Learning to Read the Halftone

Abstract

By the middle of the 1890s there was an unmistakable shift in the appearance and ubiquity of the mass-reproduced image. Distinguished photographer Henry Peach Robinson and other observers noticed that images, particularly halftone photographs, had achieved a greater prominence in the press, even constituting a deluge, and many blamed photomechanical reproduction for degrading the visual world. The Levy screens that made halftone reproduction a commercially viable undertaking were obtainable in Britain in 1893, and from this point on the debates around the mass image became more intense. However, it is important to stress that the availability of the technology itself was not the determining factor here. Rather, a number of interwoven cultural and economic forces helped shape the new illustrated magazine so that it could embrace the halftone photograph. As far as Henry Peach Robinson was concerned, these photographs were “unnecessary pictures” randomly scattered about the magazine page, not telling the viewer anything. But their popularity suggests otherwise. I suggest that the multiplicity of the halftone photograph was in itself meaningful and this abundance of fragments necessary in the creation and active maintenance of the social. The fact is that the rapid consumption of the photograph, as well as the minimal pen-and-ink sketch, for that matter, made them both particularly useful in an era that envisaged itself as moving at increasing speed.

A feature of the year was the excess of illustration, if, indeed, you can call that illustration which illustrates nothing. It is unfortunately, our own art which has brought upon us this plague of unnecessary pictures from which we suffer. In some papers illustrations are so numerous — and so bad — that editors can find nothing to say about them, and dot them over their pages without any apparent object.

— Henry Peach Robinson, Photographic News, December 28, 1894¹