From the late 1910s through the advent of digital photography and digital printing, silver gelatin (or gelatin silver) prints were made in the darkroom using negatives, enlargers, light and chemistry, the same as they have been since 1871.

Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints, in which the image consists of silver metal particles suspended in a gelatin layer. Gelatin silver papers are commercially manufactured by applying an emulsion of light-sensitive silver salts in gelatin to a sheet of paper coated with a layer of baryta, a white pigment mixed with gelatin. The sensitized paper is exposed to light through a negative and then developed out. William Henry Fox Talbot introduced the basic chemical process in 1839, but the more complex gelatin silver process did not become the most common method of printing black-and-white photographs until the late 1910s. Because the silver image is suspended in a gelatin emulsion that rests on top of a coated paper, gelatin silver prints can be sharply defined and highly detailed in comparison to some older print styles like platinum/palladium, in which the image is absorbed directly into the fibers of the paper.

All silver gelatin prints offered by Monochrome Gallery are printed by hand in a traditional darkroom on double-weight fiber base paper, and have an estimated archival rating of over 150 years. Some are also toned using selenium or sepia, which increases the archival rating of the print by converting metallic silver to a more stable silver compound.