The Printed Picture
£30.00
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'The Printed Picture', by Richard Benson – a renowned printer who has contributed to the history of printing, and a photographer whose work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art – draws on a lifetime of experience on the press and in the darkroom.
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The Printed Picture is a highly original and accessible history of the various ways of making multiple copies of pictures – from the earliest cave drawings (featuring a ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ painted print of the artist’s hand), and Renaissance woodcuts, through the various methods of printing, to photography, and ending with
today’s fast-paced innovations in digital technology.
Richard Benson is a renowned printer who has contributed to the history of printing, and a photographer whose work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art.
Each individual printing method is succinctly described in a single page, with a warm understanding of both its achievements and problems, and many personal references.
Most of the images are from Benson’s own collection of early photographs of the unknown relatives and friends of early photographers, some very rare (including a print made from an original wet-plate negative taken by Lewis Carroll).
Some printing and photography methods quickly became obsolete (such as carbon and platinum printing), others have evolved into techniques that we still recognise today. Early planographic printing (e.g. stone lithography) has evolved into digital photo-offset technology and in his survey of tritone printing he declares, “desktop inkjet printers are absolutely wonderful. They are inexpensive, rarely break, print rapidly, and make prints that look as though they have the full tonal and color range of an actual chemical print.”
Throughout the book he reveres the artist, “the great technical prowess of the finest artists never obscures the fact that their work is valued because their craft carries something far more interesting than the craft itself.”
Thames & Hudson £30 hardcoverISBN 978-0-87070-721-6