Retro/repro photography

From The Business of Photojournalism, Focal Press London, 1970, ISBN 0 240 50730 4 and Amphoto New York, 1971, Library of Congress Catalog Card No 78-127414 All rights reserved

Thank you for all your kind comments on yesterday's reminiscences of experimental photography leading up to the dawn of the digital age. Here are some more examples from the same era, in which I discussed some other aspects of the leading-edge technology at the time.

The images at the top show (left) a photograph with typed caption , scanned mechanically on a rotating drum and sent over the public telephone network to produce an exposed bromide print ready for developing in a darkroom, and (right) the same picture after 'half-tone screening' by a process camera to produce the image as a pattern of dots etched in metal, ready for printing on paper with sticky ink.

I also included the close-ups of a small part of the picture in each case, to show how much detail and definition was lost by these methods, which were the best available at the time, and were very time consuming and labour intensive.

Nobody at that time could realistically imagine a future in which we might press a button on a camera and have the pictures seen anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, and published in all the world's newspapers within the hour . . . but I did dare to predict in the closing chapter of the book the remote possibility of having daily newspapers delivered via an adapted television set! That did not happen quite as I described, but it was perhaps just a tiny hint of on-line editions and email, neither of which had been invented at that time but are now commonplace.

Enough now! But I must confess feeling that I have been privileged to have lived through a period of such ground-breaking changes. (The book is long out of print and now seems very quaint, but used copies turn up occasionally on Ebay, to amuse and sometimes embarrass me!)