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Is Beauty Old-Fashioned?
When EXIT – Image and Culture asked for permission to reproduce an image from this site in their upcoming issue Pictorialism, I happily obliged. Only when I received a complimentary issue did I understand the significance of this publication. In addition to being beautifully designed and printed, the entire issue (175 pages) is devoted to Pictorialism and its ‘reheating’. In her introduction, editor Rosa Olivares points out that while the Pictorialism of the late 1800’s was the avant-garde of the time “shaking the very foundations of the visual arts establishment,” today many consider it anachronistic or old-fashioned. But recently “Ever more young artists are inclined to take up this type of photography, in spite of fashions … And it is not just a matter of the reconceptualisation of the tableau vivant … but also the recovery of a certain type of beauty still alive among us.”
The journal includes a dozen articles by photographers, historians and critics as well as beautiful examples of both traditional and contemporary pictorial photographs like those of Desiree Dolron, Jeff Bark and Anoek Steketee.
Read “Is Beauty Old-Fashioned?” by Rosa Olivares
Continue reading "Is Beauty Old-Fashioned?" »
“Not long ago I had your portfolio of gravures in my hand and also your book Naturalistic Photography. Both took me back many years–and both seem still alive.” - Alfred Stieglitz 1933 Peter Henry Emerson and
American Naturalistic Photography
May 3—September 7, 2008
Minneapolis, April 22, 2008—America’s first movement of creative photography and its revolutionary founder, Peter Henry Emerson, are the subjects of a new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA.) Nearly one hundred naturalistic photographs by Emerson and twenty other photographers will be on view May 3 through September 7, 2008. Drawn largely from the MIA’s permanent collection, these sensitively portrayed images span the movement’s history from the 1890s to the 1930s. Other images on display include those by Edward Curtis, Alfred Stieglitz, Henry Troth, and Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr.
Continue reading "MIA Naturalistic Photography Exhibit" »
 He has made Apollo his own engraver.
- Brighton Gazette, 1858
A ‘photogenic drawing’ erroneously attributed to Henry Fox Talbot was recently pulled from a high-profile Sotheby’s auction because the “worlds leading Talbot expert” pronounced that the image may not be Fox Talbot’s and in fact might predate any photograph known to exist. (“An Image is a Mystery for Photo Detectives”, New York Times 4/17/08 p. B1.)
The expert quoted in the article is Dr. Larry Schaaf, an independent photographic historian based in Baltimore, Maryland. Schaaf is the founder and Director of The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot archives http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk and was elected the 2005 Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. Schaaf’s books include Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography (Yale University Press); The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton University Press); and In Focus: William Henry Fox Talbot Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum.
According to Dr. Schaaf, “It often surprises people that the inventor of photography on paper, William Henry Fox Talbot, was also the father of photogravure... Equally striking is the fact that Talbot actively worked on photogravure for the last twenty-five years of his life, a span of time more than double that which he devoted to photography itself.”
Photogravure.com is privileged to be able to include in its text section the essay by Dr. Schaaf, “Etchings of Light” written as the introduction to the exhibition catalog, Sun Pictures; Talbot and Photogravure that accompanied an exhibition of the same title at the gallery, Hans Kraus, Jr., in October of 2003. Included in this catalog is a selection of outstanding Fox Talbot photogravures and it alone is an invaluable resource for anyone serious about studying the history of photogravure.
Many thanks to Dr. Schaaf and Hans Kraus, Jr. for allowing the inclusion of this important essay on this site and for their continued support.
 Louisiana native Debbie Fleming Caffery makes photographs that are anchored at the intersection of earth and spirit. An early series documents the sugarcane harvest that was part of the fabric of her childhood. The haunting images of the cane workers in the fields, often made in the shadowy light of dawn, portray a vanishing culture familiar to those who have lived with it, but a world apart to most. Composed in lush black tones, the photographs suggest an atavistic relationship to earth and fire, light and darkness. In 1984, Caffery began Polly, a poignant and moving collective portrait of the late Polly Joseph, a solitary and proud African-American woman living in the sugarcane country of Louisiana. Shot in the dim light of Polly’s cabin, these masterfully printed photographs not only capture the extraordinary expressiveness of Caffery’s subject, but the expressive characteristics of the medium itself. It is clear in these portraits – collected in a book published by Twin Palms Publishers in 2004 – that Caffery seeks nothing less than the spirit. Whether working in the cane fields or among rural cultures of Mexico, her photographs collect visual mysteries that always hint at that undefined territory between this world and the next. Her newest project, Deseos Sobre Todo (Desire Overall), has won her the 2005 Guggenheim fellowship and focuses on prostitutes and their customers at a rural Mexican brothel. Since moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Caffery has worked on photographic projects for several area agencies, including Futures for Children, an Albuquerque-based Native American mentoring program aimed at keeping children in school.
