What do we know about the past, the one before we were born? Of course, there are books on history, memoirs, paintings, monuments and other objects surviving from the past and giving us some idea of what it was like to live at that time. However, they never give us a complete picture, rather fragments of reality, some of them more compelling and spectacular than the others. But they are never sufficient to give us a fulsome impression of what life was like back then. Nothing can ever make up for the fact that we did not live at that time, and this is irreparable. Life moves only in one direction and that is away from the past.
Visual records of the past
The closest we can get to having a glimpse of reality of the past is through contemporaneous records which we can see, read or listen to. They vary from epoch to epoch depending on what media were available and which of those records survive.
There are different kinds of records, including written ones such as memoirs, correspondence, etc. Yet I want to focus here only on visual records of places and events made for that very purpose, i.e. for the purpose of recording what existed or was happening at that time for contemporaries (not us) who could have seen that with their own eyes. It is not by chance that I have chosen the period from the second half of 17th century through the end 18th century. There are at least two reasons for that.
Why I chose this period
Firstly, it is the exceptional quality of material surviving from that period which was the climax of the art of engraving. In my partial opinion (with which some readers may disagree), very little of what had come before or came after that period was comparable in technical quality and style to the prints made during this period by draughtsmen and engravers such as Gabriel Perelle, Jacques Rigaud, Vander Meulen, Menant, Bretez, etc. There were excellent engravers in the 19th century, such as Gustave Doré. But he is too 19th century to my taste. Besides his work is mainly pure imagination, not a record of any contemporaneous or actual reality.
Secondly, because this is the period coming shortly before the invention of photography in the 19th century, an offspring of the Industrial Revolution, which completely changed the way we perceive and record reality. Photography also revolutionized graphic arts because artists could no longer compete with photography in terms of accuracy of reflection of reality (which, by the way, may explain the phenomenon of Gustave Doré). This is when modern art, liberated from the task of recording reality, really took off. And this despite the fact that until the invention of colour photography in the 20th century photography still could not fully compete with painters when it came to colour.
Engraving as a precursor of photography
And yet in some ways the pre-photography 18th century was the harbinger of the age of photography. Not only did it see the emergence of the concept of Vedutist, artists such as Canaletto and Guardi whose main purpose was to create accurate and beautiful images of cityscapes and places of interest for their wealthy clients on a Grand Tour to take back with them to England or wherever else they came from, as a visual memory of what they saw with their own eyes. It also saw a proliferation of prints intended to give as accurate a representation of reality as was technically possible and to make it available for as many people as possible thanks to the printing technologies that existed at that time. This was effectively the invention of photography as a concept before the invention of photography as technology and a term.
What is in common between those prints and photography is that accuracy is the key element of their value. Both the engraver (like the vedutist) and the photographer knew that they would be judged by customers or viewers largely in terms of how accurate their image was in recording what could be seen by the latter. Accuracy or faithfulness to reality was as important a criterion of quality as artistic or technical skills. Well, perhaps not always (an element of exaggeration or embellishment was not always excluded) but in most cases.
Technical similarity
Even in technical terms, printing was a prototype of photography. It was such in the sense that the process of making prints involved, as the first step, the creation of a wooden or copper plate on which the reverse version of the image was made with a chisel (on wood) or a sharp point (on metal) or other similar instruments. It would then be printed/transposed onto paper to show the correct version of the image. This is essentially a similar process to that of making photographs based on a “negative” (whatever media were used for this, paper, glass, film, etc) representing the reality in reverse, both compositionally (left to right, right to left), and colour-wise (white for black and black for white).
Except that the manual process of creating a plate was replaced with an automatic process made by a camera. That was not as revolutionary as it may sound because the camera (camera obscura) had itself been invented before the invention of photography and had been used for making prints as well as painting.
In both cases, the process involves a single prototype in reverse, which is used for making multiple copies, but which is not itself susceptible of replication. This of course does not apply to Daguerreotype, invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1839, which was a one-off, just like a painting.
This, by the way, explains why old prints can no longer be replicated using the same technology. The plates on which they were based are either lost or worn out as a result of multiple use. A few of them still exist, like the 16th century wooden plate for the spectacular bird’s eye view of Venice preserved in Museo Correr (https://correr.visitmuve.it/) in Venice (a smaller French version exists in my collection Venice). But they are usually no longer fit for producing prints of the same quality as were made at the time of their creation.
Continuity rather than disruption
For all these reasons, there is more in common between engravings and photographs (except Daguerreotype) than between the former and painting. Indeed, painting is relatively expensive and one-off, not susceptible of easy replication in multiple copies. Copies could only be made by hand and would vary in quality and accuracy depending on the skills and talent of the copyist. Engraving, by contrast, allowed for multiple identical copies to be printed. This made them relatively accessible, just like the invention of printing technologies gave rise to publishing more generally, replacing the expensive hand-made (and usually coloured) manuscripts with black and white books.
There is also similarity of purpose. Just like the vedutists and engravers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the early photographers of the 19th century (such as William Henri Fox Talbot, who invented the negative-based photography, Noel Paymal Lerebours, Paul Le Secq, Charles Negre, Edouard-Denis Baldus, Charles Marville, Johann Franz Michiels, Edouard Fierlants and many others) focused largely on topography capturing views of places and cityscapes for the benefit of their contemporaries who could see them with their own eyes. This evolved into a whole industry of print-making for the tourists, the precursor of postcards when the technology of photography was not accessible to everyone as it became in the 20th century.
Monochrome v. Colour
What is also common to both engraving and early photography (until well into the 20th century) is that both were black and white, leaving the colours to the imagination of viewers. Coloured prints did exist but colouring was made by hand, mainly in water colours, making them akin to paintings, i.e. one-offs. And in virtually all cases it was not done from life. So that it was not much different from putting colours to a black and white photograph, the technique that has become rather common over the last decades (covering also motion pictures), although it was also practiced in the 19th century. The artificial and somewhat arbitrary nature of this process actually diminished the value of prints (or photographs) as a snapshot or record of reality such as it was.
In an interesting twist of artistic taste or fashion, black and white photography has for some time been considered to be more sophisticated and sought after than colour one despite the existence of absolutely perfect colour-rendering technologies. The same trend is taking over filmmaking with black and white movies becoming ever more common, take Netflix’s ‘Ripley’ or parts of Wes Anderson’s ‘French Dispatch’ as recent examples. Is it a sign of nostalgia for the past? Perhaps. But I rather think it is more a sign of appreciation that monochrome has a peculiar elegance and sort of authenticity about it that coloured versions lack.
In fact, I believe that the technical evolution of photography in the broad sense (including motion pictures and other media) had a similar effect on photography as the invention of the latter had on painting. The more advanced the means of creating perfectly accurate images of reality, virtually undistinguishable from the latter, have become, the more photography as art lapsed back into the monochrome, turning it into a new tool for creativity. What was initially a technical limitation eventually became the means of artistic liberation from the limitations of perfect technology.
Epilogue
My collection is almost exclusively black and white (with the exception of Maps) and proudly so. Nothing can be added to or subtracted from these images without distorting their nature as a reflection of the world, or rather of specific places or events they purported to represent. Those events only remain in the books of history and most of those places either do not exist anymore or have undergone changes that make them sometimes unrecognizable. This is the best means we have at our disposal to resurrect, in visual terms, the reality long gone, like traveling through time backwards.
