The Photograph on the Page

Abstract

From the 1840s, wood engraving had translated the continuous tones of the photographic surface into raised lines that could be printed alongside type. By the 1880s, it had become common practice for photographers to supply press agencies and magazines with photographs that would be traced by penand-ink artists for reproduction by line process; in 1885, Stephen Horgan claimed that the majority of the portraits in the American press were derived from photographs.² That same year, Amateur Photographer reported that in New York “innumerable” prints were made each day for use as the basis for drawings and stated, “etchings and relief prints managed in this manner, are frequently of equal beauty to any well-executed wood engraving.”³ By the late 1880s, halftone technologies were making the reproduction of photographs in the press more economically viable, and with the increased efficiency of halftone techniques during the 1890s, the demand for photographs increased still further.

The trail of the camera is too much in evidence in the work of the artist, while too often the artist has been entirely superseded by the photographer, and instead of the vigorous, masculine handling of the engraver, we see only for the most part the thin, emasculated tones of the machine-made picture.

— H. Lamont Brown, “Facts Versus Art,” Penrose Annual, 1898¹