Portraiture and early photographic printing: surface, tonality and authorial gesture.

The research project My research project investigates the image as artefact, in particular the print surface, as produced by early photographic printing techniques and considers how these process characteristics mediate the readings that the artefacts evoke. This research project is primarily concerned with the: • materiality/physicality of the print, its surface characteristics and what makes it ‘work’ for

the author and viewer, • potential contribution of modern digital technologies to analogue early-photographic

printing processes in relation to the preparation of negatives and control of exposure, acutance and tonality,

• portraiture and the development of personal practice, in this case in the representation of the aged and aging body.

My project draws upon research from a range of disciplines and perspectives; workshop experimentation on surface attributes is informed by cultural and technical histories of photography and printmaking and by recent industry developments of materials and digital technologies. My theoretical appreciations are shaped by cultural analyses of the production and inscription of meaning and by art history discourse on portraiture and representation of the (aged) body. I hope, through my practice as a photographer/printmaker, to articulate an imaginative and technically innovative exploitation of the potential of these early photographic processes. This practice-based strand of my research is focused on the exploration of the textural and tonal characteristics of early photographic printmaking processes, in combination with digital technologies, for the representations of the body and

the portraiture of older sitters. Given the centrality of print surface and texture to this project,

Photogravure  intaglio  print  

the choice of mature and older subjects for portraiture and representation of the body seems appropriate. Skin, the face and the body offer an unparalleled generosity of texture and interpretation and provide ample opportunity for the exploration of affectively and aesthetically nuanced printmaking. Centre for Fine Print Research There has been a resurgence of artistic interest over the last decade in photography-based methods of printmaking using nineteenth century processes. The chemistry, materials and handling of the techniques are capable of realising unique qualities of tone, texture, definition, density and presence. The processes of choice for both ‘fine art’ and commercial printers for over sixty years until the First World War, they are now being adopted again and adapted for their artistic and expressive potential. Whilst there is a generosity of material accessible on-line, including practical information, for instance, about the use of digital techniques for the production of negatives, there is relatively little recently published academic research and assessment of the early procedures. The Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE, though, has supported valuable enquiries by Steven Hoskins, Anne Hammond, Carinna Parraman, Paul Thirkell and Andrew Atkinson, amongst others, that combine historical surveys with tested practical evaluation of technique. The Centre offers a technical, academic and industrial interface, combining practical and theoretical expertise in the commercial and fine art arenas that is probably unmatched in the UK. It is an ideal base for my research.

Early Photographic Printing In the early development of photography, familiarity with silver salts made them the inevitable choice for the preparation of negatives whether on paper, glass or celluloid. But concerns about silver’s susceptibility to environmental degradation prompted a search for light-fast and permanent positive print processes. The light sensitivity of ferric and chromate salts, initially noted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was exploited to insolublise colloid matrices, such as gelatines, albumins and gums, and precipitate ‘noble’ metals such as platinum and palladium, to develop four key families of process – photogravure, collotype, pigment (carbon transfer, gum bichromate) and platinum printing. Stable and lightfast images were achieved through the substitution of inert inks, pigments or ‘noble’ metals and the processes formed the basis for both individual artistic production and large-scale commercial printing.

Gum  bichromate  over  cyanotype  

Platinum prints, formed by the ultra-violet light sensitivity of iron-based compounds, become practicable and popular with photographic artists in the 1880s, an attachment continued well on into the twentieth century. They are admired for their particular delicacy and gradation in mid and high tones. The process is sensitive across an extended density range, enabling it to respond well to negatives that are not unduly compressive in their recording. It permits, by variations in chemistry and humidity, manipulation of contrast and colour. In short, it offers opportunity for authorial intervention in the pursuit of artistic realisation. However, although platinum printing offered stable and lightfast imagery, the medium lacked the potential for mechanisation and never formed the basis of serious commercial printing. Dichromated colloids, by contrast, rapidly became the medium of choice of the late nineteenth century printing industry for image reproduction, allowing ever higher-speed relief and offset printing of text and picture combined through the use of screening techniques that

expressed continuous tone and line as dots of varying size and, later, colour. Sensitised colloid matrices are able to secure extremely high definition and are used currently for astronomical and holographic images. The illustrations, above and below, show some of the

Cleaning  the  copper  plate   Sensitising  the  pigmented  gelatine  tissue  

Platinum/palladium  print  

stages in the production of a photogravure copper plate and print and, further below, the production of a collotype print.

