The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (review)

This is a book for readers of Jane Eyre (1847) who are more interested in the engraving methods used to illustrate Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds (1804) than in the heroine's response to those images. The "beautiful jewel-like wood engravings" in Bewick's work inspired Gerry Beegan to write this history of the techniques used in nineteenth-century pictorial journalism (xi). Beegan's straightforward prose makes the craftsmanship behind illustrated magazines accessible to even the graphically challenged reader. The technical terms stipple, cackle, and pluck will all make sense after reading about the photomechanical techniques patiently explained by an experienced graphic designer. This book made me realize how negligent my own captions have been in using the generic term "illustration" rather than the more precise "photorelief halftone print from retouched photograph" (119).

Beegan offers a scrupulous historical account of one aspect of an otherwise well-documented visual culture. The technical and biographical information exhibited here ensures that this will be a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in the photographically reproduced image. The title of the book promises an account spanning the nineteenth century, although, as Beegan insists throughout the introduction, its actual interests are of narrower scope, focusing on the illustrated press of the 1890s. Two of the book's chapters address the mid-century technologies of wood engraving and line process, and the remaining six chapters focus almost exclusively on the 1890s.

Beegan's approach has a number of strengths. He avoids technologically determinist explanations, embraces the polyvalent nature of the image, and introduces subtle distinctions too often absent from discussions of print technology. He shrewdly observes, for instance, how illustrated magazines such as Lloyd's Weekly News and the Illustrated London News appealed to particular social groups through their form, not just their content. A number of Beegan's conclusions are refreshingly counterintuitive in disrupting the triumphant march toward ever greater realism presumed to follow the introduction of the photograph. The common Victorian failure to recognize "the act of representation within reproduction" (205), as Beegan points out, mirrors our own continued failure to do so. Many Victorians' dissatisfaction with photography as a passing fad is vital to understanding the origins of modern graphic design during this period. The debates revisited by Beegan's study are a reminder of just how long it took the realistic effects ushered in by the photograph (or "photogram," as some early practitioners preferred to call it) to be accepted as the standard. According to Beegan, "semi-mechanical" (177), rather than mechanical, reproduction may be a better term for a style of image reproduction involving both hand and machine in its editorial manipulation of supposedly facsimile reproductions. The difference is striking in one pair of facing images showing the difference between an untouched and retouched photograph from Queen Victoria's funeral. The Victorian image has more in common with today's digital image than many would have guessed.

The placement of photomechanical technology in its broader cultural context makes this book more than just a technical manual. Yet the sections devoted to cultural history may be the least enlightening in the book since the conclusions merely confirm existing understandings of the popular press. What is original about this material often gets swallowed up by the familiar narrative of the growth of an urban middle-class readership. Many of the conclusions reached about the illustrated magazines of the 1890s strike me as equally applicable to the non-pictorial press or even to the press of an earlier era. While new imaging technologies including the halftone and photograph may embody the brisk, ephemeral nature of modernity, Beegan never explains how their modernity is substantially different from that aligned by Charles Baudelaire with the sketch several decades earlier. Beegan's account falls short of distinguishing the effects attributed to the printed image—its modernity, legibility, and accessibility—in the 1890s from those...