodalith developer. Cuts were a lot of fun in the acetic acid stop bath.

Later I got to strip halftime negatives into the pages to print the photos on the pages. I "just missed" linotype by about a year but my boss was an old newspaper typesetting with tons of stories of hot lead.

[David Eaves]

Spent many an hour stooped over a lightbox assembling film separations, cutting masks, making daylight and darkroom negs and positives, fiddling with spacers to make chokes and spreads.

Lovely work, it was as interesting as working with hot metal. I also worked in a studio producing newspapers where everything was made with bromides (no intermediate film, only final dish developed negs for platemaking) and I enjoyed using Agfa's Copyproof materials, making half tones on the process cameras and "messing about" combining multiple exposures to make line and tone vignettes.

We called it the "dark arts"!