The  sensitised  and  exposed  gelatine  tissue  transferred  to  the  plate  

Copper  plate,  with  exposed  and  transferred  gelatine  resist,  being  

etched  

Inked  copper  plate  after  printing   Photogravure  print  

For the photographic artist, the colloid processes offer unrivalled choice of colour and opportunities for hand manipulation. Photogravure processes provide the texture of the pressed image, pigment prints allow for some element of bas-relief and collotypes give almost infinite opportunities for over-printing and control of colour. For a period, Woodburytype and collotype production (see below for illustrations of process) were strongly favoured for their definition and accuracy of reproduction, but they gradually lost out commercially as Woodburytypes required to be ‘tipped in’ to the separately printed pages of books and magazines and collotypes could not be accommodated with type in the same form, though they did allow of double printing. But until the 1920s and even into the 40s, collotypes and, for photographers, photogravure and pigment prints were the vehicles for both individual ‘fine prints’ and art editions of modest size. Although Woodburytype printing is no longer possible because of the lack of the hydraulic presses required to imprint the gelatine matrix on to the lead die, the remaining processes offer a portfolio of media for artistic photographic reproduction of quite extra-ordinary capability and opportunity.

Above  left  ~  the  glass  plate  is  covered  with  gelatine  sensitised  with  ammonium  dichromate  Above  right  ~  the  dried  plate  is  exposed  to  UV  light  under  a  transparency  Below  left  ~  the  prepared  plate  inked  before  relief  printing  Below  right  ~  the  print  t  

Production  of  collotype  print    

Despite the virtually complete commercial replacement of film based processes, the digital revolution in image origination and production has been accompanied by a renaissance of the early processes, possibly as an antidote to the clinical – occasionally sterile – predictability of the digital print and its smoothly antiseptic surface, and because computer manipulation and output can now complement, and somewhat ameliorate, the highly labour intensive demand that early photographic printing techniques can require. I believe that early printing processes can achieve the very embodiment of the image as an artefact. Their appeal and contribution rests, in part, as an antithesis to the immateriality of the digital and virtual image and I find this physicality appropriate to my explorations of the portraiture of the face and the body. The intention of my practice-led aspect of the research is to explore avenues for the photographic visualization and printed realisation of the corporeality of maturity and age that attempts to engage with presence and physicality of the subject. My images are designed to minimise the contextualisation of the subject, placing them outside matrices of personal, social or economic circumstance, in order to allow wider opportunities for interpretation and response to the aesthetics of the print and the form portrayed. They speak to, but seek to avoid, the commodification of beauty and its monopolisation by youth, yet through printmaking processes that yield rich texturality and visual tactility, offer opportunities for the exploration of physicality, of the materiality of aging flesh and the possibility of dignity in its acceptance and its representation. Scars, sags and avoirdupois are pictured, not as objects of distaste or ridicule, but as illustrations of shared humanness and common destiny, The print as artefact Recognition that the mode and media of representation carry cultural inscriptions, culturally expressed, is fundamental to explorations of the meaning and identity of photography and printmaking, particularly investigations touching upon the surface and appearance of works. William Ivins’ concept of the visual syntax of prints is helpful in this regard as it articulates a sense of the organising and constructed conventions of interpretation and meaning through which the communicative potential of each medium is structured and understood (Ivins, 1953). There has been considerable technical research within the communication industries into print/image quality in terms of controllable and measurable attributes such as line and contrast resolution, colour fidelity, dot spread, ink density and reflectivity. I explore conceptualisations, after Ivins, of the syntax of printing. I find helpful, as a starting point for my investigations, the assumption that each medium and process carries within it particular limitations and potential for expression and, in the case of early photography-based printing technologies, I investigate the nature and boundaries of these parameters. The two reproductions, below, of photogravure intaglio prints indicate, I hope, something of the tactility and surface qualities unique to the process. There are more than a dozen dimensions against which industrial issues of print quality are conventionally assessed (Lindberg, 2004). These include: sharpness and contrast (frequently amalgamated as resolution), tone quality (detail and compression in the highlights, mid-tones and shadows) gloss levels, and variations such as patchiness, mottle, noise and colour shift. Because these are generally applied to half-tone relief printing (where only the size, shape and frequency of each dot are varied and the ink density remains constant) constant), this listing makes no reference to what I believe will prove to be important in my work, the maximum printed density and length of scale from highlight to shadow. Additionally, I consider further categories for substrate attributes - colour, texture, fibre, brightness, rattle and weight amongst them – and ink properties that also strongly contribute to viewer response.

