Signs for Labour-Value in Printed Pictures after the Photomechanical Revolution: Mainstream Changes and Extreme Cases around 1900

This paper begins with a survey of the way that signs for labour and skill had been deployed in printed pictures before the advent and triumph of photomechanical printmaking in the generation after 1870. It then surveys the take-up of the two main photomechanical relief techniques (the line-block an...

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Veröffentlicht in:Oxford art journal 2005-01, Vol.28 (3), p.373-390
1. Verfasser: Gretton, Tom
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:This paper begins with a survey of the way that signs for labour and skill had been deployed in printed pictures before the advent and triumph of photomechanical printmaking in the generation after 1870. It then surveys the take-up of the two main photomechanical relief techniques (the line-block and the half-tone screen), and the persistence of wood-engraving, in the major illustrated weeklies from London and Paris from 1870 to 1900, relating the use of different techniques to the problem of how to signify the value of the pictures that these magazines offered. The second half of the paper discusses the way that this same problem was negotiated in two very different sorts of printed commodities around 1900, the London art-collectors' magazine The Connoisseur, and the cheap single sheets, carrying pictures made by José Guadalupe Posada, printed and sold in Mexico City by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo. This paper shows that despite being radically dissimilar commodities, these two cases both demonstrate the depth of the crisis that photomechanical technologies had induced in the way that men and women in the Western world could understand the worth and purpose of printed pictures.
ISSN:0142-6540
1741-7287