Points of Departure

A Long Exposure

At a little past noon, the photographer unloads his apparatus from a car parked at the foot of Harkness Tower. He lugs a great wooden box and tripod over to the High Street gate, sets up the camera, and trains it at the gate. He made this camera obscura—a gorgeous and intricate piece of red woodwork—by himself a few years ago, drawing on carpentry skills he picked up as a Yale undergraduate in the ‘70s. Only the Voightlander lens protruding from the camera and the tripod it sits atop are not of his own making.

Nate Gibbons is a sturdily built man with a thick, reddish moustache. He wears a white wool hat, heavy-duty boots, and a workman’s apron. Nato—as he prefers to be called—is showing me how to make a tintype, an early photographic process that was eclipsed in the late 1800s by paper prints. A few decades ago, finicky Civil War re-enactors were the only ones still practicing the craft (albeit clumsily, Nato suggests). “They kept it alive when it might’ve otherwise died out…” His voice trails off as he opens up the trunk of his car. “But nothing dies forever,” he adds brightly, reaching for a small metal plate.

Because wet-plate photography must be processed within minutes of exposure, Nato has converted the rear of his Chevy into a portable darkroom. It is filled with jugs, vials, Plexiglas trays, and wooden boxes. Over the course of the day, I pick up the names of the panoply of chemicals and learn that many are dangerous. Nato wears gloves and goggles; his shirt is stained in many places, and, were he not careful, the same could happen to his skin. “The irony of this beautiful art form,” he says, “is that you deal with stuff that can blind the photographer.”

He coats a five by seven inch metal plate with gun cotton, an emulsion, then sensitizes the plate in a silver solution for three minutes. For a moment, he peeks out and looks toward the gate. “The camera still there?” he asks, and then grins at what he sees. He chuckles a bit: Two amorous students are kissing beside his camera. “Ah, to be young again…” he says, fitting the ready plate into a plateholder.

Once the lovers have departed, Nato slips the plateholder into his camera, removes the lens cap, and counts to 15. He replaces the lens cap, takes out the plateholder, and heads back to the little darkroom. After strapping a small red headlamp around his forehead, he promises to be “back in a jiffy” and disappears underneath the dark cloth to develop the plate. He emerges a few minutes later to fix the image by pouring cyanide solution over it. This, he explains, can be the most dangerous part of the process for a careless photographer: “Developer is acidic, and acid releases cyanide gas from the solution,” he explains. He’s heard of a few accidental deaths.

A student with a camera slung around her neck approaches us and shyly asks Nato if she can take a picture of the artist at work. She raises the Nikon to her eye and presses a button. Her camera’s shutter flits open for a thirtieth of a second, then closes. She thanks us and walks away. Nato returns to work.

What could drive a man to spend weeks fumbling through 19th century treatises on photochemistry, as Nato did, struggling to figure out what “drams” and “scruples” and “soda pop of ash” refer to? What could make him devote months to constructing cameras from scratch, and then spend over a year experimenting with those cameras before he had anything to show for it? Why would anyone make tintypes at all in the age of digital photography? Is it simple nostalgia—or maybe masochism?

It is neither. Nato has little concern for history, and no interest in emulating the Civil War re-enactors who preserved the craft most had forgotten. He doesn’t hesitate to use an electronic egg timer or other 21st century gadgets that seem oddly incongruous with his otherwise historically accurate outfit. He even affixes footwarmer heat-packs to the bottle of developer, since he worries that the January weather might impede optimal development. Though he uses a lens from the 1850s, he says he’d be glad to use a modern one, if he could afford it. Voightlander, which he calls the “Nikon of its day,” made heaps of fine lenses that no one uses anymore, and he picked this one up on eBay for sixty bucks.

If it isn’t nostalgia driving him, then might it be a devotion to craft? This could be the answer to the riddle, as suggested when another passerby engages Nato in conversation. “The problem,” says the man, who works at Yale Media Services, “is that everyone with a camera’s a photographer these days.” Nato corrects him politely: “Anyone can take a picture—not everyone’s a photographer.”

