Photogravure came of age with the mid-19th century drive to present discoveries of faraway lands and the memories they stimulated. This exploration continues today with the current renaissance of photogravure enjoyed by practitioners and collectors alike. Transcending vast distances of geography, culture, and time, through these images the texture and variety of ordinary life take on new depth and significance.

Photogravure etchings are printed by hand from copperplates with numerous kinds of etching inks and papers. More than just a printmaking technique, photogravure etching is also a way of exploring the world that brings to light an incomparable variety of tone and texture: shimmering luminous highlights, deep multi-hued blacks, shadows within shadows, and the most subtle gradations of tone. They celebrate the spark of enlightenment that comes from chance observation, a glimpse of the higher reality permeating our everyday lives.

"The Turning Point" by Peter Miller

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"The Source" by Peter Miller

Photogravure Etching in the Intaglio Tradition

For 500-plus years, copperplates have been engraved, incised, scratched, serrated, and etched to make limited editions of prints. Combining art and craft, intaglio editions convey a wide range of expression with a surprising simplicity of means. The prints of Durer, Leyden, Callot, Rembrandt, Claude, Piranesi, Goya, Whistler (to mention only a few), though vastly different in style, share a common heritage. Photogravure etching joined the earlier intaglio forms in the 19th century, embodying their depth, tonal variety, and tactile presence.

The graphic arts had already embraced lifelike spontaneity as Vermeer, Canaletto, and many others used lenses to obtain an air of luminance that had never before appeared in artwork. From the invention of the telescope in the early 17th century to the camera obscura and the camera lucida, which focused real-time scenes on flat surfaces, optical devices profoundly influenced both artistic and popular perception. All that was missing was a way of making those fleeting images permanent.

In the autumn of 1833, a revelation on the shores of Lake Como suggested to the visiting William Talbot a method of using light itself to record its own image. Light-sensitive materials, though known at least as early as 1727, had not been applied to the graphic arts. Although Nicéphore Niépce made the first photogravure in 1829, it was Talbot who worked out the method of etching a copperplate through a lens-exposed, light-sensitive resist to produce a permanent realistic record of the passing scene at a moment in time. In the latter half of the 19th century, Peter Henry Emerson, Edouard Baldus, Robert Démachy and others took the medium beyond reportage and into poetic or painterly evocations.

The 20th century saw the use of photogravure in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work and in the series by Edward Curtis on North American Indians. Despite Stieglitz's and Paul Strand's later efforts, the medium's mis-characterization as soft-focus or reproductive led to its neglect for the next half-century. In the 1970s, artists and collectors seeking a hand-crafted look re-discovered photogravure. It is now taught in workshops around the world, and is increasingly favored by artists for their own original compositions. Real photogravure etchings will always be rare because of the time and skill required to make them; but it is their resonance with the 500-year intaglio tradition, the tactile quality and variety of texture and tone that occur only in intaglio, that distinguishes them even as they reflect contemporary themes.

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