Foreword ¹

“An image is a pure creation of spirit.” (Pierre Reverdy)

Today, in a world of eternal representation, we are the observers of the theater of the grand image for as far as the eye can see, a theater which incessantly unfolds in the marvelous recording box that is our brain. Though we see them, the touch and even the substance of illustrations sometimes escape us completely, so much so that we can almost not differentiate between representative illusion and the physical reality of beings and things. Yet, the representation of the world in our eyes is not the same as the one that we want to transpose, to put into images. There, the reality of that which is visible is captured by our brains, which makes copies which are sometimes faithful, sometimes untrue. To produce these images we have, since the dawn of mankind, resorted to sometimes extremely complex alchemies, where invention has struggled with various materials, as a result of which we have been able to leave behind our illustrated drawings, the prints of our lives and of our societies.

For some 32,000 years man has not stopped etching, doodling, drawing, copying, painting, reproducing – for nothing, for eternity – producing millions of infinite writings and images which are the imperishable memory of his genius. How did he do it, with which materials, on what, and why? The alchemy of representation, in its great complexity, deserves to be slowed down, so that we can try to understand, for example, how today's images reach us in a kind of gigantic whirlwind, whereas 200 years ago these things were still rather sober. Or how else could we go from an image that we can look at, to an image that is difficult to see, or to one that we cannot even see with the naked eye? Whereas now we throw things away, in the past images were preciously preserved. Are the images which we try to preserve today not the same as the ones we were preserving yesterday?

It is amongst the cavemen that that which I call the image maker can first be outlined. Collating their visions, their dreams, their beliefs on cave walls, these first imagicians undoubtedly bequeathed to us the only widely known account of this period. In their wake, we will be able to better evaluate the formal evolution of the visual representation of nature and things, this inevitable invention in which we endeavor to capture the spirit through an artefact.

Man had to train long and hard to finally tame and durably transmit the images of the world which surrounded him. The techniques employed across the ages to make and convey these images, the materials, the pigments, the bindings, the instruments and the mediums, either natural, chemical or manufactured, not only conditioned the appearance of the image itself but also its durability.

Cave paintings, coins, palaces, churches, are just some of the mediums which have left us with invaluable visual evidence of more or less remote pasts, sometimes essential for putting together the history of humanity. If we consider the manufacturing and the trading of images from the beginning, and in its totality, we can distinguish two major periods: the longest, the pre-photographic; and the post-photographic, which began in the first half of the 19th Century, and which is therefore extremely recent. Admittedly, our eyes can see but they cannot take photographs. The images that they collect are transitory fragments in a “band-width”, a time kept in the memory, often lost, far from any material existence, and for which any attempt at verbal transcription is on this side of reality. For other animals, sight is part of a sub-conscious effort to survive. For man, by contrast, sight is a conscious irreplaceable instrument, appreciating the outside world, which is an integral part of his own physical and mental development. For us, to see is natural. However, representing what we see calls upon a certain kind of initiation. How were the first painters of history introduced to engraving and drawing? How were they able to find or invent the tools and materials needed to succeed?

The tools, materials and shapes are the three essential ingredients needed to build and formalize the representation of the visible. Footprints on sand, for example, undoubtedly the first prints left by man, were already kinds of natural images of the body, and most probably were the root of the original idea to make images. The tool here was man's own foot, with its shape, using a soft and flexible material, a support able to keep an image. Thus, without any doubt, the earth and sand were among the first image mediums, even before other sketches came to cover other materials, and other surfaces.

The various attempts leading to the reproduction and spreading of visible images or texts, little by little, drove man to develop very clever techniques, sometimes born out of chance, or sometimes by increasingly elaborate research. The first stone engravings (from before 600 BC) precede, by a long time, the first examples of wood engravings (c. 200 AD), or metal engravings made by a direct method, then etchings, or the invention of typographical characters, and, finally, lithography itself, which has been, from the 19th Century onwards, a practically irreplaceable means of reproduction, and remains an essential part of the book and publicity industries, even today.

The document media have also diversified and evolved incessantly since the beginning. Stone, bone or ivory, terracotta, glass, skins, leaves, wood, parchment, paper, celluloid, vinyl, are just some of the aids bequeathed to us, with greater or lesser clarity or brittleness, the precious evidence of life and the history of mankind.