But Nato also debunks the notion that laborious artisanship is necessary to produce a great photograph: Snapshots, he tells me, can be art too. Far from denigrating modern photographic techniques, Nato reveals that he even uses a digital camera on occasion. “People sometimes ask me, ‘If you could achieve the exact same results with a digital camera and a computer, would you do it?’ I’d sure as hell try.” In fact, he almost pursued digital photography instead of historic processes—a decision he felt had to make five years ago.

Nato is ready with the fixer. As the chemicals do their work, the image transitions from negative to positive; the dark sky fades to a pale grey, and the spectral white of the gate thickens into a solid black. Nato gives me the tintype to hold, and I see the incredibly rich detail that only a polished metal surface can register. The image has the ghostly beauty peculiar to historic wet-plate processes. Here, at last, is evidence for why Nate Gibbons pursues such an antiquated art form: “It’s all about the image,” he says. He finds the work of art that results from the historic process to be of superior beauty.

As Nato packs up his apparatus, I ask him what happened five years ago to force his decision between digital and historic processes. I am expecting a quick and ready answer, like he usually gives—probably something about a special development in digital technology around 2001. Instead, Nato is quiet for a while, then answers very carefully. “I got to a point where I saw that, realistically, I only had 15 years left of professional life to devote to a single craft,” he says.

Nato is 49 now: “I’ve got the five-zero staring me in the face like a nine millimeter,” he says solemnly. Ever since he first took Introduction to Photography at Yale, art photography has been his passion—but he never sold a single photograph, not in 25 years. Fortunately, his gamble on historic processes has finally brought him a small measure of success: He has at last attracted some attention to his photography, and last year he sold a few tintypes. But Nato figures that he is only covering his expenses with what he sells. “I’m not about to quit my day job,” he admits. Nato worked for the New Haven Register for a while when he got out of college; now he supports himself as a fire inspector in Westport.

The photographer loads his equipment back into his Chevy. It’s a little past four; the sun is too low for picture-taking now, and he has several images of the gate already—a good day’s work. With another kind of camera, he might easily have filled an entire memory card in the same four hour span. But a good photograph, Nato knows, takes time.

Goodnight, Room

“Good morning, mouse.”



Early on a wintry Friday, I am mumbling into a payphone receiver, part of an exhibit on the first floor of the Connecticut Children’s Museum. One floor up, a black rotary phone sits perched on a bunny’s bedside table, ready to receive my call. The ring is too quiet, however, to wake the bunny—or the quiet old lady whispering “hush”—from their imaginary slumbers. With its windows looking out onto the snowy corner of Wall and Orange Streets, the great, green room from Margaret Wise Brown’s beloved children’s bedtime classic, Goodnight Moon, is replicated in full scale. The view of the sidewalk is obscured by sheets of blue plastic with cutaway stars and the moon, a simulation of what the book’s characters would see from their drowsy, rocking recline. The green walls are home to the two gray stuffed animal rabbits, two little kittens, a pair of mittens, a marble fireplace, green-and-yellow striped curtains, and all the other objects familiar to generations of small children.

The telephone rings are, alas, too quiet to attract the attention of the cluster of children I know are sitting on the room’s plush, red carpet. Instead of the children’s piping voices, I am greeted with a recording that announces that everyone, from the pair of rabbits to the small white mouse present in each of the book’s illustrations, is unable to come to the phone. The recording invites me to leave a message—an opportunity which I decline. Later, on my way out of the museum, I try calling again, only to be quickly hung up on by a three year-old girl.

