The History of Printing in Eight Hours

Many of you will remember the wonderful exhibition, The Printed Picture at The Museum of Modern Art in 2008–2009, co-curated by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography, and Richard Benson, Dean of the Yale University School of Art. Some of you might have been in the gallery over the two days in May and June 2008 for Benson’s 8 hour lecture on the entire history of printing.

If not, this website posted by the Yale Art Gallery allows you to see the entire series of talks explaining ink, photographic, and digital printing processes, augmented with information from the book, The Printed Picture, authored by Richard Benson. http://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/

He begins with hand prints on caves walls and ends with a digital print after Paul Strand along with a lesson on the intrinsic value of a print. Here is just a tiny clip:

The New York Times obituary for Richard Benson, June 27, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/arts/design/richard-benson-dead-photographer-and-photo-printer.html