-from the University of Kentucky Art Museum - May Lecture Series , Feb.2006
Paul Taylor, Howard Greenberg and Debbie Fleming Caffery worked tirelessly to produce this exquisite photogravure. For information contact Howard Greenberg Gallery.
 On Exhibit:
Peter Miller
In Mongolia
2 October - 1 November 2007
Fancis Kyle Gallery
9 Maddox Street, London WIS 2QE
T: 0207499 6870
For his second exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery American printmaker Peter Miller is showing a range of his characteristic work over the past seven years in photogravure. The new exhibition centres on journeys Miller has made in northwest Mongolia. In this frontierland where the Gobi Desert, steppe grasslands, Altai Mountains and lake country come together, the artist travelled by horse or camel, staying close to the surface textures of landscape which have always fascinated him: rocks, sands, gopher holes, stream crossings, perhaps most of all those seas of grasses responding in endlessly shifting, semi-circular patterns to the pull of wind and weather
Roofs of Paris Louis Armand Hippolyte Fizeau, 1843
Malcolm Daniel, The Curator in charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum and an expert in the early history of photogravure has generously agreed to allow photogravure.com to post his important essay, "The Beginnings of Photogravure in Nineteenth-Century France." This essay is adapted from a paper first presented at a colloquium on photogravure at the Institute for Research in Art / Graphicstudio, University of South Florida, Tampa, March 22-24, 1995. It was published in French translation in Graver la Lumière: L’héliogravure d’Alfred Stieglitz à nos jours ou la reconquête d’un instrument perdu (Vevey, Switzerland: Fondation William Cuendet & Atelier de Saint-Prex, Musée Jenisch, 2002). Hank Hine invited Malcolm to explore the topic at the colloquium in Tampa and Jon Goodman, a fellow participant in Tampa, suggested that he publish the paper as part of the Musée Jenisch exhibition catalogue. Download PDF article
 Let’s face it; photogravure needs all the good press it can get. That is why I am happy to have learned that in its April 2007 issue (B&W; Issue 50). Black and White magazine featured an interview with photographer and photogravure printer, Andrew Xenios.
Xenios who is American-born, lives in Merida, Mexico. He was trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and his work can be found in private collections as well as prestigious museum collections around the world. Download Article (PDF)
 ALFRED STIEGLITZ and His Circle: EDWARD STEICHEN and GERTRUDE KASEBIER
June 22 - August 2007 Santa Fe's Andrew Smith Gallery opens an exhibit of classic photographs by ALFRED STIEGLITZ, EDWARD STEICHEN and GERTRUDE KASEBIER on Thursday, June 22, 2007.
 Peter Miller has assembled a 'personal favorites' collection of contemporary photogravure practitioners and posted the gallery on Luminous-Lint. A short introduction accompanies the on line exhibit....
visit exhibit
Image Copyright Lothar Osterburg
ART REVIEW - from the Los Angeles Times
By Leah Ollman
Peter Henry Emerson took both sides in the late 19th century debate about photography's status as an art. First, he fiercely defended the medium's expressive potential, laying out his case in a landmark 1889 book. A year after its publication, however, Emerson reversed his stance and asserted that photography's technical constraints trumped its artistic possibilities after all.
The debate itself — carried out not just internally, Emerson versus Emerson, but also heatedly in photography journals and associations — comprises a crucial but remote chapter in the medium's history. A century later, the arguments have receded, become quaint, while Emerson's photographs endure — deeply beautiful, evocative works that make the most convincing case of all for the medium's power.
