TORONTO NOTES -
Reported by Robert Carter
An except from the newsletter of the Photographic Historical Society of Canada
(photo by kind permission of Robert Lansdale)
 Our June speaker Reg Holloway, whose varied career began as a reporter/photographer in Britain, described how photography and the press have mutually benefitted over the years. He noted that in spite of our current interest in the “race into
or perhaps through digital,” we must remember photography is still relatively new - its roots go back only four or five generations (for example my grandparents were born in the 1870s and their parents in the 1840s).
Once the photographic print had been achieved
it was inevitable that a way would be found to make that image more widely available. Only a limited number of people could be reached by a single image even in an album or an exhibition. Reg emphasized that the medium for wide distribution was the press.
Artists provided the illustrations and impressions in the mass media of the day in spite of the technical limitations. Reg gave
an example of the great fire of 1842 in Hamburg, Germany. The news took 10 days to arrive in London. An artist borrowed a painting
of the city to guide his illustration. He added fire, smoke and by-standers to his interpretation of the painting and two weeks after the fire a detailed report appeared in the London news complete with a line drawing depicting the famous city in flames.
Up to the end of the 1860s, pictures in the press were line drawing illustrations printed with wood cuts engraved from the work of a traditional artist or photographer. In 1869 Montrealer William Leggo succeeded in applying Fox Talbot’s idea of using a fine screen to convert the continuous tones of a photograph such that they could be recreated with the simple black ink/white paper of the press. His "granulated photograph" process was used to publish a Notman portrait of Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Arthur in the weekly Canadian Illustrated News—the world’s first publication of a halftone image.
Leggo and his publisher, Desbarats, took the process to New York City where they improved it and in 1873 founded the New York Daily Graphic. "In 1880 the Graphic became the first daily
paper to use the halftone process to reproduce a photograph on the same page as text." Later in the same decade the combination of halftone technology and the speed of the new dry plate photography marked the start of press photography.
The rest of Reg’s talk
addressed a number of milestone press cameras and their features as the preferred models moved from glass plates to cut film to film packs and finally roll film in ever shrinking negative sizes. He brought with him a selection of these epic cameras from his collection. I was attracted most to the small technically precise c1930s Plaubel Makina which spanned nearly a half century of press use beginning just before the great war.
To learn more about press photography pick up a copy of Reg Holloway’s book The Evolution and Demise of the Larger Format Press Camera published in 2008 by Epic Press of Belleville, Ontario. / R.C.
Download the document (printable PDF).
RECOMMENDED!
A review from the Western Canada Photographic Historical Association journal January, 2009
This book was published this fall by a member of the Photographic Historical Society of Canada. It is a pleasure to review this heavily illustrated 80-page book. Camera books written, published and printed in Canada are rare. The book is a quarter history with the remainder given over to two-page descriptions of 22 press cameras from 1892 to 1976.
The history is frustratingly brief – I wanted more – but does outline the preference for durable, hulking cameras that served as an invitation through police lines and an assist to push through crowds. Quite the opposite of newspaper’s early adoption of digital cameras with five shots a second; some press photographers stayed with glass plates into the second half of the last century – as they could dispatch them in ones and twos to the runners who returned to the newsroom. Development by inspection, a fast fix and dry, and the prints were on the editor’s desk in minutes. It did mean they had to get the shot right the first time, talk about pressure, particularly in the days when you had to keep your flash powder dry – and measure it carefully!
Recommended. You can borrow the club’s copy, but at $23 you should get your own.
Tom Parkinson
WELL ILLUSTRATED – DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF MORE THAN 20 CLASSIC PRESS CAMERAS!
A book report from the Photographic Historical Society of Canada (PHSC) journal
The Evolution and Demise of the Larger Format Press Camera
by Reg Holloway
Published by Epic Press, Belleville, Ontario,
Contact: info @essence-publishing.com
ISBN 978-1-55452-294-1, Softcover, 80 pages,
55 B&W Illustrations, $23.00 CDN/US plus shipping
Through his own experiences as a reporter/photographer in England, PHSC member Reginald
Holloway has produced a book dedicated to the cameras that he worked with or were the prevalent equipment used
during the largeformat camera days.
Today's automatic light weight digital equipment is a far cry from those heavy, singleshot, glass-plate cameras used by early press photographers. Cameras made of wood, brass and leather could weigh up to five pounds while the plates and holders for perhaps a dozen exposures could add as much again. The ealiest photographers had no range-finder, exposure meter or flash equipment so it was experience that guided them to a proper exposure which could only be verified when the plate was developed.
The book presents some history to early press photography with cameramen being assigned to give coverage of the Crimea War in 1855 and the American Civil War from 1861. The 8x10 field camera on tripod was most common with the wet
plate process requiring coating and processing of the plates right in the field. The results were converted into woodcut engravings for reproduction in the popular press. Otherwise actual photographic prints were inserted into magazines or displayed as exhibitions. It wasn't until the 1880s that the halftone engraving with its dot matrix, that photographs could actually be printed directly to a page along with type. It can be proudly claimed that the first halftone image appeared on the front of The Canadian Illustrated News in Montreal in 1869.
Holloway traces out the changes in processes and equipment over the years with commercially dry plates offering greater emulsion speed resulting in shorter exposures and smaller handheld cameras.
"During a period of sixty years (and for some a little longer), press photographers wielded large and rugged, often handsome, equipment and they created a romantic image of themselves - an image that remains synonymous with the craft they established," says Holloway.
The book is well illustrated and contains detailed descriptions of more than twenty classic press cameras. All cameras shown are in the author's collection which he assembled from many parts of the world during 30 years in the British foreign service following his career as a reporter. His last three positions were as Consul General in Toronto, Senior British Trade Commissioner in Hong Kong and Consul General in Los Angeles.
Mr. Holloway believes the book will be of interest to anybody who is or was involved in photography or is fascinated by old cameras.
Download the book report (printable PDF)...
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