Further trends in the preservation and use of images developed in several directions. Firstly, the use of photography as a memorable historical document, and secondly, its inclusion in the arsenal of scientific tools and evidence. But the most intensive development of photography was in the field of everyday and historical portraiture, and, due to its perceived progressiveness in comparison to painting, as an alternative to works of fine art.
It is especially important to distinguish between these areas of photography in the early period of its history, when it was difficult to draw a clear line between some of them. For example, species photography by geographers, ethnographers, and travel reporters often fulfilled not only its natural science functions but also had an aesthetic character, and eventually became a historical document. The same can be said about individual and group portraits taken for private, domestic purposes, but which eventually become scientific and documentary evidence of an era.
The emergence of photojournalism
Photographs for magazines were engraved, which complicated the process of replication, which is why they were not used much in printing. Only in the late 70s and early 80s of the 19th century, when new types of reproduction of photographs (phototypes, zincographs), generated by photography itself, appeared in printing, did photographs appear more and more often in mass printing.
Engraving (French: gravure). A type of graphic art in which the image is a printed impression of a convex or recessed pattern made by various engraving techniques on the surface of a plate (“board”). The second meaning is the plate itself or an impression from it. Often lithography (“flat” engraving) is also referred to as an engraving.
Photo-tintype engraving is a photo-painting, the most common way of replicating photographs of city views and genre scenes in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Phototype – A method of flat printing from a glass or metal grain plate covered with a photosensitive layer, on which a reproducible image is photographed. When printing, only the printing elements are wetted with ink. The second meaning is an impression obtained from such a plate.
Zincography is one of the types of letterpress reproduction plates. It allows the negatives obtained from iso-originals, including those made by photography, to be copied onto a zinc plate coated with a photosensitive layer, and then to produce zincographic clichés with the help of an acid etchant that does not remove the white space elements that were not duplicated during copying.
Photolithography is a form of graphic art. It is based on the lithographic method of printing using photography, when a stone is covered with a photosensitive layer to obtain the initial image. It became widespread after the discovery of photography in 1839 and before the invention of zinc printing in the 80s of the XIX century.
Since then, photography has become more widely used in periodicals, which was, in fact, the beginning of photojournalism.