 Emerson, born in 1856, spent his childhood on his family's sugar plantation in Cuba and in the U.S. but settled permanently in England as a teenager. He took up photography in the early 1880s, using it almost exclusively to explore the marshlands and rural lifestyles of the coastal region of East Anglia. Over a decade, the period covered in the Getty Museum's sumptuous show, "The Old Order and the New: P.H. Emerson and Photography, 1885-1895," he published six books and two portfolios of photographs and text on the area. Rail travel had recently made the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk accessible to tourists, shifting land values and threatening the traditional ways of the region's farmers and fisher folk. Several other photographers published travel guides to the area and its attractions, but Emerson adopted a more anthropological approach, keyed to understanding and preserving the manners and customs of the locals. In attitude, he aligned with John Ruskin and William Morris in championing pre-industrial labor; aesthetically, he found inspiration in paintings of ennobled peasantry by Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage. Emerson's photographs showing fowl hunters, hay gatherers and reed cutters make poignant records of passing ways of life. They also manifest what Emerson regarded as the essence of photography — its ability to present a naturalistic image, from life. To him, that meant replicating the way the eye registers a scene, with the object of chief attention in sharpest focus and the rest more softly defined. His notion was deemed radical in its day, an upstart challenge to the more popular practice of combination printing, joining multiple negatives to create a narrative scene in crisp focus from edge to edge. One of Emerson's most exquisite images, and a prime example of his concept of naturalistic photography, is "Gathering Water Lilies," printed in platinum in the 1887 masterwork "Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads." Emerson's composition leads the eye directly to a white blossom being lifted from the water by a woman leaning over the edge of a rowboat. Dense reeds behind and tree branches to one side seem to shelter the boat in its placid pocket of the marsh. The picture is a harmonious gem but also part of an informative chronicle of labor: The lilies served as bait of sorts for a type of fish caught in bow nets, like the one folded behind the boat's oarsman. The exhibition, organized by the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, England, in association with the Getty, surveys well Emerson's practice, his context and his contemporaries. It concludes with selections from his final photographic project, the graphically spare, atmospherically rich "Marsh Leaves" (1895). Hung next to kindred lithographs by Whistler, these final pictures form a coda of understated drama to Emerson's photographic career. Reductive and unsentimental, they distill the unpeopled landscape to silhouetted forms in lush, charcoal tones. Their vast, empty spaces invite philosophical reflection. Emerson could be an arrogant showman (issuing medals with his own likeness to photographers he deemed worthy) and a great wit (publishing his renunciation of photographic art in the form of a funeral notice). Above all, he was an impassioned, sensitive observer committed to both visual and emotional truth. "Remember," he wrote to students of photography, "that your photograph is a rough index of your mind; it is a sort of rough confession on paper."
 From The PressTelegram.com
By Jim Farber, Staff Writer
PETER HENRY Emerson is the most important and influential 19th-century photographer of whom you've probably never heard.
Born May 13, 1856, in Cuba, the son of a British sugar plantation owner and fourth cousin to Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was briefly in America during the Civil War before moving to England, where he attended Cambridge University. Emerson was a renowned athlete and outdoorsman, a physician, a self-styled anthropologist, a devoted Darwinian, a prolific writer/lecturer and a vitriolic critic of those who contradicted his philosophy of photography as "pictorial art." For the last 23 years, one of the great collections of Emerson's published work has been resting serenely in the vaults of the Getty Museum. Now these remarkable albums are on display as part of a major collaborative exhibition "The Old Order and the New: P.H. Emerson and Photography, 1885-1895." "Why didn't we display them before?" the Getty's curator of photography, Weston Naef, asked, as he presided over the exhibition's opening in March. "There are about 18 published volumes. And if you bring all 18 out and open each to one page, they would only fill two very large tables." The key to making the exhibita reality, he said, was to form a partnership with an existing collection in which the pictures were removed from their original texts. That partner turned out to be the Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford (recently renamed the National Media Museum) in Yorkshire, England. "We borrowed an exhibition they had created for their galleries," Naef said, " and reshaped it to suit our space and provide a context for our albums." The task of dovetailing the two collections, which showcase more than 150 photographs, publications and related ephemera, fell to Anne Lyden, the Getty's associate curator of photography.
Working with her English counterparts, John Taylor and Philippa Wright, the three curators chose a theme for the exhibit based on the title of one of Emerson's photographs: "The Old Order and the New."
In the photograph, which is rendered in the soft gray tones synonymous with platinum prints, three men drift in a sailboat somewhere on the Norfolk Broads, that unique landscape of lakes, streams and marshland common to England's East Anglia. In the distance, an outmoded windmill lies dormant, while its mechanized replacement belches out a plume of steam. It was this confrontation between the old ways and the new, combined with the natural beauty of the region, Lyden said, that stimulated Emerson. "Emerson saw the modernizing effects of the Industrial Revolution having a terrible impact on the region, which was largely rural," Lyden explained. "He's clearly of a different class than they are," she said. "He's very affluent, and he's coming to this very impoverished area. But he sees something heroic in these people and he wants to celebrate it. He gains their trust and immerses himself in their society. He even learns their dialect. At the same time, he takes a very Darwinian approach. And in his texts he refers to them as `peasants' and `specimens.' " Ironically, in his effort to preserve the traditions of the past, Emerson incorporated tools that represented the latest technological advancements in photography. His equipment included a stock of the new gelatin dry plates, which freed photographers from the necessity to process film in the field. He carried a light view camera with a relatively long lens that offered variable focusing, he incorporated a variable speed shutter capable of freezing action and he produced a 6-by-8-inch glass negative.