The museum that she and I spend our morning enjoying was born, according to Director Sandra Malmquist, in “a series of Inspiration Meetings, held from February through July 2000.” At these sessions, a diverse group of community members—parents, builders, teachers, legislators, artists, and naturalists—met to craft a theme for each of the building’s eight rooms. The museum is based on Harvard psychologist Howard Garner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences—each of the rooms is dedicated to one of the eight intelligences Garner articulated: Musical, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Bodily- Kinesthetic, Linguistic, and Naturalist.

The great, green room is the Linguistic room, and exists thanks to a perceptive New Havener who noticed the uncanny resemblance between the room’s existing fireplace and the one drawn almost sixty years ago by Clement Hurd, the book’s illustrator. After this discovery, Malmquist said, “It became immediately clear that re-creating the great, green room from Goodnight Moon would be an entirely magical process resulting in a totally magical product.”

Several months, a conversation, and a letter to Goodnight Moon’s publisher HarperCollins later, the great, green room opened its bedroom door to the public.

The room caters to a large portion of that public. Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, and Hebrew editions of Goodnight Moon are shelved alongside the original, while the large pieces of plastic and metal type that line the magnetic walls with words from the book are underscored by Braille lettering. Malmquist describes the “inclusion of children with disabilities” as “a cornerstone of our work and our museum.” Many of the children’s books have also been Brailled, and an American Sign Language alphabet puzzle sits next to a Perkins Braille typewriter on the bunny’s desk.

In its twin goals of bringing to life a fictitious environment and fostering the linguistic intelligence of its visitors, the transformation of the great, green room from two dimensions into three has been an immense success. Creating Readers, a literacy program run out of the museum, builds on children’s enchantment by distributing copies of picture books to its visitors, drawn from the community-at-large. Over the last five years, the museum has given away more than 25,000 works in English, Spanish, and Braille.

Barraged by screaming toddlers, I muse on a story of the book’s republication. While older editions’ back covers sport a photo of the illustrator, Hurd, flicking a cigarette, current HarperCollins editor Kate Jackson obtained permission from his son to digitally remove the cig. But the younger Hurd was ultimately unhappy with the final product, saying that the altered photograph of his father’s extended, empty hand “looks slightly absurd to me.”

In the same way, the museum’s revised edition lacks some necessary element. Something, I think, resting my hand on the bunny’s bedside table, is missing. A certain particular essence… a certain keystone. Here, beside the comb and the brush, I pick up the red plastic bowl full of mush. But, for obvious practical reasons, the bowl is empty. So too, at night, after the children have gone, is the room.

The Original Copiers

Once upon a time—well, in the 1960s—Mike and Ellie Ianuzzi had a dream. Determined young New Haveners amidst a swarm of studious, stoned Yale students and scholarly, stoned Yale professors, they funneled their passion into their very own lovechild: a photocopy shop. Groovy.

Birthed in a tiny space on Broadway, TYCO survived adolescence a couple of stores down and is now enjoying a ripe middle- age at its current address on Elm. Despite the buzz about a rapidly approaching “paperless society”—a concept which fizzled in proper Y2K fashion—TYCO has grown, acquiring a new baby sister along the way: Elm City Fine Stationers, on Chapel Street, was hatched to compliment TYCO’s everyday services. The two stores, still lovingly attended to by Mike and Ellie, are prospering.

One of the forces driving TYCO’s success is its long-term staff. As Mike Ianuzzi describes it, an employee “either fits or doesn’t fit. You can tell early on.” Course packet season, the most hectic time of year, weeds out misfits. “This is the time when everyone here really peaks and steps up to the plate—it’s a high-pressure environment. It helps that Ellie and I are in the trenches with them and really believe the employee situation is a two-way street,” Ianuzzi reflects from his desk on the cluttered third floor of the TYCO war zone. “This is a big part of why I think our customer relations are second to none.”

Jodie Foster ‘85 might agree. “She was one of the absolute nicest people ever to walk through our door,” Ianuzzi attests. One of the perks of catering to a Yale crowd is interacting with future bigwigs, be they students at the drama school or ambitious EP&E majors. “I’m sure Bill Clinton came into TYCO sometime during his time at Yale,” Ianuzzi muses. “We might not have known it then, but we probably copied some papers for him.”

