The term covers a form of 19th-century publishing frequently referred to as the photographically illustrated book. ‘Publication’, however, is more wide ranging, since it encompasses all the types of printed text that were photographically illustrated during the 19th century.
While making up a comparatively small component of the overall publishing market during the second half of the 19th century, the long-term significance of the photographically illustrated publication is difficult to overstate. The application of photographic illustration to accompany printed text is now such a fundamental and integral part of industrialized societies that it is a paradox that relatively little has been written on its history. Heidtmann and Gernsheim have been the two principal scholars to have published bibliographic information in this field. However, the scale, scope, and significance of the application of photography to the illustration of books and other publications containing printed text largely await discovery and interpretation.
The application of photography to book illustration was appreciated by Henry Talbot. His six-part serial The Pencil of Nature (1844-6) may generally be considered the first photographically illustrated publication of any significance, although it only contained a total of 24 photographic plates. Few photographically illustrated publications appeared in the remainder of the 1840s, probably no more than a few dozen worldwide.
Talbot's photographically illustrated publications exemplified a standard that was used throughout the 19th century. Photographic prints were most often pasted on to one side of separate sheets of paper of heavier stock than the text pages, and these were inserted amongst the signatures. Frequently these folios were unpaginated, although they might include letterpress captions and credits. Nevertheless, as early as 1850 there had been rare examples of photographically illustrated books in which photographs had been pasted into specifically created blank spaces on text pages, thus pointing to full integration of photographic image and text. However, this remained uncommon.
Another milestone was the creation of a special photographically illustrated presentation edition of the Reports by the Juries of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Around 130 copies of this edition were produced, each containing more than 150 individual images that had to be pasted on to mounting cards and then bound into the volumes of text. The production of over 20, 000 photographs was a massive undertaking. The contemporary impact of these volumes through their international distribution remains to be evaluated.
While photomechanical processes were applied to book illustration as early as 1840, with Joseph Berres's (1796-1844) publication Phototyp nach der Erfindung des Prof. Berres in Wien, the vast majority of photographically illustrated books produced during the 19th century were created through the insertion of mounted original photographic prints into printed texts. Used initially was the salted-paper print, where the image was formed in the chemical emulsion imbedded in the fibre structure of the paper and thus had a mattlike appearance. This was particularly suitable for purposes such as the reproduction of engravings, for example in Notice sur la vie de Marc Antoine Raimondi (1853). Similarly, in the 1870s the heliographic photomechanical process of Amand Durand (1831-1905), a master engraver, was adopted for a number of facsimile reproductions of old-master prints. These continue to cause confusion amongst print collectors today.
From the second half of the 1850s the salted-paper print was replaced by the albumen print. While this had a shiny appearance, it could render better linear detail since the photographic image was not affected by the structure of the paper. Its combination with the rise of the wet-plate process proved to be decisive. The albumen process was to dominate the remainder of the 19th century.
Photographic illustration of books and other publications was also used to promote a number of other photographic print processes during the 19th century. By the 1860s the issues surrounding the fading of albumen prints were addressed by the introduction of the permanent carbon process. An additional advantage of the carbon process was that the pigments that formed the photographic image could be tinted as a single colour. This was effectively exploited by some publishers, such as those who produced books on old-master drawings; Macmillan & Co.'s Specimens of the Drawings of Ten Masters, from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle (1870) is a pertinent example.
Another photographic print process widely used for illustration was the Woodburytype, a photo-relief process renowned for its deep and rich tonalities, first marketed in 1869. Although the Woodburytype was a photomechanical process, it, like the albumen and carbon print, required prints to be individually trimmed and mounted.
From the middle of the 1850s photomechanical illustrations were appearing in a range of publications. In some instances ‘hybrid’ processes were used to create full-colour illustration, such as the combination of photolithography and chromolithography to produce illustrations accompanying Jules Labarte's Histoire des arts industriels (1864). Collotype and photogravure were also used extensively during the last quarter of the 19th century.
From the mid-1850s books illustrated photographically with images including portraits from life, topographical views, architecture, paintings, engravings, drawings, manuscripts, sculpture, and the decorative and minor arts were appearing in modest but ever increasing numbers, primarily in Europe. The 1860s was a particularly rich and varied decade in the history of British publishing and illustration, and the photographically illustrated publication forms an integral part of it.
