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Michael Allan
My first camera was a half frame Leica with a fixed lens that I would take backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains when I was in high school. I graduated to a Pentax K1000 and Kodachrome when my boys were old enough to backpack in Colorado with me, but when they were teens with a life of their own, the camera went into a drawer. Several years ago I picked up an all in one Sony and started backpacking again. One thing led to another and I bought a Sony A7r, then upgraded that, bought a printer, and I never looked back. I now mostly shoot black and white with a focus on printing.
Collegiate Peaks Wilderness
Rock Stars
After success with carbon ink printing by Cone Editions, I noticed they had a lot of photogravure classes and I was curious. How would photogravure compare to carbon ink? Does it look different? Would it get more attention? Is it more durable? So off I went to Vermont for a week to learn and make prints by etching steel plates, rubbing ink all over them, and then smashing them into paper. It sounded simple, but the devil was in the details.
Photogravure is a very old art form based on intaglio printmaking. The artist etches a metal plate and the removed metal holds ink which is then pressed hard against wet paper to transfer. Relief printmaking is the opposite. Ink is rolled on the top surface and lightly pressed on dry paper.
There are numerous ways to etch metal, such as hand tools or chemicals. Traditional photogravure uses a film and photosensitive copper plate along with a mesh to form small cells that hold the ink by exposing the plate to ultraviolet light.
Direct to Plate Photogravure uses an Inkjet printer to print an image on a photosensitive steel plate, which is also exposed to ultraviolet light.
The main advantage of Direct to Plate is radically improved resolution of Inkjet printing. The Cone Editions process uses Piezeography and Green Mountain Plates to achieve the highest fidelity prints.