The land's surface seen from great heights often presents patterns of great beauty. I he aerial camera allows us to isolate a section of the earth's surface for contemplation. Our eyes alone are not of sufficient optical acumen to give us at once the over-all dominant pattern and wealth of enclosed detail. Most aerial photographs are dull enough records. But when the ground possesses a rich pattern, we can often select from photographs taken purely for scientific purposes some which will appeal strongly to our esthetic imagination. Many of the aerial reconnaissance photographs taken during the war are of intrinsic beauty. They were taken by pilots high above enemy territory flying straight and level on a predetermined course while three automatic cameras made exposures at intervals of a few seconds. The dozens of photographs taken on each flight overlap to form a topographical record of many miles of the earth’s surface. Each single print, therefore, is not an independent picture, but merely one unit of a series from which interpreters could extract military information. The pictorial quality which we see in a single print is a by-product.
This is true of all the scientific photographs which are reproduced in these pages. The similarity of such photographs to the work of modern painters has often been pointed out, and it is even possible to choose photographs which resemble specific paintings. The similarity is not mere coincidence. Our vision of the world has been conditioned by scientific discoveries; the artists were the first to be moved and stimulated by these revelations of the physicists. The new vision disclosed by the laboratory has, in general, been assimilated rather than imitated. Marcel Duchamp has stated that when he was painting his famous Nude Descending the Staircase in 1912, art circles in Paris were stimulated by stroboscopic and multiple-exposure high-speed photographs. The advance-guard magazine L’Esprit nouveau published in 1921 photomicrographs, astronomical photographs, and a record photograph of machinery was reproduced with the caption: “This plate is not related to any article. It is here only to give pleasure and to provoke thought.” Among the documents which Le Corbusier presented in his manifesto on decorative art (1925) are scientific photographs and drawings. He pointed out that the illustrations in popular scientific magazines
take the cosmic phenomenon to pieces under our eyes; amazing, revealing and shocking photos, or moving diagrams, graphs, and figures. We are attacking the mystery of nature scientifically . . . It has become our folklore.
The camera and the printing press were linked from the very birth of photography. Daguerreotypes themselves were made into printing plates. A satirical lithograph of 1839 by Theodore Maurisset, captioned Daguerreotypo-manie, shows Alfred Donne at work with camera, aqua fortis bottle and etcher’s press, while camera fans pass beneath him in procession bearing the banner, “Down with Aquatint!” Donne made the metal plates printable by etching out the clear silver areas and building up the highlights by the newly discovered electrotype process; they could then hold ink and be printed like an etching or copper-plate engraving. The technique was improved by Hip-polyte-Louis Fizeau, who borrowed from the aquatint engraver the trick of breaking up middle tones into minute divisions of black and white dots by sprinkling the plate with powdered resin. For the album Excursions da-guerriennes, which N. P. Lerebours began to publish in 1840, he contributed two of these primitive photogravures: a view of the Hotel de Ville in Paris, and a detail of the Gothic carving on the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
The negative-positive process brought more successful photo-mechanical reproduction techniques. Fox Talbot himself patented in 1852 and again in 1858 photoglyphic engraving, which produced printable steel plates. To reproduce the middle tones, Talbot broke those areas up into minute divisions of black and white either with grains of resin, or by double exposing the negative with a screen of fine-mesh muslin.
Experiments were also made in the production of photographic images which could be printed by the lithographic process.
Another method of reproducing the photographic image in facsimile with ink was invented in 1866 by Walter Bentley Woodbury. He printed negatives on gelatin, made light-sensitive with potassium bichromate. The exposed film, when “developed” in hot water like a gum print, becomes a relief map of light and shade: the highlights are valleys and the shadows are hills. A mold of these contours is made by forcing a block of lead against the gelatin under great pressure. The lead plate is then filled with a jelly-like ink, paper pressed against it, and a perfect facsimile of the photograph is obtained, with vari-
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| L. WRIGHT: Wreck on the Providence and Worcester Railroad near Pawtucket, R.I.. 1853. Daguerreotype. Collection Zelda P. Mackay, San Francisco |
ations of tone reproduced by proportionate variations in the thickness of the deposit. No finer process for reproducing photographs than the now unfortunately obsolete woodburytype has ever been devised.
But all of these methods — photogravure, photoglyphic engraving, photolithography, woodburytype and dozens of variants of them, had a common disadvantage. They could not be printed on an ordinary press together with type. Although these methods made possible the reproduction of photographs in great quantity, the reproductions themselves had to be published exactly as photographic prints had been published: pasted down on blank pages of books, bound into them as separate plates, or mounted on cards in portfolios.
Type is in relief. The ink is applied to the raised portions. To print photographs in the same press with type, a method was needed by which the highlights would be depressed and the shadows would remain upon the surface of the block.
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| brady: General U. S. Grant at his headquarters. The National Archives. Washington. D. C. Right: Reproduction in Harper's Weekly, July 16, 1864 |
The goal was attained with the invention of the half tone plate in the 1880’s.
This important invention was perfected at precisely the time that the technical revolution in photography was taking place. Dry plates, flexible film, anastigmat lenses and hand cameras made it possible to produce negatives more quickly, more easily, and of a greater variety of subjects than ever before. The halftone enabled these photographs to be reproduced economically and in limitless quantity in books, magazines and newspapers. The consequent demand for photographs became so great that specialization became common: photographers began to produce pictures for the printed page.
The pattern had already been set. News photographs were taken as carb as 1842, and the great illustrated weeklies began to use them from time to time as models for their wood engravings. Copies of the Illustrated London News and its counterparts, such as L'Illustration (Paris), the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) and Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Com banion (Boston), of the
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| newton: Shantytown, New York. Halftone in New York Daily Graphic, March 4, 1880 |
1850’s not infrequently contain pictures of railroad wrecks, balloon ascensions, and collapsed or burnt-out buildings which bear the cut-line “From a Daguerreotype.” The use increased with wet plates. Fenton’s Crimean War pictures were reproduced in the Illustrated London News, and Brady’s pictures of the Civil War appeared in Harper’s Weekly.