This site shows works that navigate mainly between printmaking and
photography. Many of the images shown here result from learning
Copperplate Photogravure, an image printing technique that swelled in the
second half of the 19th century. This website is intended to share these
personal learning experiences and the main sources used because it is believed that it makes more sense for changes in our knowledge to be made within the framework of communities.

The printing of a photograph is frequently seen as a following stage of the
work fulfillment and not as a set of decisions that shape its character. This choice favors certain aesthetic features, although it is sometimes
considered that the contemporary use of photographic procedures from the
19th century contributes to a stronger presence of the photographic image.
That belief seems to be supported by the easiness with which a digital print
may be made. A digital print is often seen as the natural printing of an image ignoring the possible settings of the machines or the interpretation that a professional printer has decided for an image.

Printmaking offers several techniques for printing photographs. I am
currently concentrating on learning photogravure which uses copper plates as
matrices and is sometimes called Heliogravure, Copperplate Photogravure,
Photogravure, etc. The use of their names is diverse, as in so many areas of
the language, and it becomes even more convoluted if attention is paid to
their uses in different latitudes. Nevertheless, it remains fairly well identified
as the Talbot-Klíč method.

Other photogravure techniques, such as those performed with
photopolymers, have very similar results. The practice with copper plate very
frequently includes some comment on the beauty of the matrix among the
reasons for embarking on a procedure that is much more arduous, but the
choice of one or the other process, so different in the physical effort and the
infrastructure they require, is not the consequence of a rigorous comparison
of their respective results, but rather of what each artist enjoys and wants of
the production process.

Any of these variants is a “handmade” image. Sometimes they
are referred to as hand-pulled prints, that is, prints in which the transfer of ink
to paper is done by hand. The scale is different and therefore our relationship
with them and the meaning we can attribute to them is also different. In turn,
any of its methods strengthens the materiality of the image, its character as an object, benefited by the graphic power it allows. But the prominence that can be chosen for the material (that strong presence mentioned) is not something exclusive to this printing process, but something shared by those who, for example, begin to look into the contributions that the choice of paper makes and start to interact in a more tactile way with images. Furthermore, there is a wide range of possibilities, also in this process, in the relationship that one wishes to establish between what is represented in the photographic image and its surface.

The objective here is not to preserve a craft or to appeal to a way of doing
things. It is about showing a shared recycling of knowledge that makes it easier for us to find and incorporate what is most important for each one and in this particular case, what is most appropriate for each author to shape a work and thus configure the personality of an image.