Commercial assessments of quality are made against industry standard origination targets. In other words, it is fidelity of reproduction not affective and cognitive stimuli that is under evaluation. An ongoing challenge for my research is to relate this numerical vocabulary of empirical measurement to the emotional tone of subjective response, whilst recognising that none of these judgements operate outside the wider cultural environment of subjective interpretation – particularly important given the ‘archaic’ nature of my chosen processes. Photography, portraiture and the construction of identity The emergence of photography in the 1840s effected on the practice of portraiture a dramatic yet nuanced impact. The common early photographic style of presentation – upon which I draw in my practice - was formal, almost monumentalised, in part due to the requirements of lengthy exposures, but informed also by the style and dignity of the earlier classical painted portraits. Early photographic portraitists had little experience or tradition to call upon other than the gesture and setting – the ambience and attitude - of classical and contemporary portrait painting and sculpture. This photographic formality was and fairly consistently has been largely maintained, even as the emerging technologies allowed for more spontaneous activity and pose. Until the mid-eighteenth century, it was a rare portrait that was not confined to the classical prototype, to heroic myth, paternal authority, or pastoral idyll and masquerade. By the nineteenth century, philosophical and civil enquiry into the nature and meaning of social identity, including (in modern terms) the ‘presentation of self’, provided an additional frame of discourse and discipline for the portraitist. The relationship between the external and internal aspects of the identity portrayed became seen as problematic. Whilst the social and economic status of the sitter could be depicted through a wide range of stylistic and indexical devices such as the inclusion of props and backgrounds, illumination of the psychology and moral character of the subject, separate and perhaps conflicting dimensions, were and remain challenging both to achieve and to interpret. The relation between photography and painting is, of course, reciprocal. A powerful and continuing reaction against quasi-photographic ‘realistic’ representation left mimetic painted portraiture distinctly unappealing to the artist-elite, a response upheld until very recent revivals. Contemporary art-photography frequently plays with these issues through ironic commentary and deconstruction of ‘identity’ and ‘reality’, most commonly expressed through a full-on, face-on, unmediated and unmanipulated statement of the roles of photographer and beholder in the presence and explicit complicity of the subject; or through the construction - physically or virtually - of tableau where the actors, drawn or photographed from the life, are co-actively complicit in the posing they strike and the knowingness they demonstrate. There has been a recent fashion in art-photography for these fictions to be made explicit. At the root of these concerns lies a presumption, that the experiential realities of human identity, understanding and interaction are social constructs shaped by, and lived wholly within, the language, semiosis and mores of civic, political and economic hegemonies. Contemporary interrogations of both the portrait and the photograph take theoretical enquiries beyond notions of character, representation and indexicality and now have at their heart a concern to account for the cultural production, inscription and function of visual meaning. Every sitter, every subject, is now held to be both constructed and contingent. My research practice, acknowledging this discourse, aims to privilege the physical as complementary to the social construction and to secure an intimate reciprocity rather than merely voyeuristic gaze or dispassionate scrutiny. I wish to permit empathetic awareness of the corporeal presence of my subjects through presentations of the envelopes of their skin

that heighten the haptic of surface, texture and dimensionality. My use of ‘archaic’ techniques, distancing somewhat the realism of the photograph as index, contributes – I hope - to the materiality of the artefact, complimenting the sitters’ explicit complicity and gifts of accessibility and acceptance. Contemporary tools of interrogation – including critical theory, compositional interpretation, haptic visuality, content analysis, semiology, psychoanalysis and discourse analysis – have direct relevance to my empirical research where they offer access to the viewers’ construction of meaning and to my professional practice where they culturally situate representation of the body and the Gaze of the spectator. Conceptualisations of haptic visuality, to take one instance, identify the tactility of its appreciation as it finds pleasure in texture and grain. Marks (2002) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004) posit the haptic/optical distinction as an overlap of perception and describe the affectiveness of oscillation across the boundary between the visual mastery of the figurative space and the loss of control within the ground of the surface, precisely the effect that I am concerned to investigate.

Mirroring the discourse on the artistic and cultural production and representation of individual identity, attention has been paid over the last two decades by gerontologists and sociologists to the social construction of ‘old age’ as an economic and political category of difference and discrimination. Parallels have been drawn with feminist analyses of the relationships between the biology of sex and the performance of gender - the physiology of the aged body thus seen not as the determinant of social interaction, but as an envelope of capability that is more properly understood as framed within economic relations and embodied through socialisation into role and expectation. In Western culture, representations of, and supplication towards, the achievements, power, wisdom

and dignity of the aged have co-existed since at least Greek and Roman times with anger and exasperation over their dependency, fear of the magic of the hag and the witch, and unease with infirmities of the body and mind. It seems as if there is always something at least a little challenging about looking closely at representations of the aged. Older age has been both celebrated and demonised in art. For every historical account of the deference and respect paid to aged people and their civic responsibility and influence, there appears to be an alternate description of descent into incapacity and begrudged dependency on the charity and goodwill of offspring. There are many works that attest to the wisdom, generosity, dignity and the familial and political authority of their older subjects. In contrast, George Richardson’s eighteenth century work on Western iconology noted that old

