the ghosts of Stieglitz and Steichen

This post looks at 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 19th century. But lately, it’s been showing up with surprising relevance in contemporary practice. Why?

Because we’re craving meaning in the material.

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 symbolized modernity in the hands of Stieglitz or Kasebier now feels like an act of resistance—against disposability, against perfection, against speed.

More Than Vintage

This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Photogravure isn’t stuck in the past—it’s rooted 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.

The Medium as Message

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.