800
Kirchner immigrated 1863 to Delft in the Netherlands
with her mother and daughter Dorice. Kirchner started
the photographic fi rm with Frederik Gräfe, husband of
her sister Marie, and from there photos where signed “E.
Kirchner & Co-Zuiderstraat 179.” At the fi rm, Emma
Kirchner was the professional photographer and Gräfe
still a gunsmith until 1872.
May 9, 1871, Gräfe fi red Kirchner and announced
that he would work alone at number 136 at the same
street, on May19, Kirchner announced that she worked
alone in the old studio.
In 1875 her daughter Dorice (1852–1939) married
Henri de Louw (1851–1944) with whom Kirchner
worked almost a year as ‘Henri de Louw & Emma
Kirchner.’
Unfortunaly Kirchner never left any written docu-
ments, which makes her life more mysterious.
From 1876 until 1899 Kirchner made her best work,
mostly carte-de-visite and cabinet pictures portraits of
Citizens in and around Delft by albumin-style. May
1899 Johan van Doorne took over her studio.
Kirchner moved to The Hague and in 1903 to
Amsterdam where she died at the house of composer
Bernard Zweers (1854–1924), who was married to her
granddaughter Dora (1876–1959).
Kirchner was not only a highly educated emancipated
woman, but the only women photographer in Delft until
almost the end of the 20th century. She was the only
photographer in the Netherlands to work alone for such
a long period of time without any pupils, compared to
other female photographers, who worked with their
husbands or pupils.
Petra Notenboom
KLIČ, KAREL VÁCLAV (1841–1926)
Perhaps surprisingly, for someone whose contribution to
the printed image was so signifi cant, some considerable
confusion results from reading the published accounts
of Klič’s life. He is variously described as being Czech,
German and Austrian.
Karel Václav Klič was born in Hostinne, in the
foothills of the Krkonose Mountains in the present-day
Czech Republic. The town has long been a centre for
paper-making. His artistic talents showed early in his life,
and he was admitted as a student at the Art Academy in
Prague in 1855 when aged only 14. Apparently unwilling
to conform, he was expelled after only a few months, only
returning to complete his studies some years later.
Klič, also known as Karl Wenzel Klietsch—the Ger-
man/Austrian version of his name—had a varied career
—working as a draughtsman and as a painter for a time,
before leaving Prague. He was also an accomplished
cartoonist and illustrator, and found outlets for his work
in many newspapers. Records show that he worked in
Prague and Brno (Moravia) and Budapest before open-
ing a photographic studio in Vienna, Austria.
It was probably Klič’s experience in newspaper il-
lustration which led him to revisit the idea of developing
a photo-mechanical printing process—an idea fi rst ex-
plored and brought to fruition, albeit crudely, by Henry
Fox Talbot in the 1850s.
It was while he was working in Vienna that Karl
Klič developed the process for which he is remembered
—photogravure. His fi rst successful prints were exhib-
ited at the annual exhibition of the Vienna Photographic
Society in October 1879 and drew much admiration,
although the secretive Klič did not reveal any details of
his methodology. Further prints were exhibited at the
following year’s exhibition in November 1880. With
hindsight, much of the credit for the process must go
to Talbot whose photoglyphic engraving process had
produced a similar if rather less refi ned result more
than twenty years earlier, but Klič’s innovations made
it work much more effectively. Whereas Talbot’s work
had largely remained experimental, Klič’s process
became the fi rst widely used mass-production process
for photographic images, offering the permanence of a
pigment-based image at a cost which was only a frac-
tion, in both time and money, of that associated with the
Woodburytype or with carbon printing.
In 1880 and 1881, several of his prints were repro-
duced in the Austrian photographic journal Photogra-
phische Korrespondenz, and also in 1881, a photogravure
portrait of Mungo Ponton was published in Britain in
The Yearbook of Photography and Photographic News
Almanac. This portrait, provisionally dated 1870-1879
may have been taken by Klič.
The process was used to great artistic effect by,
amongst others, Peter Henry Emerson in the 1880s
for publications such as Pictures of East Anglian Life,
published in 1888.
Alfred Steiglitz started to use the process in the
1880s, ands some of the fi nest examples of photogra-
vure printing can be found on the pages of Camera
Work published by Steiglitz in the early years of the
twetieth century.
T & R Annan of Glasgow, whose Old Closes and
Streets had originally been produced in carbon two
decades earlier, produced editions in photogravure in- Thomas Annan and his son James Craig Annan
had learned the intricacies of gravure printing directly
from Klič in Vienna in 1883.
Klič had experimented with zinc etching processes in
the 1870s before his quest for the ideal photomechanical
printing process led him to what became photogravure.
His earliest proposals embraced ideas drawn both from
Talbot’s experimental process of 1858, and from the
carbon printing process, at the height of its popularity
in the 1870s.