Nineteenth-century photographically illustrated publications were produced in a number of different forms. The portfolio of loose photographic prints was the simplest, frequently having nothing more than a printed title page and an index of the plates. In some instances a few pages of accompanying printed text might be loosely inserted. In others, loose prints with text captions and credits on each mount were sold as sets. Again, loose pages of text might also be available.
The physical size of photographic illustrations during the 19th century varied considerably. They ranged from almost ‘thumbnail’ size in some cases—for example, Henry Taunt's New Map of the Thames (1872)—to large plates. A number of standard photographic print formats were also exploited for book illustration. The popularity of carte de visite-format celebrity portraits spawned a number of book publications across Europe. One distinctive type is the biography—often of a religious figure—with a carte de visite portrait as frontispiece. From the late 1850s the stereoscopic view was used to illustrate books on diverse subjects ranging from topography and architecture to sculpture. The Stereoscopic Magazine, published from 1858 by Lovell Reeve (1814-65) as a serial, each monthly part costing two shillings and sixpence, and containing three stereo photos with descriptive letterpress, is a prominent example. The cabinet format, introduced in the late 1860s, was also used for illustration.
The size of print runs varied considerably. Some titles were privately printed and only a handful of copies produced. Conversely, other titles may have had a run of several thousand. The British Library catalogue notes the number of copies printed for some 19th-century photographically illustrated titles. However, publishers sometimes significantly overestimated demand and the sale of ‘remainder’ copies through specialist auction houses is indicated by advertisements in contemporary journals such as the Athenœum.
Photographic publishers adopted a number of standard marketing strategies. One was the use of pre-publication subscription, particularly for deluxe titles. The part-work or serial was another. These devices were used both to attract a wide range of buyers and to limit financial exposure in a market affected by nascent mass-production techniques. Frequently, once a full year of a serial had been published the parts were given a special title page, bound as individual volumes and sold to the Christmas market. Advertisements in periodicals like the Athenœum show that the ‘illustrated gift book’ was another sector targeted by photographic publishers.
The commercial success of photographically illustrated publications has yet to be fully evaluated. Photographically illustrated art serials that reproduced well-known paintings were popular. The results of effective advertising of such works were noted by the contemporary press, and in 1875 it was reported that the ‘artisan classes’ of northern manufacturing towns had flocked to obtain an issue of The Picture Gallery (published by Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, of London) dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Curiously, the photographic illustrations were in fact almost exclusively taken from engravings after the paintings.
One feature of photographically illustrated publications was the rise of specialist publishers. Blanquart-Évrard in Lille was a particularly successful photographic publisher in the early 1850s, thanks to his industrialization of photographic printing. In Paris Gide et Baudry and Goupil et Cie also published significant works. In the following decade many book publishers adopted photographic illustration, though a number were particularly prominent. In Great Britain these included Sampson Low, Bell & Daldy, A. W. Bennett, Day & Son, Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, and Bickers & Son. Specialist art societies, such as the Arundel Society, also played a key role, and in the late 1860s and early 1870s this society collaborated with the South Kensington Museum and the Department of Science and Art in a series of photographic publications entitled Art Workmanship of Various Ages and Countries.
Many journals of scholarly societies were beginning to include some form of photographic illustration by the 1860s. Professional journals exploited the opportunities far less frequently until the last decade of the 19th century, and newspapers such as the Illustrated London News did not make extensive use of photographic illustration until the early 20th century.
Assisted by the rise of printing technologies, photographically illustrated publications proliferated during the last decade of the 19th century to become a mainstream component of publishing. But, while the pasted-in albumen print was still in use, it was the photomechanical processes that were dominating illustration.
— Anthony Hamber
Bibliography
- Gernsheim, H., Incunabula of British Photographic Literature 1839-1875 (1984).
- Heidtmann, F., Wie das Photo ins Buch Kam (1984).
- Wilson, J., Photography and the Printed Page in the Nineteenth Century (2001).
- Kusnerz, P. A. (ed.), ‘Photography and the Book’,
History of Photography , 26 (2002)
