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Photogravure is a type of intaglio printmaking developed in the 1830s by Henry Talbot in England and Nicephone Niepce in France. These were the first photographs, pre-dating daguerrotypes and the later silver-gelatin photos. Photogravure was used for both original fine art prints and for reproduction of works from other media such as paintings. Photogravure is distinguished from rotogravure in that photogravure uses a flat copperplate etched rather deeply and printed by hand, while in rotogravure, as the name implies, a rotary cylinder is only lightly etched, and is a factory printing process for newspapers, magazines, and packaging. Due to an unfortunate confusion of terms, searches for "photogravure" on the web often turn up industrial machinery designed for rotogravure.
Photogravure registers an extraordinary variety of tones, through the transfer of etching ink from an etched copperplate to special dampened paper run through an etching press. The unique tonal range comes from photogravure's variable depth of etch, that is, the shadows are etched many times deeper than the highlights. Unlike half-tone processes which merely vary the size of dots, the actual quantity and depth of ink in a photogravure etching are varied. Photogravure practitioners such as Peter Henry Emerson and others brought the art to a very high standard of expression in the late 19th century, which continued with the work of Edward Steichen in the early 20th century. But the speed and convenience of silver-gelatin photography eventually displaced photogravure, which fell into disuse after the Curtis gravures in the 1920s. Fifty years later, photogravure experienced a revival in the hands of Aperture and Jon Goodman, who studied it in Europe. Photogravure is now actively practiced in several dozen workshops around the world.
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