Download or read book Prints and Visual Communication written by William M. Ivins, Jr. and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1969-07-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results—freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist's prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs. It is this premise that William M. Ivins, Jr., elaborates in Prints and Visual Communication, a history of printmaking from the crudest wood block, through engraving and lithography, to Talbot's discovery of the negative-positive photographic process and its far reaching consequences.