Photogravure (in French héliogravure) is a process for printing photographs, also sometimes used for reproductive intaglio printmaking. It is a photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained (adding a pattern to the plate) and then coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio plate that can reproduce detailed continuous tones of a photograph. The process was important in 19th-century photography, but by the 20th century was only used by some fine art photographers. By the mid-century it was almost extinct, but has seen a limited revival.
History
History of process The earliest forms of photogravure were developed by two original pioneers of photography itself, first Nicéphore Niépce in France in the 1820s, and later Henry Fox Talbot in England. Niépce was seeking a means to create photographic images on plates that could then be etched and used to make prints on paper with a traditional printing press. He used prints (engravings etc.), waxing the paper to make it translucent, then laying this on a copper plate coated with light-sensitive bitumen. Niépce's early images were among the first photographs, pre-dating daguerreotypes and the later wet collodion photographic process. But the process was little used, not least because the original engraving was all but destroyed. But once a "transparent photographic positive" became possible, interest revived. Talbot, inventor of the calotype paper negative process, wanted to make paper prints that would not fade. He worked on his photomechanical process in the 1850s and patented it in 1852 ('photographic engraving') and 1858 ('photoglyphic engraving'). Photogravure in its mature form was developed in 1878 by Czech painter Karel Klíč, who built on Talbot's research.:4 This process, the one still in use today, is called the Talbot-Klič process.
History of use Because of its high quality and richness, photogravure was used for both original fine art prints in the form of photographs manipulated by various means on the negative and for photo-reproduction of works from other media such as paintings. From the 1880s, the Talbot-Klič process was used commercially for very high quality reproductions of old master prints, excelling in capturing variations in tone.
Photogravure practitioners, such as Peter Henry Emerson, brought the art to a high standard in the late 19th century. This continued with the work of Alfred Stieglitz in the early 20th century, especially in relation to his publication Camera Work. This publication also featured the photogravures of Alvin Langdon Coburn who was a fine gravure printer and envisioned his photographic work as gravures rather than other photo-based processes. The speed and convenience of silver-gelatin photography eventually displaced photogravure, which fell into disuse after large photogravure projects such as Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian, published between 1907 and 1930 with more than two thousand plates. One of the last major portfolios of fine art photogravures was Paul Strand's Photographs of Mexico of 1940, reissued as The Mexican Portfolio in 1967 by Da Capo Press for Aperture, in an edition of 1,000 with twenty hand-pulled gravures. The process was revived from the 1970s by the American printer Jon Goodman, who learned it in Europe and in 1978 established a photogravure workshop for Aperture at Millerton, New York, where he printed portfolios after Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. Photogravure is now actively practiced in several dozen workshops around the world. Contemporary artists working in the medium include Sama Alshaibi. Photogravure may be used in combination with other print processes.
Stamps Photogravure has often been used to print stamps. For example, between 1934 and 1936, stamps of King George V were produced by the British postal service using photogravure, as were the majority of British stamps from then until 1996. In the United States, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing began printing stamps in gravure from its own press in 1971.
Qualities
Photogravure registers a wide variety of tones, through the transfer of etching ink from an etched copper plate to special dampened paper run through an etching press. The unique tonal range comes from photogravure's variable depth of etch, that is, the shadows are etched many times deeper than the highlights. Unlike half-tone processes which vary the size of dot, the depth of ink wells is varied in a photogravure plate. The human eye resolves these fine variations into a continuous tone image. Photogravure is distinguished from rotogravure in that photogravure uses a flat copper plate etched rather deeply and printed by hand, while in rotogravure, as the name implies, a rotary cylinder is only lightly etched, and it is a factory printing process for newspapers, magazines, and packaging. The Getty Conservation Institute's The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes provides guidelines for identifying photogravures and distinguishing them from rotogravure prints. In French, the correct term for photogravure is héliogravure, while the French term photogravure refers to any photo-based etching technique.
Technique
Photogravure plates go through several distinct stages:
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