Photography History, Publishing News and Events

NEWS AND EVENTS

BACKYARD BEARS • $175
(Runner Up Prize. Pocono Record Photo Contest)

We purchased our first home in the beautiful Pocono’s over 25 years ago. I was fascinated by the work Dr. Gary Alt was doing with his study of the Pennsylvania Black Bear and we sure had plenty of them as visitors over the years. I love to photograph the beauty around us and each season offers so many possibilities. In the fall of 2001 we had a family of bears that paid us a visit and stayed for over a week. I shot a series of bear photos on October 19, 2001 at 3:30 in the afternoon. I was interested in the color richness of their black coats against the muted colors of the forest in our backyard in Hemlock Farms.

PUBLISHING TIMELINE 2000
by Richard Sasso

A chronology of graphic arts & publishing events from prehistory to the year 2000. Contains 344 pages, plus covers, in the printed text. Fully illustrated in color with 350 illustrations. Introduction by noted historian and author, Carl Schlesinger. Includes a searchable CD-ROM.

BOOK INTRODUCTION
by Carl Schlesinger

After much study of this important work by Richard Sasso, I marvel at the large picture he is painting. It is not just the rise of graphic arts in importance to world civilization. It is also his choice of thousands of entries of diverse and yet related facts that put a human face on an industrial profession.

The items are presented chronologically and the story that comes out of this method is fascinating. Mr. Sasso starts by going back 37,000 years, to the dim prehistory of the Reindeer men of Northern Europe. Compiler Sasso tells us that these early humans developed pre-alphabet picture writing by scraping their outlines of local animals on the walls of caves.

As I leafed through the Timeline’s pages I felt like I was in a time machine which allowed me to see the human evolution of written, then printed, then electronically imaged communications on this earth. If you open this book to glimpse the larger picture, you too will be fascinated by the struggle to transmit ideas from one’s head to another person’s, and by what means, and then how to record a message in permanent form for the generations to come.

In today’s world it is easy to take speech and written messages for granted. Sasso’s book bends time for our microexamination. Think of it—37,000 years of failure and then success in development of sounds and gestures, then words, then ideas drawn in pictographs on stone walls, then marks on leaves of plants, on smoothed leather, on groundwood paper. Finally, the methods of information transfer used today: glowing images on coated glass or—even more sophisticated—information displayed on liquid-crystal lightboards.

All of this is at our fingertips in Sasso’s work. The author moves us along in his chronology and also tells us of the great men and women in every age who invented, discovered, or applied new knowledge to make communication easier, quicker and cheaper.

There is arcane knowledge scattered throughout. The invention of plate glass (1688) for example, which made the glass negative for photography possible more than a century later. How does a Monotype typecaster work? Is it true that Egyptian mummy wrappings were used to make American paper in the 1850s? Information you never thought you needed (or were expected to know) is offered to the reader with every page turned.

There have been a number of chronological encyclopedias published in the last two centuries. One that I have used till now is a 1966 edition of the Annals of Printing, by W. Turner Berry and Edmund Poole, printed in London. That book, however, only takes me to 1950. Sasso makes it possible for me to re-live the most exciting times of my life as a printer—the years of 1950 to 2000, when almost every day some breathtaking invention was announced that forced “blue-collar” professional craftsmen out of the industrial age of iron and steel and into the era of electronics, plastics, laser beams, computers, the Internet, non-impact digital imaging and other whiz-bang developments which make our lives both easier and yet more complicated.

Mr. Sasso has a very impressive background in the graphic arts. He was well-suited to take on this monumental task, which will provide our generation with the knowledge we should have to understand how communication images have evolved. I must mention here that the specifics of recent technology changes, and Sasso’s clear description of each process and the way it works, makes the book really valuable. Graphic arts teachers and printing history students and researchers can now read the factual story of the last 25 years of typesetting chaos and progress—possibly the most important period since the invention (in the Western world) of printing itself some 550 years ago.

Finally, Sasso should be especially commended for making this an index-friendly book by providing an accompanying CD version with his printed text. This thoughtful extra will allow a user to locate quickly any reference desired by typing in any word of choice, or a topical word group, or searching for a keyword to obtain additional references. That is what makes this a true 21st-century book.——Carl Schlesinger

THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
See excerpts below from the book, "Publishing Timeline 2000." Copyright © 2000 by Richard Sasso. All rights reserved.

The History of Photography
1556 to 1864

While the subject of the photographic process has been discussed for many years, (in some ways it goes back a thousand years), our timeline is not intended to be a thoughtful guide to the complete development of the many processes that that were related to its development. This timeline only attempts to point to some of the highlights in the evolution of the photographic processes and the people who have contributed to its development.

The history of photography is a study of art and science, and the 19th century was witness to major developments in the photomechanical aspects of various photographic processes. A 50-year period of great experimentation in the field of photography began in the early 1800s.

Some of the major events and the people who have been responsible for them are noted on the pages that follow. In the development of the photomechanical aspects of the process, considerable overlapping and secret techniques were prevalent (some of these secrets died with their inventors), but in the end, the 19th century alone had over 125 different photographic processes and inventors. By the end of the century, they would transform the graphic arts and publishing industry in a profound way. And later, a new art form would emerge.

1556
Leonardo da Vinci was familiar with the principle of the camera obscura (a pinhole-type camera) and a description was published by Giovanni Porta as early as 1556. The basic design of the camera was a box with a small hole. Since light travels in a straight line, the image that was projected inside the box appeared upside down. It was discovered later that fitting the box with a lens from a telescope created a clearer, brighter image. The camera obscura was used by artists to aid them in creating a picture that could be traced on paper.

1685
The camera obscura (a pinhole-type camera) was developed in 1685. The basic design and operation of this camera were known as early as the year 1000. Then, the invention of plate glass by Abraham Thevart in 1688 made it possible to develop the glass negative (among other things) used in the photography process.

1727
In 1727 Professor J. Schulze was experimenting when he noticed that a flask containing nitric acid and chalk which accidentally also contained some silver, started to darken on the side where the flask was facing sunlight in an open window. He also found that by adding more silver, the mixture would darken faster. He could not achieve the same results using the heat from a fire and soon realized that it was the sunlight causing the reaction. Schulze published his results, but this experience and some others that followed by the turn of the century, did not lead directly to the development of photography.

to be continued...

Text and photographs in this "History of Photography Timeline" from the book, "Publishing Timeline 2000," by Richard Sasso. Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.