1997 "Georgia Peaches" Limited Edition Still Life Photogravure by Lou Spitalnik

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"Georgia Peaches" was created in 1997 and it is a limited edition photogravure. The image is 7.75" h. 10" w … Read more "Georgia Peaches" was created in 1997 and it is a limited edition photogravure. The image is 7.75" h. 10" w on 14.25" h x 16.5" paper and is composed of peaches on a pewter tray on top of an antique tapestry.

Lou Spitalnik is an art history scholar and a former newspaper art critic. His art history studies have left him with a deeply classical sensitivity, although, he doesn’t want his photographs to look like copies of paintings.

He uses a view-camera, so he sees all his images upside down, takes dozens and dozens of shots to find one that pleases him. He looks for new images by getting as close as possible to "very small, very special things." He shoots for the process, allowing it to dictate his choice of fruit, flowers, bowls and other subjects. The medium becomes the message.

A photogravure is the most sophisticated of the photo-mechanical processes, so strictly speaking, it's not a photograph. The image isn't made in a darkroom. Rather, the photographer's negative is transferred onto a copper plate, which is used to print or engrave the image with ink, and he hand-coats every picture.

A copper plate is grained (adding a pattern to the plate) and then coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which has been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio plate that can reproduce detailed continuous tones of a photograph.

The process was important in 19th-century photography, but by the 20th-century was only used by some fine art photographers. By mid-century it was almost extinct, but has seen a limited revival. See less