This month, Richard Roberts discusses the innovation of photography in printed advertising, and how it radically changed advertising artistic style.

New technology is driven by advances in photography.

Practical and usable photography came about in 1839 with the introduction of the metal-based daguerreotype process developed by Louis Daguerre closely followed by the paper-based calotype processes developed by William Henry Fox Talbot. However, it was not until the late 1870s and early 1880s that photography went a step further and was applied to the printing process.

Photomechanical Processing

A photomechanical process was developed by Fox Talbot in the 1850s and refined in 1878 by Karel Václav Klíč, a Czech painter known as photogravure, who worked on the principle of acid etching a copper sheet that has a gelatine mask on it. The high-quality result was suitable for the printing of fine art prints. Figure 1 shows a photogravure print published in The Illustrated London News on 5th July 1884. The print is single-sided and on better paper than the rest of the issue which leads me to believe it was a special supplement. Here is a beautiful print that shows the start of the competition to the engraving process.

Of course, the engravers art is now at its peak as can be seen from Figure 2a, from The Illustrated London News of 28th June 1884, only a week before the photogravure print. The amount of detail that has gone into this engraving is incredible and leads to a very pleasing piece of artwork. Figure 2b shows a close-up of one section of the advert to illustrate the detail possible by a master engraver. Notice the darker image of the gentleman, done to show he is pictured through the glass case.

Halftone Print

Although the first halftone print appeared as early as 1869 in Canada it was not until the early 1880’s that a viable and commercially usable process was established. Halftone printing relies upon an optical illusion for the picture itself is made up of a series of tiny dots which when viewed from a distance appear to merge as a solid picture. Looking through our copies of The Illustrated London News the first halftone adverts found are from 1890 and 1891 (see picture to left and below). The use of halftone gradually increases at the expense of engraving until about 1900 when it has virtually replaced the use of engravings in both advertising and editorial. This change is not for artistic purposes but purely for financial reasons as the halftone process is a much quicker process than the time consuming one of creating the engravings.

Join me next month when my series draws to a close with a blog post that focuses on innovations in colour.

Until then, take care.

Richard Roberts