Prints and Visual Communication - Softcover

Ivins Jr., William M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262590026 ISBN 13: 9780262590020

Publisher: MIT Press, 1969

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

This is the first book that unequivocally declares and historically supports the dignity, the force, and the validity of the printed picture as a basic form of communication in all forms of the repeatable image, whether woodcut, photograph or photographic reproduction. Distinguished by wit and forthrightness, it is a lively illustrated survey of the search for methods of reproduction to give the visual image the flexibility that the language of words achieved through the printer's press.... Rarely does a technical work have authority coupled with imagination and readibility. Mr. Ivins' book exhibits both these qualities. Through the deeply sensitive pen of this scholar the visual image joins the sight and sound of words to take a place in the stream of human communication. -Romana Javitz, Picturescope

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1969
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262590026
• ISBN 13: 9780262590020
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288