Negative Photographs: The dots appear in varying size, depending on the tones of the original photographs. A negative photographs copy of the picture is first made with a camera, inside of which is fitted the halftone screen. This negative photographs is then printed on a metal coated with bichromated gelatin. The dots on the negative photographs allow light to penetrate and render the glue insoluble, so that when the plate is etched with acid each single dot remains on the surface of the plate, which is then mounted at type height on a wooden block. In the final print the minute clusters of dots cannot be distinguished, but appear as tones of gray.
An extraordinary series of photographs of Victor Hugo living in exile on the island of Jersey were taken in 1853-54 by his son Charles and his friend the poet Auguste Vacquerie. An eerie romanticism pervades these pictures; details seem selected for their symbolism: Hugo's favorite rocks or his resting place under the flowering vines of the conservatory. A series of just hands—Hugo's and his wife's—was made; a novel idea in photography, it was a portent of the close-up. Hugo was greatly interested in these photographs, and even made a drawing based on the negative photographs of a gnarled and twisted barnacle-clad breakwater—an astonishingly early recognition of the beauty of the tone reversal of a negative photographs image. |
