1114
Until fairly recently, the modern commercial process
was called screen photogravure or rotogravure. In this
process, the continuous tone positive and gravure screen
were exposed in succession onto carbon tissue which
was then mounted on the copper-plated gravure cylinder.
A later form, where the plate is made fl at and afterwards
curved around a cylinder, was known as “plategravure”
(ca. 1930s).
In an effort to remove one of the main diffi culties of
the original photogravure process, researchers have tried
to replace the chemical etching step with other methods
that involved “spark erosion” and laser engraving, the
latter developed by Crosfi eld but abandoned in early
- The most popular method currently employed
is based on the electromechanical engraving process
invented by Hell in Germany in 1952. The Helioklischo-
graph uses up to a dozen vibrating styli with diamond
tips that peck out tiny pits in the copper surface.
Luis Nadeau
See also: Baldus, Edouard; Curtis, Edward Sheriff;
Goupil & Cie; and Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore.
Further Reading
Bonnet, Manuel d’héliogravure, Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1890.
Braun, Alexander, Der Tiefdruck, seine Verfahren und Maschinen,
Frankfurt: Polygraph Verlag, 1952.
Cartwright, H.W., and MacKay, Robert, Rotogravure, A Survey
of European and American Methods, Lyndon, KY: MacKay
Pub. Co., 1956.
Denison, Herbert, A Treatise on Photogravure in Intaglio by the
Talbot-Klic Process, London: Iliffe & Sons, 1895. Reprinted
in 1974 by the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester.
Gasch, Bernard, Rakeltiefdruck, Halle, Wilhelm Knapp, 1950
Geymet, Traité pratique de gravure héliographique, Paris: Gau-
thier-Villars, 1885
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, “The Graphic Arts. A Treatise on the
Varieties of Drawing, Painting and Engraving.” In Comparison
with Each Other and with Nature, London, Seeley, Jackson
and Halliday, 1882.
Huson, Thos., Photo-Aquatint and Photogravure, London, Daw-
barn & Ward, 1897.
Jammes, André, et al., De Niépce à Stieglitz: La Photographie
en Taille-douce, Lausanne, 1982.
Lilien, Otto M., History of Industrial Gravure Printing up to
1920 , London: Lund Humphries, 1972 (155 pp.).
Morris, David, and MacCallym, Marlene, Copper Plate Pho-
togravure: Demystifying the Process, Boston: Focal Press,
2003.
de Zoete, Johan, A Manual of Photogravure, Haarlem, Nether-
lands, Joh. Enschedé en Zonen, 1989.
PHOTOHISTORIANS
For several decades after the publication of the fi rst pho-
tographic processes in 1839, and indeed for most of the
nineteenth century, photography was primarily regarded
as an invention. Its history, therefore, was predominantly
written as the history of an invention, comparable as
such to histories of the steam engine or the electric
telegraph, and more often than not fi lled with the petty
personal quarrels, as well as broad generalizations on
the invention’s utility, that attended such enterprises
at the time. Accordingly, most of the fi rst historians of
photography were its scientifi c patrons, inventors, or
early practitioners, and the histories they wrote were
predominantly “technical,” as they have often been
called, or rather professional and promotional. After
1914, and more so after 1930, new brands of photo-
historians emerged, some of them early collectors of
photography’s incunabula, but others from outside the
ranks of the profession and even the realm of amateurs.
Between 1930 and 1970 they gradually changed the
perception of nineteenth-century photography, which
came to be regarded more as a socio-cultural artefact,
and also appreciated in artistic as well as fi nancial terms.
Starting in the 1960s and especially after 1970, the in-
fl uence of art historians, museums, the art market, and
art-historical models on photographic history became
more marked, without extinguishing other approaches,
especially those of collectors, by then more special-
ized, and cultural historians and critics, who challenged
traditional art-historical assumptions while broadening
even more the scope of photographic history.
The very fi rst attempts at writing a history of pho-
tography were embedded in the very procedures of
publication of the various processes that competed
for recognition and infl uence, starting in 1839: thus
François Arago’s and, to a lesser extent, William
H.F. Talbot’s presentations to the French and British
learned bodies contained some historical research on
the origins of the invention. These accounts aimed,
among other goals, at establishing the usefulness and
even the cultural legitimacy of the invention. They
were decidedly less technical than broadly scientifi c,
and placed photography—envisioned as a discovery,
even more than an invention—within a relatively
long-term history of science. Thus Arago, while en-
dorsing the claims of the French inventors Niépce and
Daguerre, was the fi rst to link their research to those
of alchemists, as well as earlier (French) physicists,
be it in order to better stress the magnitude of the
inventors’ achievement. Incidentally, it must be noted
that Arago’s choice to designate Daguerre and the
daguerreotype—over Talbot, but also over Niepce—as
the true beginners of photography caused, in France, a
long string of priority claims and vindications (Isidore
Niépce’s in 1841, Victor Fouque’s in 1867, Adolphe
Mentienne’s in 1891, etc.) that led to sometimes sig-
nifi cant historical disclosures. In 1949, the publication
by Russian historian Torinan Kravets of a large body
of Niepce-Daguerre correspondence preserved (since
1840) in the Russian Academy of Sciences still echoed
that ancient feud, which has, repeatedly since then and