While the equipment Emerson used would have been familiar to the photographers of his day, his theories regarding photography as a means of observing nature were completely unique. And his guiding principle was the action of the human eye. "The image which we receive by the eye," he wrote, "is like a picture minutely and elaborately finished in the center, but only roughly sketched in at the borders. The principal object in the photograph must be fairly sharp. Everything else must be subdued ... slightly out of focus." Today, we take Emerson's "soft focus" approach for granted. But in 1886, when he published his first pioneering book of photographs and anthropological commentary, "Life and Landscapes on the Norfolk Broads," the effect caused quite a stir. When he elaborated upon his ideas in 1889 in an instructional treatise (and aesthetic diatribe) called "Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art," the effect, a writer of the day recalled, was like "a bombshell dropped in a tea party." Prior to Emerson, the notion of "fine art photography" meant slavishly mimicking the sentimental style favored by painters of Victorian England. Emerson's work rebelled against it, embracing the new approach to landscapes represented by painters such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the members of the Barbizon school. Emerson called for an entirely new direction in photography based on observations drawn directly from nature, as exemplified in his most famous image, "Gathering Water Lilies." "Nature," he wrote, "is the great refiner, the poor man's poet and painter."
Wandering through the galleries of the Getty Museum, it's nearly impossible not to fall under the subtle spell of Emerson's images, with their somber skies, wafting reeds, glittering streams and stoic "peasants."
Perhaps Nancy Newhall, noted photography critic and author, stated it best when she wrote, "P.H. Emerson was probably the first true photographer-poet."
jim.farber@dailybreeze.com
Sunday April 1, 2007
4 pm
Museum Lecture Hall, Getty Center
Emerson was an influential and controversial polemicist for a new movement in art photography. In this lecture Hope Kingsley, historian and curator of photography, traces Emerson's sources in art and optical theory and discusses their relevance to photography in the 19th century. Complements the exhibition The Old Order and The New: P.H. Emerson and Photography, 1885-1895.
Hosted by Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, the west coast campus of Memorial University, located in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, The Architecture of the Book will facilitate critical discourse on the artist's book from interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspectives. Sessions will be held in conjunction with The Architectural Uncanny, an exhibition of prints, photographs and book works by Marlene MacCallum, and will coincide with the 20th anniversary cele bration of The March Hare, Atlantic Canada's largest poetry festival. Marlene MacCallum, from Domestic Arcana, hand bound book work using photogravure and letterpress, 1999
Continue reading "The Architecture of the Book: An International Symposium" »
13 October 2006 - 4 February 2007 National Media Museum, Bradford, West Yorkshire
A major exhibition showcasing the work of photographer Peter Henry Emerson, with photographs and ephemera drawn largely from the NMPFT and RPS Collections. Guest curator John Taylor and the Museum's curator Philippa Wright reassess the importance and context of Emerson's work, which combined new techniques and technology in a bid to record and preserve the traditional life of East Anglia. A book will accompany the exhibition. Podcast lectures related to this exhibit can be found online including a brief lecture by John Taylor entitled, 'The Gravure Print".
For more information visit the National Media Museum's web site.
 Technology Into Art: The Photogravure From 1850 to Today
November 11 through January 28, 2007
This landmark exhibition has been organized for the museum by the University of South Florida’s Institute for Research in Art and the USF Contemporary Art Museum.
Edward S. Curtis
Navaho Medicine-Man, from the Prospectus of the North American Indian, 1906 Photogravure, 8 1/2 x 6 inches. Image courtesy of The Drapkin Collection
More...
Continue reading "Florida Museum of Graphic Arts Photogravure Exhibit" »
 Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery of Houston recently opened an exhibit of Peter Miller's photogravures of images from his Mongolia series. The show runs from December 2 through Jan 11. For more information please contact the Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, 4520 Blossom Street, Houston, Texas 77007. Tel 713-863-7097, fax 713-863-7130.
“The Architect’s Brother” features 42 large-scale photographs made by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, many of which are photogravure prints. The exhibit runs through Oct. 29 at the Figge Museum of Art, in Davenport, Iowa.
"Images of a man blowing pollen off a mammoth flower, producing clouds in a pit or bandaging branches to a dying tree may seem the result of simple manipulation of digital photos. Yet curator Michelle Robinson said viewers are often shocked to hear the truth: Nothing in the photographs is computer generated."
Read review by Katie Vaughn in the Quad-City Times.
The Luminous-Lint web site, created by Alan Griffiths, is a rapidly growing comprehensive survey of the history of photography. Recently - with the help of photogravure.com, Mack Lee, David Spencer and Jon Goodman - Alan has highlighted the photogravure proccess and the important role it has played in the history of photograhy.
In conjunction with the exhibition “Camera Work: A Centennial Celebration,” at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA, in 2003, The Photo Review has published a 64-page full-color catalogue of the same title with essays by Peter C. Bunnell, Lucy Bowditch, Stephen Perloff, Barbara L. Michaels, and Luis Nadeau.
Continue reading "Camera Work: A Centennial Celebration" »
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