The Interesting World of Photography Prints
To talk about the history of art would take ages (or in my case pages!) to go from the start centuries and centuries back, to present day, and include all details. It’s a fact art has been the powerful means to express what the human soul hides, when words fail to accomplish the task.
From the parietal art, followed by the awakening throughout the Renaissance, the masterpieces of greats we admire in the galleries and museums worldwide, to photography prints – a whole time lapse of the timeless wall décor.
So how did we get from paintings to prints? Well, before the invention of cameras, paintings were the means to record images of people, landscapes, cityscapes, and oh, meals for that matter, but before Instagram made it popular, it was called still art.
As soon as cameras appeared, more specifically in the 1830s with the portable camera obscura of the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, photography skyrocketed, so the choices of fine art photography prints nowadays to adorn your abode with are endless.
An easy way to transform one’s home interior décor, prints bring about vividness to our homes, offering it through colours (though that depends on the photography itself), objects, and angles. Certainly, the possibility of not having to go look for prints in galleries, but find a wide range at online galleries, make your pick, and have them delivered to your door is more than revolutionary.
This way more photographers, and more prints reach out to more people. Yes, we owe a great deal to technology when it comes to spicing up our interiors with prints. Not just from the point of online shopping, but also the constant upgrades of cameras, specialised printing papers, printing ink, and of course, printers – it’s all related.
While cameras went from negative to positive, followed by flexible roll film and colour image, to digital, and instant photography, the photographic prints underwent their own alterations too, starting off with the linen rag papers, then resin-coated papers, to the latest extremely durable glossy, matter, lustre, and metallic finish papers.
The development of a variety of high quality papers was simultaneous to the development of quality ink cartridges (toner, and ink) as well as specialised printers (inkjet, and laser) that rely on latest printing technology, and thanks to the stable printing pigments, we get the much-needed and wanted photography colour permanency.
Of course, using technology as a helping hand goes even further and deeper, allowing the usage of a variety of photographic filters, so when we set our eyes on a specific photography print that we’d love to see hanging on our walls, we also admire the whole process behind it, and the subjects – the photographer, the object, the technology of cameras, printers, papers, and ink.
