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Course: Special topics in art history > Unit 2
Lesson 11: Photographs- Seeing Through Photographs
- Before Photography - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 1 of 12
- The Daguerreotype - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 2 of 12
- Talbot's Processes - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 3 of 12
- The Collodion - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 5 of 12
- The Albumen Print - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 6 of 12
- The Platinum Print - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 7 of 12
- The Pigment Processes - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 8 of 12
- The Woodburytype - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 9 of 12
- The Gelatin Silver Process - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 10 of 12
- An Introduction to Photography in the Early 20th Century
- Color Photography - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 11 of 12
- Digital Photography - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 12 of 12
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The Woodburytype - Photographic Processes Series - Chapter 9 of 12
The Woodburytype process, invented by Walter Woodbury in 1864, revolutionized image printing. It combined photography and press to create detailed, believable images. The process involved molding an image into a lead sheet using a gelatin relief hardened by light. The result was a seamless, precise image that looked like a real photograph.
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Video transcript
When the woodburytype process came along it suddenly became possible to produce things
that looked like photographs. They had all the believability and the detail and the truthyness, if you will, of a real
photograph. But they could be made on a printing press, and made even more easily, in even greater quantity
for even less money. This process was invented in 1864 by Walter
Woodbury. It is a photomechanical process that combines photography and the press, that produces a
continuous tone image. The woodburytype is not made by light, it is not
made by chemicals. It is molded, it is made in a mold. The mold is a sheet of lead that has depressions
in the lead. Those depressions were made by something that
was developed by light. A piece of gelatin, where areas of the gelatin were
hardened by light, or left so they would be washed away in hot water. You ended up with this potato chip thick gelatin
with relief. Relief meaning you have high and low spots. This would be put against a piece of lead. It would be put into a press with the capability of
pressing many, many tons of pressure. It would actually push that relief image into the
sheet of lead. When you took it apart the lead sheet now had
hills and valleys. Then we take a dollop of warm gelatin with
pigment. It is not ink, it is gelatin. You put that on the mold,
you slide in a piece of paper, and press. What happens is that the warm gelatin with
pigment is pushed into the mold, against the paper, and when you release the two you get
a formed image. It’s pressed, so it is actually a cast image. The mold is made with photography but the actual
image itself we do not call a photograph. The woodburytype produced a beautiful seamless, poreless, precise image that really
looked like a photograph. This was first used in reasonably high end
publications. It was used to convey a sense of you are there,
which is what photographs have always done. It greatly surpassed any previous printing process
to do that.