Page 18 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 18/146
She was pleased with her own edition of Idylls, published in 1875, replete with her ‘tipped-in’ photo- prints. Amongst others, the University of St Andrews has a copy of this book - the first volume of poetry to be published with photographic illustrations:
“At Tennyson’s encouragement, Cameron went on to produce a book of her own with albumen sil- ver prints interspersed with texts by Tennyson lithographed from Cameron’s hand-writing. The first volume appeared in January 1875 and the second in May, selling for six guineas. Only a dozen or so copies are known to have survived. The frontispiece for each volume was a portrait of Tennyson dressed as “The Dirty Monk,” dated 1869. The Library has acquired the second volume, which con- tains 13 albumen prints including a frontispiece photograph of Tennyson dressed as ‘The Dirty Monk’ and staged groupings of other sitters wearing their remarkable costumes with flair.” (Univer- sity of St Andrews).
So these books - by Talbot, Atkins and Cameron, marked the very beginnings of the photographical- ly illustrated book. But ‘tipped-in’ photographic prints were a laborious process - even photograph- ically making the albumen prints was tedious and smelly - not suitable for mass publishing at all - more in league with the 20th century ‘artist’s book’ or small-scale print-runs that became the hall- mark of William Morris’ Kelmscott Press in the last decades of the century. The real power of pho- tography as an illustration medium in publishing was to come after the invention of the halftone process in the 1870s and 1880s.
Frederick Ives + George Meisenbach: Half-tone printing process c1873-1882.
There was no single inventor of the process for rendering continuous-tone images (like photogra- phs and paintings) into a line (black and white) plate for printing letterpress alongside type. Wil- liam Henry Fox Talbot experimented with various screens to reduce the contone image to half-tone (graded-size dots to represent the amount of black in a tiny area of the contone), but the process wasn’t really perfected until the 1870s. In 1873 Stephen Horgan experimentally produced the first half-tone to be published in an American newspaper - the appropriately named New York Daily Graphic. No matter its provenance, the halftone screen effectively automated the reprographic process - no longer did photographs have to be laboriously hand-copied by an engraver. Photo- graphs suddenly became a real mass medium - they could be reproduced accurately at various re- solutions - largely depending upon the quality of the substrate (the paper) - about 80 dots/inch for newsprint, 200 dpi or more for a coated art paper. This invention brought the newspaper into the 20th century as a vibrant graphic medium...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone