1890-1910 Photography changes the format
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Early photographs had to be copied by hand, like this flood scene. Magazines hired photographers to shoot pictures and engravers to etch them. Every photo-technologist sought a method of printing pages directly from photographs. Some succeeded, but their methods couldn't combine photos easily with type. These methods included variations of lithography; they produced high quality reproduction plates which were pasted into books and fine art magazines. |
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Pictures were attractive. Even the earliest printers put individually painted illustrations into their books, like the hand-lettered medieval manuscripts. Then printers used wood blocks, etched out by artists and fit into type racks. A printer would keep a set of blocks, and might use the same 'walled city' image to represent many different towns.
In the 1800s, illustrations were engraved on copper and wood, using a number of sophisticated new techniques (or so they seemed at the time) for simulating grey tones with only black ink. Most illustrations were etched with acid or by hand from pictures drawn onto metal or wood. The process was tedious but produced elaborately textured images, more beautiful than you'd expect from the few that are reproduced today.
Sketch artists were sent to cover events like news photographers are now. They sent back romanticized drawings; this dramatic and noble Civil War battle was probably gruesome and unpicturesque in reality. A good illustrated magazine like Harper's Monthly or Leslie's carried lots of small type. It took hours to read a magazine.
Photographers and editors had to devise precedents for using photography and words together in print. The first photo-interview, between French photographer Paul Nadar and 100 year old physicist M. E. Chevreul (see right), set a precedent for photo-captions later. The muckraking photographs of Jacob Riis is Mc Clure's influenced later social realism documents of the thirties. The combination of the photos, evolving styles of journalism, and the new technology of offset printing and color process created a new language of the printed page, a language which made high-power advertising layouts possible.
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The first halftones: "A Scene in Shanty-Town." The tones of photo (above) were filtered through a screen of black and white lines or dots, which gave the illusion of shades of grey. Photographs, more 'realistic' than drawings, could now be reproduced on a page with type with far greater speed and choice. Editors could select one from a number of photographs; they didn't have to trust the sketch artist's rendition. Photographs immediately dominated the news. But the halftone process itself altered the feeling of the original photographs; most people did not realize until later that the photo and printing processes distorted reality as much as the old sketch artists. |
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