Since the rapport built with students operates on four-year cycles, TYCO relies primarily on its devoted professor clientele. Each professor selects a store to print their course packets according to the service, value, and—at least for Dean Jennifer Wood of Ezra Stiles—the dog biscuits. “I use TYCO for my course packets because I love the people (one woman gives treats to my dog) and they’re very fast,” Wood comments. “I’m very loyal to TYCO.”

Other TYCO customers grow attached to Mike’s earnest and furrowed forehead, the faded photograph of his baseball-playing son plastered on the back wall, and the convenient location.

In discussing his competitors, Ianuzzi is carefully diplomatic. “There’s a niche for everyone,” he allows. The demands for copy services amongst academics seem nearly inexhaustible, supporting upwards of ten different stores within a several-block radius of campus. TYCO’s two most visible competitors, York Copy and Yale’s Reprographic and Imaging Service (RIS), represent opposite ends of the entrepreneurial spectrum.

York, situated a block away from TYCO, also bills itself as a small, family-run business with a reliably loyal clientele. Alberta Colasanto opened York Copy with her husband two years after TYCO’s beginnings. The Colasanto’s store has a twin, Docuprint and Imaging on Whitney Avenue, which caters to primarily non-Yale patrons. York Copy, on the other hand, relies so heavily on the abundant university business that it is forced to significantly shorten its hours over school holidays.

This business, occupying a smaller space than TYCO, has rallied its own professor fan-club by appealing to an idealistic aversion to big business. Jean-Jacques Poucel, DUS of the French department, is of this persuasion: “I like to support the one I perceive to be the small guy: York... and for that reason.”

The antithesis to the “small guy” in the Xerox world of New Haven is the Yale-owned and -operated RIS. Many professors choose this operation due to its association with the University, as well as its wider payment options. One of the biggest complaints of TYCO and York Copy customers is the cash or check-only policy regarding both businesses’ course packets.

“I bought three course packets at York Copy,” Phil Lang ‘09 vents. “I had to pay $120 in cash!” RIS, however, allows payment by credit card as well as Bursar billing, which makes it very appealing to cash-less college students whose parents pay the bills.

What TYCO and York Copy lack in payment options, however, they make up for in their friendly, family-run personae. And among a campus community of idealists, family matters.

Reconstruction

I pass beneath Elihu Yale at least five times daily. Perched atop the upper tiers of Harkness Tower, Yale’s namesake resides on High Street. While I often frequent this section of the street, our encounters had, until recently, occurred unbeknownst to me. Luckily, Eli has plenty of other historically important figures to keep him company: Jonathan Edwards, Eli Whitney, John Calhoun, and Nathan Hale also adorn the tower’s heights.

James Gamble Rogers, the architect behind much of Yale’s gothic genius, including Harkness Tower, incorporated a variety of statues into its construction. Aristotle and Homer are immortalized in the tower’s design, as are allegorical representations of Justice, Life, Progress, and Death. Rogers modeled Harkness after St. Botolph’s Priory in Boston, England. Originally, he looked for inspiration to the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford, but ultimately decided that its construction was “too heavy,” and that a lighter structure, similar to that of St. Botolph’s, would be more aesthetically pleasing.

Paul Goldberger ‘72, one of the authors of Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism, explains how “in this one project, Rogers established a kind of soft, highly picturesque Gothic as Yale’s primary architectural style; he gave the University a physical symbol… that has never been supplanted.” The tower was built two hundred years after Yale erected its first building; Harkness’s prominence established an official style to usher the University into a new era.

Although the tower and the other buildings which comprise Memorial Quadrangle—Branford and Saybrook Colleges—received a great deal of praise for creating a central motif for the Yale campus, Rogers’s buildings drew harsh criticism as well. William Harlan Hale ‘31, who commented on the designs in a Yale publication generously titled The Harkness Hoot, accused Rogers of ignoring the emerging influence of Modernism and falling back on anachronistic, derivative architecture instead.

