Re: How can you tell?

Eric wrote:

>I'd like to ask a couple of follow-on questions to this discussion.
>
>* what would be considered the heyday of carbon printing?
>* what was carbon's niche? It seems to me that it would not have been
> used for large "editions" in the way that photo-, later roto-, gravure
> was used, or the way collotype was used, either?

Hi Eric,

I think there were a couple of carbon printing heydays. First, there is
the remarkable production of Adolphe Braun's studio in France during the
full decade of the 1860's, plus a little into the 1870's. Someone on the
list recently mentioned the very fine publication "Image and Enterprise,"
by Maureen O'Brien and Mary Bergstein. This is a great book on the life
and work of Adolphe Braun, who was also great. Braun's studio produced
large editions of black and white carbon prints, printing in many sizes.
They made some very large masterpieces that were around 22x30 inches.

The second heyday could be the first flowering of color printing and
photography that occured in large part due to the carbro process. Nickolas
Muray and Paul Outerbridge were but two of the great masters working in
tricolor carbro during the 1920's, 30's and up to World War II. There were
many individual masters of this difficult printing process, and there was
also the Vivex Laboratory in England. Vivex was a lab that offered carbro
printing services, and they produced Mme. Yevonde's original prints. I
don't know of any real editioning done by these printers. Often, the
photographers produced only one master carbro print which was then supplied
as a proof, accompanying the original glass plate separation negatives.
These camera-original negatives were used to make the color printing plates
that were inked to print America's first color magazine covers.

best wishes,

Tod Gangler

Art & Soul
Seattle, WA.

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Received on Mon Sep 13 19:23:41 2004