Photogravure  intaglio  print  

men personify winter, the cold north wind, misfortune, custom, treachery, and timidity; whilst old women represent drunkenness, avarice, malevolence, melancholy, envy and longevity (Richardson, 1794). Exhibitions of photographs of the aged and sometime naked body enjoyed a relatively brief flowering a decade or so ago. Whilst the artists came to their projects from a wide variety of backgrounds, I find it striking that many of their works were presented as large-scale monochromatics, frequently hand-worked or self-printed. Jacqueline Hayden and Melanie Manchot offered life size, manipulated images, for example, whilst John Coplans’ Frieze series (silver gelatine) included pieces over three metres tall. They choose media and techniques to work almost viscerally with their audience, an approach I seek to emulate. In my practice I seek to avoid objectified representation. I try to incorporate and foreground the agency and self-awareness of my sitters, acknowledging their participation in the construction of the images. At the same time, by denial of socio-economic placement, and dress, I hope to offer enhanced space for the emergence of the viewers’ engagement, unconstrained by my ascriptions of identity, class, status or authority. My sitters are

presented anonymously, without prop, social cue or smile. They gaze appraisingly at the viewer; their intimacy of naked exposure independently and individually asserts their physicality, persona and participation. My prints – archaic processed photographic imagery though not photographs – aim to depict the humanity and scale of presence of subjects who, with dignity, offer intimate and voyeuristic access to their embodied selves to the gaze of the unknown other. It is ‘shared intimacy’, that my work aims to offer through non-judgemental access to the lives of the sitters as impressed upon

their bodies and wrought upon their skin. I wish to monumentalise their presence, to realise them architecturally, as it were, through the materiality of the print, so that they, rather than their image, are the subject and respect of our gaze – the texture, tonality and dimensionality of the printed surface a compliment to the body and its envelope. I am mindful of an apocryphal quotation attributed to George Bernard Shaw, ‘I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, but I merely looked constipated’, which speaks to artistic pretension and conceit. My portraiture seeks simply to re-present aging subjects for our shared intimacy and acknowledgement. The authenticity and dignity of their participation warrants, I believe, treatment that respects their right not to be devalued or derided, that does not commodify or objectify but respects their embodiment, their courage

Photogravure  intaglio  print  

and their gift. Dignity is not an attribute or a commodity that can be bestowed – it’s a quality of relationship. Peter Moseley My professional career has been as an education manager, but since retirement I’ve had the opportunity to return to my life-long interest in portraiture and photography. I completed an HNC in Photography, followed by a MA in Printmaking at Brighton University and I am now nearly two years into my PhD research at the Centre for Fine Print Research. Exhibitions: 2010 - Volte-face – solo portrait exhibition at Gallery 1885 2009 – Every minute should be enjoyed – group exhibition at The London Print Studio 2006 – Take Five – solo ‘alternative processes’ exhibition at Gallery 1885 2003 – Salvo – group exhibition at Penny Gallery May 2012    

Selected References Atkinson, A. (2005). The Creation Of Digital Photographic Fine Art Print Through The Woodburytype Model. Unpublished Thesis. University of West of England. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London, BBC Publications.  Berlind, Robert: Art and Old Age. Art Journal, Vol. 53, No. 1 Blaikie, A. (1999). Aging and Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Brilliant, R. (1991). Portraiture. London, Reaktion Books. Coldwell, P.and Rauch, B. (2001). Interrogating the surface. 2nd Impact Conference Paper. Comar, P. (1995) “The Body Beside Itself.” Identity and Alterity: figures of the body 1895-1995, La Biennale di Venezia esposizione internationale d’arte, Venice, Marsilop Editori, 1995. 439-43 Coplans, J. (2003). Body Parts: A Self Portrait by John Coplans. New York, PowerHouse Books. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, Athlone Press. Ivins, W. (1953). Prints and Visual Communication. London, Routledge and Regan Paul. Marks, L. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Pelzer-Montada, R. (2008). “The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print” in Art Journal, vol. 67, no. 2, 2008 pp. 74-91. Thirkell, P. (2000). The Integration Of Digitally Mediated Imaging Techniques With 19th Century Continuous Tone Printing Processes. Unpublished Thesis, University of West of England West, S. (2004). Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford UP. Woodall, J. (Ed). (1997). Portraiture: facing the subject. Manchester: Manchester UP.