Photographs in Ink
Benjamin Levy, Guest Curator and PhD Candidate at Case Western Reserve University
The exhibition Photographs in Ink, on view through April 2, 2023, looks at the intersection of photography and printmaking. Whether used for visual communication or creative expression, photographic images produced in printer’s ink have increasingly saturated our daily lives since the invention of photography. The group of processes showcased in the exhibition are broadly termed photomechanical. The difference is whether the image we see is the result of a mechanical process — transferring ink from a printing press — or a chemical one — resulting from light-sensitive materials in the darkroom. While the latter is the scenario that readily comes to mind through experience or popular media, both must be considered as parts of a whole to understand the immeasurable impact that photography has had on art and culture.
This intersection of photography and printmaking is not just an academic interest of mine — it is quite personal. My father helped me set up my first darkroom in the basement bathroom when I was 12 years old. That orange-red light still conjures the smells of the chemicals. The still, sometimes stale, air was punctuated by sounds of sloshing liquid in trays and the mechanical ticking of heavy metal timers. This was all set to the soundtrack of the sole CD that permanently resided in the old boom box — necessarily old, in order to predate illuminated controls.
It was at the Maryland Institute College of Art where I fell in love with printmaking. At the time, switching departments felt like a departure, but I quickly realized that the attention to process and materials — let alone much of the terminology — was shared between the two disciplines. Years passed, and I fell into museum work and now academia as a doctoral candidate in the joint program between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. I decided to direct my research at this intersection and was amazed to find a wealth of history and artistic practice that had not received dedicated attention. Under the incredible mentorship of Dr. Barbara Tannenbaum, my curatorial advisor and the museum’s chair of prints, drawings, and photographs and curator of photography, I was able to actualize this long-standing interest into Photographs in Ink. Told through historical and contemporary works of art, the exhibition presents two narratives in a fluid exchange: the use of photomechanical processes to widely disseminate images and their adoption by fine artists as content and aesthetic choice.
This first narrative is expressed brilliantly through a photogravure early in the show of the lunar surface by French astronomers Maurice Loewy and Pierre Henri Puiseaux. There is an incredible amount of detail, and the print is quite large at more than 22 x 18 inches. The plate comes from a deluxe 12-volume atlas of the moon created by the duo at the end of the 1800s. It remained the most accurate reference of the moon’s surface until the age of space travel (compare, for example, the museum’s lunar panoramic photograph from 1966)! The image was taken through the grand equatorial coudé, or elbow telescope, at the Paris Observatory. The telescope was Loewy’s invention, one of the first to utilize mirrors instead of exclusively fixed lenses, allowing the main body of the telescope and the viewer to be physically apart, with the spectator in an adjacent space sheltered from the elements. This separation also made it possible for Loewy to introduce a mechanism that enabled the telescope to track the moon’s movements during the exposures. Given weather conditions, they were only able to photograph 50 to 60 nights per year; the project thus took 15 years to complete and contained nearly 100 of these large-scale photogravures.
The physical size of the resulting photogravure, a technical feat, not only signaled the luxury quality of the project but also facilitated collective viewing. Prior to advances in photomechanical processes to publish detailed images of scientific phenomena, observations made through a telescope or microscope had to be recounted mainly via written narratives or drawings. These other forms of communication were not as objective or accurate, and many early darkroom techniques resulted in small objects best suited for individual viewing. Photogravure, one of the oldest photomechanical processes, combines photography and etching. After exposing a specially coated metal plate to a photographic negative, acid is used to eat away at the plate at varying depths based on the shade of gray in the image. The more the acid eats away, the more room there is for ink, resulting in a darker appearance.
A photogravure plate is inked and printed by hand. To prevent too much ink from being removed while preparing the plate for printing, a traditional technique called aquatint is employed, in which a fine powder is applied to the plate prior to etching. This added texture holds the ink where desired in the etched sections, resulting in photogravure having one of the least noticeable underlying visual structures: a random, grainy appearance. The inked plate is run through a traditional roller printing press. The plate must be reinked for every impression. I find this moonscape poetically suited to a large photogravure. When enlarged, a traditional photographic image loses some detail, colloquially referred to as being “grainy.” And the resulting printed texture we see via the aquatint process is literally created with powdered rosin. So we are seeing a delightfully nerdy sequence: a grainy image, made using powder, of the dusty topography of the moon’s surface!
Jumping to the other end of the exhibition’s chronology and representing fine artists’ adoption of the tools and aesthetics of mass media, we find Andy Warhol’s image of Elizabeth Taylor. Before Warhol and Taylor were friends, turbulent events in her personal life made the actress a magnet for the tabloids, which is what drew his initial fascination. The stark black-and-white portrait of Taylor is punctuated by Warhol’s characteristic vibrant coloration: red lips, blue eyes, and teal eye shadow, all set on a bold tomato-red backdrop. The shapes do not exactly align with Taylor’s facial features, and the soft light of the source image, a publicity photograph for the 1960 film BUtterfield 8, is rendered in harsh black shadows.
Fundamental to Warhol’s signature style is an enlarged halftone dot. The halftone is an efficient printing strategy that converts shades of gray from a traditional photograph into dots of varying sizes, printed in only black ink. From a distance, the human eye reads the portion of the photo printed with large dots as a dark tone, while the smaller dots, consisting of less ink, read as a lighter tone.
The development of the halftone process contributed to a revolution in publishing. Since the halftone image could be printed simultaneously with text, most notably in newspapers and magazines, it was a major factor in the establishment of the mass-media landscape of the 20th century. Halftones continue to surround us and fill our lives. I notice them every day on my walk from the mailbox to the recycling bin in cheaply printed junk mail and misaligned grocery store circulars. Once you start to notice the halftone, there’s no going back! In Liz, the halftone dot ties the image of Taylor to a photograph that has already been mass-produced. This adds another layer of distance from the individual whose likeness is being endlessly repeated and objectified. Warhol’s approach to celebrity might be best understood in the modern vernacular as an interest in Taylor’s “brand,” rather than as a desire to create a portrait of the person.
It is that call-and-response, the fluid back-and-forth between practitioners and artists since the beginning of photography, that makes this such a rich topic for me, and I hope for you too.