“It seems almost incredible,” he wrote. “When the world is witnessing a sweeping rebirth of genuine architecture, and when every clear-headed designer who is not bound to copies and formulas is envisioning a new order of forms and masses and relationships, then the builders of Yale join the tribe of potential imitators who grind out their lifeless plagiarisms.”

Whether or not the style was indeed plagiarized, Yale officials admired the University’s Gothic appearance so much that they commissioned Rogers to design more buildings in the same mimetic style. These buildings—Jonathan Edwards College and Sterling Memorial Library—were built in conformity with the style of the “Gothic corridor.” Rogers continued this tradition when he constructed Davenport College in 1933. While the interior of Davenport is decidedly Georgian in style, the College’s exterior façade on York Street bears Gothic architecture.

This was not the first time that Rogers had engaged in this type of architectural makeover: Two years earlier he had changed the front of the University Theater to reflect a Gothic look. Goldberger says that Roger’s unusual stylistic decision “was motivated by an awareness that buildings do not stand alone as islands in the city, that they must establish urbanistic relationships among themselves, and that their civic responsibility, so to speak, is to the streetscape.”

Rogers faced two challenges while working at Yale. In addition to presenting a uniform architectural style, he faced pressure to make the buildings appear much older than they actually were. In his opinion, however, Yale’s attempt to associate newly-constructed buildings with an earlier time period felt artificial. After he decided to apply tile instead of “historically authentic” slate to the roofs of the Quadrangle buildings, Rogers wrote a letter to Anson Phelps Stokes, a former secretary of Yale which read: “As far as traditions go, I hope that the only traditions governing us will be Yale traditions and our country’s tradition… It does seem awfully hollow and servilely cringing to use a tradition that means nothing to us.”

Alan Plattus, a professor of architecture and urbanism at the School of Architecture, explains that the University’s desire to associate its buildings with a bygone era harkens back to a theory of Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian who discussed the “invention of tradition.” His theory claims that traditions are not organic creations but rather human inventions which develop and reproduce over time. Hobsbawm’s idea applies to Yale and its efforts to establish and nurture a legacy. “Yale,” asserts Plattus, “is an invented tradition.”

Plattus believes that the decision to model Yale’s architecture after older Gothic structures was an attempt to emphasize the University’s history. While most would consider this an extremely serious task, Goldberger notes that Rogers took quite a playful approach to his work. “Rogers’s architecture,” says Goldberger, “conferred a lightness on an institution that did not take naturally to it and, indeed, might almost be said to have been seeking something entirely different: a sense of gravitas.”

An example of the architect’s good humor can be found etched into the Hall of Graduate Studies. Forgoing the words of Plato and Shakespeare, Rogers chose to inscribe the first sentence of Rafael Sabatini’s popular historical novel Scaramouche—after which Senator JohnKerry would later name his largest yacht—into the building’s exterior. The stones read “He was born with a gift for laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.”

Live Culture

Before entering the Peabody Museum’s Machu Picchu exhibit, “Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas,” you must sit through a ten-minute video in a dark room on stiff, backless, wooden benches. Here, you learn that the city of Machu Picchu was built in the 1460s, thrived until the 1532 Spanish conquest of Peru, and was later reduced to ruins as it “faded from memory”—that is, until Yale Professor Hiram Bingham III’s “scientific discovery” of the site in 1911. The video poses questions such as, “How was such a great archaeological structure revealed after 350 years?” The narrator invites you to “let your journey of discovery begin.” The large screen then rises to reveal a heavy door, which takes the cue to slowly open on a reproduction of a portion of the ancient city—mimicking the feeling of “discovery” Bingham must have felt one hundred years ago.

