The Graphic Arts

I know this is not exactly "photography" in the sense that is usually meant here, but for most of the 20th century, the graphic arts were (and to a certain extent still are) one of the major consumers of light-sensitive materials, like cinema. Once the province of letterpress and engraving, the printing processes were essentially photographic for the last hundred years or so.

Without the graphic arts, we would have never had beautiful cross-purpose applications like lith printing. (In fact, for the longest time I couldn't get my head around why Anton Corbijn would fool around with a rotary press! ) Nor would the Red Dot Artar and its siblings have greeted the lensboard of so many rabid LF photographers! And if it weren't for quality printing, nobody could have ever afforded to look at the great photographs of major and minor artists all over the world reproduced in book and magazine formats.

So as a way to celebrate the vaster ecosystem of film photography that the graphic arts represent, I'd like to invite all of you who had experience with the analogue processes to share your experience and explain to the young ones what it meant to prepare halftone reproductions, color separation plates, etc, before the advent of CTP or RIP.

Next time we make a lith print or fool around with APHS film, we might better understand what these tools were made for, and perhaps we will find new toys to play with!

Okay, so having graduated in 1998, maybe I am not one of the old veterans, but while in college, I had to learn manual stripping, including such fun as cutting ruby-lithe with an Xacto. Honestly, it sucked . . . no romance to it at all.

Printing negatives are still in use, and probably will be for a longer time. There are computer to plate processes, and platesetters still in use, though the input might be a file most of the time. Process cameras are still in use, just not as often as a decade or two ago. Many older printing processes are still being used, because they work and remain profitable.

Unfortunately many modern printing films cannot directly be switched to usage for still photographic purposes. The engineers and chemists can probably give better reasons for this than I could; though one thing is that the light sources used to expose these films are different than daylight.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
Dead Link Removed

I received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1978 in Graphic Design, Graphic Arts and Photography then went on to Art Center and Brooks Institute of Photography. Other degrees before and after that experience rounded out my escape from reality after serving in combat in Vietnam.

In the major I was required to learn and prove just about every printing method know to man. Everything from strip up to layout and printing. The process camera was my friend. The art work was done by hand as was the design work. It was harder than hell and oh what a computer could have done.

I owe a lot to the professors and teachers who taught the older processes. I am glad to have lived in a time were hands on real life tools were used. Running four colors on a Heidelberg Kord isn't easy. I enjoy Indesign these days to no end but the smell of printing inks are hard to get out of your system.

mhv said:

So as a way to celebrate the vaster ecosystem of film photography that the graphic arts represent, I'd like to invite all of you who had experience with the analogue processes to share your experience and explain to the young ones what it meant to prepare halftone reproductions, color separation plates, etc, before the advent of CTP or RIP.

Click to expand...

In 1969, at the age of 19, having tried and loathed office work, I got a photographic traineeship with the British Ministry of Technology in Chiselhurst, Kent, UK and made friends with a 16x20" Littlejohn process camera, which, typically of its ilk, was a giant wooden camera running on a set of rails about 20 feet long, at one end of which was a pivoting copyboard (glass plus pressure pad) about six feet square. The first hazard to negotiate was the four exposed carbon arcs used for lighting, each was rated at 30 amps, 120 V DC, and had the intrinsic feature of DC that, if you were to touch one with the palm of your hand, your hand would close over the carbon rod, you would not be able to let go, and you would be toast! The old guy I was working with used to lick the end of his finger and tap the rods if they refused to strike (light up), I found a plastic ruler safer! Every now and again, I had to do the rounds of the lights with a tube wrench and a tin bucket, unscrewing the clamps and allowing the stub residues of the burnt-out carbon rods to fall into the bucket before replacing the rods (which were about 15" long when new and burned down to about 2", with the need for regular resetting).

The camera had a single film/plate holder, this was permanently fitted with a sheet of plate glass coated with non-drying adhesive to which sheets of 16x20" film (Kodalith 3) were attached. For simple line copying, I would expose anything up to 20 sheets of film and then process them all at once in a deep dish - the resulting splashes rotted away my lab coat in an average of 4 weeks! For critical work, the lab bench had a built-in red safelight panel also 16x20", with clear perspex dishes development could be carried out by inspection. Half-tone dot negatives were made using a glass dot screen (as I recall, we used 80 dpi mostly, we also had a 120 dpi screen), this was clipped inside the back of the camera and moved back by a lever to come into contact with the film once the filmholder had been attached and the "roller-blind" sheath had been pulled back. It was some time before I was allowed to fit or remove the screen, which was treated like a holy relic!

I sometimes wish I had a wooden process camera as an ornament, otherwise I really don't miss them (or the quite outrageous health risks by modern standards) at all!

Regards,

David

David:

You must be really old!!

In high school, in the early 1970s, I was in a high level academic programme, but had the great good fortune to be able to take some graphic arts electives. I fell in love with the process camera - a great behemoth of a horizontal camera.

Many halftones later, I had a good grasp of the halftone process, at least as far as preparation for the offset press. I also learned enough to operate a simple offset press competently, and a better offset press without disaster (three colours on that one).

It was a wonderful complement to my photographic experience, and actually led to a really good summer job.

It did, however, also lead to me being really picky whenever I encounter a poorly printed publication or brochure.

Just like my Dad is picky whenever he sees a movie where the colour balance shifts between reels, or there is an obvious scratch on the print

Thanks for a though provoking question.

Matt

I wish that I had learned all this stuff myself, in fact, I almost enrolled in the Colorado School of Art in 1985 to study photography - instead I went into an Electrical Engineering path. Big mistake!!

When I left school in 1983 I worked for a small electronics company. I spent most of my time designing printed circuit board tracking. In the days before computer aided design (CAD), this was done on a drawing board or light box by sticking black pads in the hole positions and then the tracks were placed with red and blue tapes, red for one side, blue for the other onto a sheet of clear polyester. The lightbox had a 0.2" pitch grid to aid alignment.
This original was then photograped twice using red and blue filters on a process camera to separate out the front and back images and to reduce it to full size as the original was done at 2:1
I now do PCB tracking on a computer but I would still prefer to do it the old way.


Steve.