Photogravure is another photographic process, one in which the image from a negative is etched into a metal plate. Photogravure was widely used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The soft, sensuous tonal quality it produces perfectly suited - and helped propagate - the then-dominant school of art photography, Pictorialism. Alfred Stieglitz used photogravure for the images he published in his landmark quarterly, Camera Work (1903-1917).
Some of those Camera Work gravures are among the most beautiful photographic images ever made. Two of them, Stieglitz’s “The Terminal’’ and Alvin Langdon Coburn’s “St. Paul’s From Ludgate Circus,’’ are in “A Century of Photogravure,’’ which runs at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University through Oct. 23.
Exhibition director Bonnell Robinson has brought together 69 gravures from 27 photographers. Some of the names you’d expect: Stieglitz, Coburn, Edward Steichen, Clarence White. Others you wouldn’t: Aaron Siskind, Kiki Smith, Roy DeCarava. In a further surprise, one of the three DeCaravas is a portrait of Billie Holiday. The honeyed allure of Lady Day’s voice finds a visual counterpart in the softness of gravure.
Yet at what point do softness and sensuousness cloy and dampen? Content is a crucial consideration with gravure. So many of the great turn-of-the-century examples were cityscapes. Whether consciously or not, Stieglitz and Coburn were making the modern metropolis seem less confrontational, less contemporary. Paul Strand did something similar a few decades later, relaxing the harsh desert light of Mexico when he used gravure for the photographs he took there.