I imagine that his discovery was a little more arduous. He wrote in his diaries about the magnificent payoff: the “great snow peaks looming above the clouds more than two miles overhead” and “the foaming, glistening, roaring rapids,” that left him awestruck. I, however, am not immediately taken aback by my first visit to the exhibit of the royal retreat of the Incan king Sapa Inca Pachacuti. After scanning a display of cameras used by Bingham, some of the extensive pictures he snapped, accurate diaries he scribbled, and maps he drew, I set foot on a replica of an ancient Incan road, leading to a reproduction of the foyer of the Incan king’s residence. The walls, floors, and trail are crafted from actual molds taken of Machu Picchu. If you overlook the squeaking “granite” floor, the fiberglass “stone” walls, and the panoramic photograph of Machu Picchu spanning the entire right wall of the second room, you can concentrate on the original artifacts Bingham carted away from the site in 1912. It is around these authentic objects that curators Lucy Salazar, a native of Peru, and her husband, Anthropology Professor Richard Burger, have designed their exhibit.

A three-foot-tall ceramic vessel used for storing chicha, an Andean corn beer, is the largest artifact in the exhibit, housed in a glass case in the center of the trail. Most of the objects are more delicate, such as metal tools that boast of the Incas’ metallurgic prowess and smaller pottery painted with fine, geometric designs. These are displayed in the trapezoidal niches used as storage units in the stone walls. Although some artifacts are on loan from other universities, the majority are from the Peabody collection. These objects are the only real artifacts amidst a gamut of reproductions, including the fake-stone walls, the floor, the panoramic photo, three life-sized mannequins of men in traditional dress, and a miniature of the entire site.

Salazar sees her work of displaying these long-neglected artifacts to recreate a small segment of Machu Picchu in New Haven—and several other cities the exhibit has visited—as piecing together the highly-organized world of the Incas and allowing the public to interact with it. After eight years of preparation, she can now share the immensity of the Incas’ accomplishments at Machu Picchu and impart lessons of this history that are invaluable today. Huge storage houses, for instance, ensured that, in times of drought, everyone had food. “The people didn’t have hunger in the empire, because everything was so organized,” she explains.

Some of Salazar’s favorite parts of the exhibit are the artifacts that are made in matching male and female pairs. Most everyday objects were produced in couples at Machu Picchu, in accordance with a belief in reciprocity that ran throughout the empire. “It’s an Andean concept, but the Incas are the first to reflect this symbolism,” Salazar explains. “The idea is that you’re not alone.”

This notion of harmony is a far cry from the acrimony stirred by the current struggle between Yale and the Peruvian government over the ownership of the artifacts. While the United States’ exhibitions of the objects has increased interest in the original Machu Picchu, the Peruvian government is forcing Yale into a cultural battle. For Peru, Machu Picchu is a source of national pride: The current president, Alejandro Toledo, held his inauguration at the historic site in 2001.

When Salazar left her native Peru in the 1980s to study in the United States, she was not on a quest to unlock the mystery of the lost Incan city. As she and her husband became the first academics to study the collection as a whole, her interest was not derived from or connected with her heritage, but rather from the challenge of exhibiting culture in general.

These artifacts have symbolic power beyond Salazar’s control. Their public unveiling in the United States is overshadowed by Peru’s current revival of indigenous pride. And while New Haven’s recreation would not be as compelling without the original artifacts, it is also possible that the artifacts’ impact on the public isn’t as powerful when plucked from the breathtaking setting and rich history of their original home.

Printed Matter

Last month, in the sweeping entrance hall to Sterling Memorial Library, sat a recently departed and often-overlooked exhibit based upon the age-old adage that oil and water do not mix (dining hall soup is compelling evidence). It’s a beautiful thing, really: pure, unadulterated, and easy science for the most ethyl and benzene-phobic among us. But this practical knowledge has a much larger context in lithography, a printing process that cheerfully exploits nature’s great divide. From the defiant philosophy upon which it is based to the actual printing process, which takes place on a large black press recalling a medieval torture device, lithography is a classic process rooted in technique.

