Washington, DC—Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840–1940 tells the fascinating story of the search to find and perfect a way to print photographs in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, resulted in some of the most beautiful photographs ever made—featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Presenting 40 photogravures and 4 bound volumes illustrated with them (many recently acquired and exhibited here for the first time), Etched by Light shows how this process enabled photographs to circulate widely and help shape our collective visual experience. The exhibition is on view from October 15, 2023, through February 4, 2024, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition coincides with the symposium Photomechanical Prints: History, Technology, Aesthetics, and Use, organized by the FAIC Collaborative Workshops in Photograph Conservation and hosted by the photograph conservation department of the National Gallery from October 31 through November 2, 2023.

“Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners developed a method to produce photographic prints in ink,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. “Including photogravures from the National Gallery’s collection, this exhibition shows the pivotal role photogravures played in the history of photography by enabling the creation and widespread dissemination of tonally rich and lasting prints.” 

Exhibition Tour

National Gallery of Art, Washington, October 15, 2023–February 4, 2024

About the Exhibition

From its very beginnings, photography revolutionized the way pictures were made and knowledge about the visual world was disseminated. But in the early 1840s, artists and scientists working across Europe discovered that it had drawbacks. The daguerreotype process, developed by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, created astonishingly vivid images, but each one was unique and could only be copied by making another photograph. William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative/positive process held more promise, but his silver-chloride prints faded when exposed to light. Early practitioners also learned that it was hard to make numerous identical prints that could be tipped into books or journals, owing to variabilities in the paper and chemicals that were used to make prints. Such obstacles, at least initially, frustrated their hopes of fully realizing the potential of this new medium.

Divided into three sections, Etched by Light traces the search—unfolding across 100 years—for a process to print photographs in ink, which were more stable than traditional silver-based photographic prints. It moves from the experiments in the 1840s and 1850s by French and British photographers such as Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau, Charles Nègre, and Talbot, who discovered the chemical and technical components necessary to print photographs in ink, to the successful solution invented by Talbot in the 1850s and perfected by Karl Klíč in 1879. In their photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper. Favored from the mid-1880s through the 1930s, revived in the 1980s and 1990s, and still popular today, photogravures have a smooth, continuous tonal range, although an extremely fine grain is evident under magnification.

The exhibition also shows how photographers working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Peter Henry Emerson and Alfred Stieglitz, exploited the photogravure process for its artistic potential. They highlighted the individuality of their pictures through their choice of paper and inks, and even manipulated the photographic image itself. They also utilized the reproducibility of the process, inserting their photogravures into limited edition books, portfolios, and journals that they circulated in an effort to prove the artistic merit of photography.

The exhibition concludes with the work of modernist photographers, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Laure Albin Guillot, Man Ray, and Margaret Bourke-White, who used the process to enlarge small negatives, creating big, bold, and sometimes colorful photogravures. Circulating their photogravures widely in books and portfolios, as well as commercial advertisements, these artists demonstrated that photography could tackle new subjects, revitalizing our view of life, art, and science, and in the process revealing critical new insights about the world around us.

Exhibition Organization

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Exhibition Curators

The exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, with Andrea Coffman, collection manager in the department of photographs, both at the National Gallery of Art.

Photomechanical Prints: History, Technology, Aesthetics, and Use Symposium

After the invention of photography, photomechanical printing techniques were refined to create exact replicas of photographs in ink on paper. Using different methods, the photographic image was transferred to traditional printing technologies—gravure plate, halftone relief block, or lithograph stone. Once the image was printed on paper as a photogravure, halftone, or photolithograph, it could be used for publication in newspapers, magazines, and books, or for enjoyment as art.

Photomechanical prints were developed to fill many needs, including practical and economical methods for mass reproduction, techniques to facilitate the simultaneous printing of images and text, increased image stability, as well as artistic expression. These works exist at the intersection of numerous disciplines: photography and printmaking, functional and artistic practices, the histories of photography and the graphic arts, and the specialties of paper and photograph conservation.

This program provides an opportunity for conservators, curators, historians, scientists, collections managers, catalogers, archivists, librarians, educators, printmakers, artists, and collectors to convene and collaborate while they explore all aspects of photomechanical printing. By advancing our understanding of these ubiquitous but under-researched materials, we may find improved approaches to their collection, interpretation, preservation, treatment, and display.

For more information: https://learning.culturalheritage.org/p/photomechanical.

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Exhibition Announcement: 04/07/23

Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840–1940
National Gallery of Art, Washington, October 15, 2023–February 4, 2024

Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners searched for and perfected a method to produce identical photographic prints in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, yielded some of the most beautiful photographs ever made—featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840–1940 tells the story of the first 100 years of this process. Artists and scientists working across Europe from the 1840s through the 1870s were dismayed to discover that identical silver-based photographic prints were not only difficult to make but also faded quickly. Building on one another’s discoveries, innovators such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Hippolyte Fizeau, and Charles Nègre perfected a way to etch a photographic image into a copperplate and print it in ink. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, photographers such as James Craig Annan and Peter Henry Emerson utilized this process to demonstrate the artistic nature of photography while somewhat later photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, and Laure Albin-Guillot used the technique to create large, bold pictures that they disseminated widely. Including 46 photogravures and 5 bound volumes illustrated with photogravures, many never before exhibited, Etched by Light shows how these works, through their proliferation, have helped shape our collective visual experience.

The exhibition coincides with the symposium Photomechanical Prints: History, Technology, Aesthetics, and Use, organized by the FAIC Collaborative Workshops in Photograph Conservation and hosted by the photograph conservation department of the National Gallery from October 31 to November 2, 2023.

The exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department, with Andrea Coffman, collection manager, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.