ChromoGenIcs.com
Title
Chromogenics - Fine Art and Historical Photographs
Description
Chromogenics is one of those words that you see and wonder "what in the world is a Chromogenics?" It's actually a scientific word that loosely translates: The beginning of color. The name seemed fitting some 14 years ago when Greg Rumney and Rudy Gillard formed the company that specialized in custom color printing (remember that thing called a dark room?) and film processing. They also specialized in commercial/product and aerial photography. You name it, they would shoot it. In the late 1990s Rudy retired after a career spanning back to the late 1940s. With Greg at the helm the company began to turn in a new direction, one that he never would have foreseen. It began when he started doing reproductions of old historical photographs using his state of the art 4x5 camera and incredibly sharp Schneider lens. He found that he could make very large prints (7x9 feet) and they retained their sharpness! Since he had all the equipment to process film to his liking and had a very large darkroom it was a match made in heaven.
Greg, a local native of Humboldt County, grew up in Petrolia, a place nestled in a beautiful valley on the Lost Coast, the most westerly point on the continental United States. There he knew some of the old timers whose families were original settlers to the valley. He always inquired if they knew where he could find old photos of the local history. At first they trickled in one or two at a time and then other people heard that he was looking for old photos or negatives. He remembers one donor saying, "Why in the world would you want these old photos, they're just junk". "Yes", Greg said, "But one man's junk is another man's treasure".
Soon donations of old photos began arriving almost weekly. At the beginning of the new century, the spread of digital photography began to take a toll on the custom printing and commercial photo business, as many companies began doing their photography in-house. So Greg decided to start doing reproductions of his collection for some of the local businesses to hang as permanent collections. Soon people from all over were buying old photos that Greg would mat and frame to hang in their home or business. Word was getting out about his diverse collection that included logging photos from the Pacific Northwest dating back to the 1880s, an incredible collection of the British occupation of India that has to be seen to be believed, and thousands of images of planes, trains, and automobiles. Other topics covered by the collection include Victorian portraiture, motorcycles, towns, and nautical themes to name a few. Today Greg's collection is in the neighborhood of 70,000 images; he and his wife Penny work full time cataloging and digitizing the Historical Collection.
