by Ivins (Author)
The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results-freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist's prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs. It is this premise that William M. Ivins, Jr., elaborates in Prints and Visual Communication, a history of printmaking from the crudest wood block, through engraving and lithography, to Talbot's discovery of the negative-positive photographic process and its far reaching consequences.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 01 Jan 1969
ISBN 10: 0262590026
ISBN 13: 9780262590020
Book Overview: William Ivins has made a more thorough analysis of the esthetic effects of prints and typography on our human habits of perception than anybody else... He not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience in print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. Marshall McLuhan