Photogravure

The earliest forms of photogravure were developed by two original pioneers of photography itself, first Nicéphore Niépce in France in the 1820s, and later Henry Fox Talbot in England.

), waxing the paper to make it translucent, then laying this on a copper plate coated with light-sensitive bitumen.

[3] Photogravure in its mature form was developed in 1878 by Czech painter Karel Klíč, who built on Talbot's research.

[2] Because of its high quality and richness, photogravure was used for both original fine art prints in the form of photographs manipulated by various means on the negative[5] and for photo-reproduction of works from other media such as paintings.

From the 1880s, the Talbot-Klič process was used commercially for very high quality reproductions of old master prints, excelling in capturing variations in tone.

[2] Photogravure practitioners, such as Peter Henry Emerson, brought the art to a high standard in the late 19th century.

The speed and convenience of silver-gelatin photography eventually displaced photogravure which fell into disuse after the Edward S. Curtis gravures in the 1920s.

Many years later, photogravure has experienced a revival in the hands of Aperture and Jon Goodman, who studied it in Europe.

The Getty Conservation Institute's The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes[10] provides guidelines for identifying photogravures and distinguishing them from rotogravure prints.

Macdermid Autotype, the last manufacturer of the gelatin pigment paper (tissue) needed to make traditional copper plate photogravure, announced the end of their production in August 2009.

Since then, other manufacturers, including Bostick & Sullivan, Phoenix Gravure, and others in India, Taiwan, and Japan have begun supplying gelatin pigment paper (resist tissue) to the market.

Donald Farnsworth at the art workshop Magnolia Editions developed a digital direct-to-plate photogravure process that does not use gelatin.

The dual exposures produce an "etched" polymer plate with many thousands of indentations of varying depth which hold ink, which in turn are transferred as a continuous tone image to a sheet of paper.