Views of The Kamakura Print Collection

Two hundred fifty years after Josiah Wedgwood established his pottery firm in Stoke-on-Trent, England, its bankruptcy this month reminds us anew of how taste changes. The firm’s colorful floral designs on luminescent bone china were once the favorite of European royals and their followers. But now casual living and lower cost are more in favor. What does this have to do with photogravure? Unremarked in all the obituaries is the opportunity missed in the early days of the Wedgwood firm: Thomas Wedgwood, Josiah’s son, was one of the first to experiment with light-sensitive materials — materials whose form changed by the direct action of sunlight. Young Wedgwood made photograms (contact prints) of leaves and other objects in the 1790s, but the exposure once started could not be stopped, and the prints darkened with further viewing. We don’t know whether Wedgwood considered using light-sensitive materials to bake designs into pottery, but had the firm done so, perhaps it would have a greater variety of design available today. Several decades after Thomas Wedgwood’s experiments, William Talbot used different light-sensitive materials to develop the permanent prints we know today as photogravure etchings.