In 1796, 43 years before the invention of photography, the lithographic reproduction technique was invented by Aloïs Senefelder in Germany. Developed during the first half of the 20th Century, it brought, without question, the most important graphic revolution in the worlds of text reproduction and printed images. In this respect, we can consider two very great periods in the history of print: one, the pre-lithographic period, and the other which began with lithography in all of its forms. Here, two distinct lithographic fields start to truly develop: on one side, the advanced forms of the graphics industry (and the photolithographic industry); and, on the other side, a completely innovative form of artistic expression, now freed from the technical constraints of engraving and now able to devote itself with joy to those much freer forms of graphics, with drawings made (or transferred) directly onto the lithographic support itself. These two domains participated, together, in the technical developments which led finally to the offset printing methods used overwhelmingly today and which profit from these most advanced technologies.

As far as the photographic reproduction of images was concerned, one major challenge was the faithful reproduction of half-tones. This problem was solved in 1884 by Meisenbach, the inventor of the linear screen which was quickly applied to typographical image reproduction and then successively to photo-lithography and to offset printing. This photographic support itself already contained the seeds and the “secret” of the visibility of half-tones, incorporating the smoothness of the granular nature even of photosensitive emulsions. But to print them, it was necessary to find a way of transcribing them in a printing matrix, initially in black and white, and then later in color. An interesting characteristic is that the various screens which we have just alluded to, in particular the finest or ultra-fine (higher than 80 lines/cm) or the most recent digital grids forming an ultra-fine grid of random dots, have always tried to more or less blend in, until made invisible to the naked eye. The printed images our eyes can see are actually optical illusions. Today, if we look closely at a beautiful reproduction of an engraving by Durer, or at a painting by Vélasquez, for example, it is impossible to distinguish the dots from the printing screens which they are made from. Already in the 19th Century, commercial chromolithography used clever methods to create half-tones, either with the proper matrix granulation (stones or granulated metal), or by dots, drawn very finely with a feather, which simultaneously allowed the ranges and mixtures of the colors, of which there are some sublime examples. In the art field, it is nowadays necessary to use a microscope with a magnification of ×30 to determine the true nature of a printing technique.

Even in the first half of the 20th Century, we saw the first steps of a very new aid to knowledge. Indeed, 1936 and the publication of a founding article by Alan Turing, “On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, is the true starting point of the creation of programmable computers. But it was especially from the 1980s that the use of computers was democratized and, little by little, became essential to the world of information and imagery. From then on, texts and images have been created by each and everyone, with no need to be preserved in a physical, material way, but instead held on other media which we would not have dared to even imagine 30 years earlier. The image, which is still the product of another optical illusion, while keeping its own graphic originality, from now on needs no hardware support to be visible. It has its own light, can be modified at will, engraved, printed, and sent to the entire world with the single touch of a button. The image, in this case, is created in all its subtleties of color and light, not by a material screen, but by something which replaces it virtually, a succession of dots invisible to the eye (pixels) which are now at the origin of texts and images digitally recorded on our computers.

During the second half of the 20th Century, the American Jack Kilby invented the very first printed circuit (in 1958), another artefact in the service of knowledge transmission which is at the root of modern data processing, and the mass production of electronic chips with integrated transistors began not much later. For his work and his some 60 patents, Kilby received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000. All these circuits are used in a more or less direct way nowadays, in information recording and image handling and storage. The big family of integrated circuits and microprocessors continues to move forward, and with them has come another new technology, microscopic photolithography, which makes new plate sensitization techniques possible and, thanks to the use of masks and light beams, the engraving of circuit supports in smaller and smaller micro-relief (such as, for example, the various chip-cards with integrated circuits, whether analog or digital).

At the beginning of the third millennium, another “image” architecture was already on the horizon, in a nanosphere with still vague contours, which curiously made us swing from a visible optical illusion towards an invisible physical reality. Indeed, from micro-photolithography to polymeric nanostructured materials by nanolithographic printing, the miniaturization of 3D engraved spaces took a giant leap forward. micro-dimensions are already virtually invisible to the naked eye; those of nano-dimensions will need a scanning electron microscope to be seen.

Lithography has thus exceeded the old domains of printed texts and of the “macro-image” with which we were more familiar, to reach other limits, in a new nano-imagery resolutely emerging from a dream world.

Ultra-miniaturized circuits, texts and images can, from now on, be conceived in infinitesimal spaces, and it may even be possible to think that millions of images, for example, could in the future easily be stored in less than one square meter of recording space.

However, we still know little about the stability and perennial nature of these digital media. How will the enormous mass of documentation recorded each day, all the images and mixed texts, be preserved? What will become of them in the coming centuries? We, who have already benefitted from many “recordings” of the past, also have a shared responsibility for the way in which we leave our imprints for future generations. From now on, we dare to hope, copying and the successive multiplication of documents will allow a kind of systematic and unlimited preservation of writings and images for the future.

Jörge DE SOUSA NORONHA

1 Foreword written by Jörge DE SOUSA NORONHA