One of the projects I worked on this summer as a RISD Museum intern involved helping with research for Process Work, an upcoming exhibition revolving around the role of photomechanical printmaking processes at the turn of the 20th century. The exhibition showcases a whole host of processes invented during the time period for reproducing images from the lesser known Woodburytype to the collotype, to the still-ubiquitous halftone image. Among the objects in the show are prints from newspapers that were widely distributed, collector’s books, early experiments and contemporary work by artists using photomechanical processes.
With all of this in mind I decided to experiment in making my own prints and began to think about what to do with these processes today on both a technical and philosophical level. What does it mean to work with these processes in 2024? Why are we drawn to technology that is obsolete? How can we use contemporary methods to (re)think through antique processes?
I. The Process
On a technical level, many of these processes involve materials that are hard to acquire, especially with short notice, and chemicals that require special equipment to use. As I could not easily acquire gelatin mixed with bichromate to melt onto a glass plate to make a collotype, I turned to a tool of modern convenience that I did have access to (through the makerspace at Brown University): a laser cutter. The laser cutter is not a direct stand-in for the collotype but rather just a different method of inscribing an image onto a plate, the fundamental tenet of all photomechanical printmaking. The following provides an outline of the process.
1. It started with a picture I took a few years ago on a cold day at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. I took the photo on black and white film and then scanned the negative to a digital file.
2. I then brought this photo into Photoshop, where I prepared the files for the laser cutter. I decided to do two experiments in photomechanical printmaking: one intaglio plate and one woodblock relief. In the simplest of terms, relief printmaking involves creating a raised surface onto which ink is applied by carving into a block of material, usually wood or linoleum. Intaglio printmaking involves creating depressions on a plate which then hold ink while the unmarked surface is wiped. Thus, I prepared one digital negative (for the relief print) and one digital positive (for the intaglio). In order for the laser cutter to “read” an image and engrave it, the image must be completely graphic, meaning that it only has two colors: black and white. I experimented with a few different ways of doing this and ended up using one positive diffusion dither bitmap, where the dots are randomly dispersed (top) and one halftone screen bitmap (bottom), where the dots are dispersed as if through a half-tone screen. The scrap blocks I was using were different sizes so the two images have different “resolutions.”
3. The laser cutter engraves wherever the black is and ignores the white. This left me with the photograph engraved on a small acrylic plate (top) and a wooden block (bottom). To aid in printing and make the wood more resilient I sprayed the woodblock with varnish and let it dry.
4. After inking the plates, they were ready to be printed. I printed the woodblock by hand and ran the intaglio plate through the press. After adjusting amounts of ink and moisture of the paper I was left with my two photomechanical reproductions. The two images on top are the woodblock prints, with slightly different amounts of ink, moisture, and pressure, the image below is the photoengraving.
II. On Process
It may be an absurd undertaking to pursue photomechanical printmaking today. As the exhibition discusses, many of these reproductive techniques were devised for a practical reason: to create more reproductions with less human labor, so as to allow for faster and wider dissemination. What was seen as fast and labor saving historically might seem questionably so in retrospect, such as the practice of transferring a photo onto a woodblock which would then be engraved by hand. These days, sharing an image is as simple as pressing a button. If you want a physical copy of an image you can send it to a printer. Now, the labor is hidden in the data processing involved in creating, storing, and printing a digital image. Photomechanical printing in the form of industrial offset printing is still used for newspapers and magazines due to its speed and economic feasibility, but for the most part photomechanical printmaking now exists not as a practical tool but as an aesthetic choice.
Through the process of creating these laser cutter prints, I began to see them and the process of their making as a transformation of the image instead of a reproduction. Take a look at the image in three states next to one another—original, negative bitmap, print:
Not only is it a process of transformation, but in a way it is also one of degradation. Yet degradation is not a negative effect but rather, taken outside of the context of utility, becomes the operating principle of this method that makes its results worth thinking about and not just a failure to achieve perfect reproduction. The material traces of process, and here the material traces of the digital become formal additions to the final print and the basis of an auratic experience. It is the way that the grain of the wood block crossed with the pattern of the digital bitmap, creating a new texture. It is in the way the laser cutter “failed” on the left side of the acrylic plate (right edge of the print), leaving the edge of the image to almost dissolve into blankness. It is perhaps in these failures, in these material changes, where the image becomes the print. Although photomechanical printmaking may no longer be a technological advance, it is certainly an artistic tool rife with possibility.
Izzy Roth-Dishy was the 2024 Mellon Summer Curatorial Intern in the department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. She is a senior at Brown University and an occasional printmaker.