People are people. As foreign as our ancestors may seem to us at times, they suffered from the same idiosyncratic deficiencies that morally compromise us, the children of technocratic modernity, and leave us dialed into an oddly prescribed fox-trot; we walk the same streets, just different incarnations. In other words, no matter how far we feel we’ve progressed beyond our fathers’ and our fathers’ fathers’ impulses, we have not.

Nothing makes this more glaringly obvious to me than photography. Much of what I preserve at the regional archives that I work at are photographs, largely because they are the best way to interact with our past; nothing is more engaging than seeing a person from another time and identifying characteristics that remind you of yourself, possibly, or maybe someone else that you know. Photographic methodology has changed, it’s been concomitantly advanced and simplified, and the power to document the present is at the fingertips of every Tom, Dick and Harry, yet technological ease does not an artist make. There has certainly been something lost with the prevalence of digital formats: an attention to detail. When photographic materials were still rare and expensive, photographers chose and framed their subjects carefully, and when the development process was still lengthy and scrupulously indebted to a skillful dedication to ones art-form, photography remained just that–an art. Now my nine year old cousin has a digital camera, and if you align the settings to “idiot proof,” she is fully capable of taking pictures that rival my own, which is not easy on my artistic ego.

What sent me on this tangential musing is a combination of two elements in the history of photography: a photographic process that undeniably declares photography an endangered art-form, and a photographic man who pioneered the beauty of immediacy by marketing human frailty.

Artistic inspiration generally emerges organically from an artist, but the artistic process should be more agonizing and time intensive than fits of creative brainstorming; photogravure is the epitome of one such sentiment. Photogravure is an intaglio printmaking process that was initially developed in the 1830s by Henry Fox Talbot and Nicephore Niepce, and predated daguerreotypes, with which people are generally more familiar. Although this method produces prints with extraordinary tonal depth, the steps required for its production are as tedious as they are laborious:

• Step One: a continuous tone film positive is made form the original photographic negative.
• Step Two: a sheet of pigmented gelatin tissue (which is now solely manufactured by one company–the Autotype Company) is sensitized by immersion into a solution of potassium dichromate and dried against a plexiglas sheet.
• Step Three: the film positive is exposed to the sensitized gravure tissue, placed on top of the pigmented gelatin tissue, and the combination is then exposed to UV light. A separate exposure is applied to a hard-dot mezzotint screen; the UV light passes through the positive and the screen and hardens the gelatin in proportion to the degree of light to which its exposed.
• Step Four: the exposed tissue is adhered to a copper plate under a layer of cool water
• Step Five: a hot water bath removes the paper backing and washes away unexposed gelatin; the layer that remains forms a contoured resist on the copper plate, i.e. a picture emerges.
• Step Six: the resulting plate is etched in a series of ferric chloride baths in steps which creates a gravure plate with tiny wells of varying depth to hold ink.
• Step 7: a print is created.

The scarcity of supplies and the sheer time commitment involved in the photogravure process is why there are only a few dozen practitioners in the entire world today: that’s right–a few DOZEN, the entire WORLD.

Flying Lessons in Photogravure

And even while I deign to lament the loss of an attention to prolonged process as a means to purify art and arts intent, I am also quite beholden to the temporal beauty of the instantaneous moment that propelled Weegee to the epicenter of popular culture on the coattails of the dehumanized matter he offered to the world of journalism, then the art world, and then, most appropriately, the ultimate realm of the unreal–cinema. In many ways, Weegee was the liaison between the barbarous beauty of the streets and the barbarity of the upper crust; he showed the denizens of the early twentieth-century how the proverbial Gotham could exist in cold urban exteriors as well as the frothiest of glamorous insiders and the interiors they were inside. He cut his photographic teeth at a time when organized crime ran rampant, so crime was what he documented. Yet even given the rawness of his subject, his ability to capture people best while at their worst was remarkable in that even while chronicling the syndicates of evil or perversion, he still retained a certain frail intimacy within the lens that keeps the most gruesome, repulsed tinges in the viewer at bay and allows us to empathize and connect with the (often times) degenerate images that are proffered before us. Many of his subjects were witnesses to crimes and tragedies–crowds amassed behind police barricades stricken with agonizing amuse as they watched buildings burn and bodies, maimed and lifeless, loaded into antiquated coroners station-wagons, mothers besides themselves with grief witnessing the same events, the list could go on. The point is, he was there to capture these images, spontaneous images that found a market; film noir was quick to adapt his motifs to the silver screen and he was an integral part from the ground floor, up. By forgoing stages crafted by powder puffs and strategic lighting, he heightened the authenticity of his photographs and forged a medium that would influence the production of art for decades to come.

Weegee: Crime

1942: Tenement Fire

Later in his career he had the pleasure of photographing high society in their element, such as opening night at the Opera; here is where beauty is inverted and Weegee’s genius truly shines. He used infrared film that allowed him to take candid photos of the rich and famous while in attendance at various and sundry events, decked out in their finest furs and gems, and in doing so exposed them for the hideous vessels they were, composed of little more than masterfully disguised imperfections: veins just below the surface of the skin, whiskers, and other unsightly human characteristics were exposed. Here he acted as a type of artistic archeaologist, unearthing the ugliness of American royalty, while simultaneously exalting the beauty of the unincorporated and disenfranchised–those who held their grief close and endured with dignity and relative grace, with little shelter from their misery and the prying eyes that were often the very source of their burdens.

Mrs. George Washington Cavanagh

Perhaps his greatest legacy is his ability to expose the fact that the entirety of the world we’ve created is largely a pedantic farce–one in which the wolves don sheep’s clothing and the sheep are left shivering in dimly lit alleys taking comfort in the grief of the less fortunate. Juxtaposed against one another, photogravure and Weegee’s off-the-cuff creations are equally artistic, if not equally accessible; we all garner the possibility of finding a Weegee amongst ourselves, but very few will have the opportunity allow the photogravuretuer within us to find its release.

But people are people. Our reactions continue to revolve in repetitive cycles because human nature has only deviated so much since its inception. I say this because the rich still believe in the insulating capabilities of their finery, and the poor are still looking for kicks where ever they can get them. I say this because what is considered beautiful very rarely is, and what most overlook because of its weathered carcass is often radiantly divine. We still love, we still hate, we still grieve, we still railroad our intentions with pragmatic placation, we still find hope and laughter in pedantic brutality and simplistic idiocy. We still find comfort in one another, despite our complete inability to stave off the inevitable emotional rape and plunder that accompanies all human interaction. Because, in the end, to do anything short of the aforementioned would be less than human and people are, if nothing else, people.

People are People