Digital BW, The Print

A mechanized subspecies used to appear regularly as the rotogravure 
section of the Sunday papers in the thirties and forties. Usually 
printed in sepia/browntone, it was a fixture of the society pages:

"and you'll find that you're
in the rotogravure..."

(A buck if you can name the song. Canadian buck). 

Photogravure was a feature of the most elaborate series on photography 
ever published in the US, the ten-volume *Complete Photographer* 
edited by Willard Morgan, 1940-43. Each volume contained several 
photogravure sections, each with up to a dozen illustrations, many by 
the great B&W photographers of the day (and the past as well). It 
was/is truly a wonderful way to reproduce tones, but Lenswork's 
sneering de haut en bas tone with respect to ink jet prints, and the 
implication that only a few little old clockmakers can print 
photogravure is pretentious and silly. I've seen many ink-jet prints 
from this very company of printers that equalled Photogravure. PG was 
dethroned by duotone printing after the war, as tastes shifted to more 
open midtone- and high value-reproduction rather than the rich but 
dark low values of photogravure.

Incidentially, if you think you have some of the older photogravure 
repros in your collections, a loupe will discover the tiny square 
boxes that contain and transfer the ink and diagnose the process.

I don't know what's become of the process these days. Perhaps Ernst 
can comment.

Bob Bollini

>
> I'd like to understand just how the photogravure varies the tones.  
I'm
not
> finding any really good information on that, but a close-up of the 
plate
> would probably help quite a bit...
>
> Here's one more explanation, a bit more detailed, but over my head:
>
> http://haleysteele.com/hs_root/learning/technical/index.html
>
> I'll have to read it a couple of times very slowly to get any
understanding
> of it.  Very bizarre picture as an example of PG by the way.

Thanks for the link. Very interesting although his explainations and
constant referrences to other printing methods I don't understand make 
it a
bit difficult. I do get from it that the ink density in the print is
controled by the depth of the acid etching.

Martin