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Photogravure class, day 1
Jan. 9th, 2010 08:27 amIt's early on Saturday, I have to leave soon for day two.
This is not meant to be a balanced or complete description of photogravure history, it's just what appealed to me enough to remember :)
Photogravure is the process of creating an etching plate from a photograph (etching plates have small indentations in them that are filled with ink; the print is made by pressing paper into the inked plate which transfers the ink to the paper - the deeper the indentation, the more ink it holds, and the darker it prints onto the paper.) After the plate is made, the prints are created by a mechanical, not a chemical process.
There's a long history of the artistic use of photogravure. It was invented as a way of producing "archival" prints free from the fading common to prints created using chemical processes, as well as prints from a reusable negative or positive (as opposed to a single image produced from an exposure like the daguerreotype.)
It was taken up by the pictorialists, who (basically) liked their photographs arty and without hard edges. It fell out of favor with the "straight photography" movement who liked their images unsullied (so so they asserted) by artistic modes or styles.
If you do an image search on "photogravure" you'll see images all over the map from messy plates to extremely sharp to woo-woo arty/dreamy.
(running out of time)
The guy giving the class does his own work as well as photogravure work for other artists and clearly loves the process and loves sharing what he knows. He also has copies of some of the earliest photogravure work such as The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow and The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation which we got to look at and which these linked images do absolutely no justice to.
Intellectually I'm attracted to the idea of an art "thing", a tangible object created by artistic process that then has value.
Emotionally I respond to the mix of photographic realism with the moods and feelings evoked by some of the techniques available in non-photographic visual art.
And that just completely fails to express anything LOL
I guess I feel like there's a visual vocabulary available in pure photographic images that can be extended by the visual vocabulary available in traditional art processes and that photogravure is a way of seamlessly bringing them together.
Today, we expose and etch.
I also love hanging out with arty people.
This is not meant to be a balanced or complete description of photogravure history, it's just what appealed to me enough to remember :)
Photogravure is the process of creating an etching plate from a photograph (etching plates have small indentations in them that are filled with ink; the print is made by pressing paper into the inked plate which transfers the ink to the paper - the deeper the indentation, the more ink it holds, and the darker it prints onto the paper.) After the plate is made, the prints are created by a mechanical, not a chemical process.
There's a long history of the artistic use of photogravure. It was invented as a way of producing "archival" prints free from the fading common to prints created using chemical processes, as well as prints from a reusable negative or positive (as opposed to a single image produced from an exposure like the daguerreotype.)
It was taken up by the pictorialists, who (basically) liked their photographs arty and without hard edges. It fell out of favor with the "straight photography" movement who liked their images unsullied (so so they asserted) by artistic modes or styles.
If you do an image search on "photogravure" you'll see images all over the map from messy plates to extremely sharp to woo-woo arty/dreamy.
(running out of time)
The guy giving the class does his own work as well as photogravure work for other artists and clearly loves the process and loves sharing what he knows. He also has copies of some of the earliest photogravure work such as The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow and The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation which we got to look at and which these linked images do absolutely no justice to.
Intellectually I'm attracted to the idea of an art "thing", a tangible object created by artistic process that then has value.
Emotionally I respond to the mix of photographic realism with the moods and feelings evoked by some of the techniques available in non-photographic visual art.
And that just completely fails to express anything LOL
I guess I feel like there's a visual vocabulary available in pure photographic images that can be extended by the visual vocabulary available in traditional art processes and that photogravure is a way of seamlessly bringing them together.
Today, we expose and etch.
I also love hanging out with arty people.
