the ghosts of Stieglitz and DEMACHY
Thoughts on how a historical process is finding fresh resonance today:
There’s something uncanny about photogravure. It looks like it belongs to another century - because, in a way, it does. The soft focus, the slow process, the rich black ink pressed into paper - it carries the visual and tactile DNA of the early pioneers of the photography, of the mid 19th century and early 20th century. But lately, it’s been showing up with surprising relevance in contemporary practice. In this year’s RA Summer Exhibition, I counted at least 20 artworks that had ‘photogravure’ in their description that had a visual link to a photographic image in their inception.
In a culture of hyper-efficiency and constant digital churn, photogravure offers a deliberate slowness. Its antique qualities are no longer signs of obsolescence, but signals of care. Of choice. Of presence. The process that once symbolised modernity in the hands of the a Pictorialist like Robert Demachy or Alfred Stieglitz, the founder of the Photo-Secession movement, now feels like an act of resistance - against disposability, against perfection, against speed.
This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Photogravure has its roots in the past but it isn’t stuck in it. The look may recall vintage prints, but the hands guiding it are asking new questions. Today’s artists are using photogravure not to mimic history, but to reframe it - to draw out deeper emotional currents, to ground modern imagery in tactile memory, to slow the viewer down.
And it works. There’s something about that etched plate, that soaked paper, that inky impression - it doesn’t just reference the past. It holds it. You can feel time in it.
When a contemporary image - say, a blurred cityscape or a fragmented portrait - meets this historical process, a kind of quiet dissonance happens. The subject says now. The surface says then. And that tension speaks volumes. It turns the image into something reflective, even elegiac. Not quite memory. Not quite moment. Something in-between.
This is where photogravure thrives - in the gap between eras, between technologies, between touch and image. A medium born of invention, reclaimed as meditation.