Lithography’s roots go back to 1798, before the era of “photosensitive emulsions” and other modern-day technological toys. To create a lithograph, artists draw an image onto a stone block which they cover with acid. The acid reacts with the oil-based image in a way that creates “walls” around the design. After a quick water wash, the artist applies a coating of ink that is retained within the walls. A run through a press applies only the oily sections to the page while the water-based sections remain blank. The highly sought-after images are created without the hassles or splinters of woodcuts, or the burden of finding a middle man to do the etching for you. Painless this process is not, but, as any burgeoning artist could tell you, artistic independence is well worth the price.

The final products, as I saw on a recent visit to the exhibit, are well worth the trouble. Though modern, user-friendly, ink-jet printing has largely replaced lithography, lithographic images are like every person’s ideal mate: complex, unique, and well-defined in all of the right areas.

Sterling’s exhibit, entitled “Production, Not Reproduction,” housed an eclectic group of lithographs, running the gamut from “The Bread Book”—whose black and white pages are filled with close-ups of, well, slices of bread—to a fold-out lithograph of a disjointed accordion surrounding magnified blades of grass.

Burdened with a desperate need to procrastinate? Track Charles Henri Ford’s lithographically produced “Silver Flower Coo” (1968). Part art, part visual poetry, it’s a book of photographs of random words. “Now where’s the FIG?” “Like chick make A slick.” Or, “Sweetie PIT isn’t your label.”

A different showcase housed a powerful book about sexual assault—a red sticker bearing the word “RAPE” attached two stark-white flaps across the book’s cover, patiently waiting for a reader to come along and tear it in half. Nearby, another book was sprawled open, proudly displaying a black-and-white photograph of a man’s hairy, buttocks. The book, “Impressions: A Pocket Manual for Aesthetic Wear,” is a collection of tasteful nudes, with swatches of actual fabric covering the images. The book manifests its cheekiness with painfully serious commentary inscribed alongside the naked rumps.

But the irreverence of the images should come as no surprise, given the history and culture of the process. Lithography is, in a way, a process of contradictions, trying to make one point while inadvertently making another. It’s the technique of “democratic multiples”—taking the power away from snooty gallery-owners and allowing artists to see through every detail of their work, from its creation to its distribution. Yet Norman Paris, Professor of Printing at the Yale School of Art says this isn’t entirely so: In spite of an underlying “damn the establishment” mentality, he points out, “Lithography is a fine art, so it’s just as much of a business.”

As Paris argues, “Lithography is a culture that tries to speak about mass culture without being mass culture, per se. “But this is what makes lithographs paradoxical: The exhibit’s Pop Art era collection seems to poke fun at mass culture, yet its images are produced on the same machines as newspapers, business materials, and ads, making them a distinct part of the very mass consumer culture that they satirize. And although lithographers harp on “conceptual underpinnings” and other lofty ideals, the medium’s popularity stems largely from the fact that lithography is relatively cheap, and easy, too—at least compared to its predecessors, carved wood and stone.

Now that the Sterling’s exhibit is over, the lithographs of buttocks and accordions are safely tucked away in Sterling’s stacks. But in spite of the rise of ink-jet printing, the process of lithography lingers. Just as we are suckers for scandal, it seems that there is something irresistible about the vaguely contradictory and irreverent process of lithography. A chance to “screw the establishment,” too good to pass up? The results of the process, such as a flip-book of a housewife morphing into Wonder Woman, are just farcical enough to catch our eyes. So is lithography a reproduction of an image, or a brand new production? Is it a critique of mass culture or a part of it? A printing process or a fine art? It is hard to say. But when it comes to the results of lithography, one thing is certain: This art is fine, indeed.

Out of Print

At Yale, student hit each other with foam swords in a role-play of a medieval war battle—and are not judged negatively. The University fosters a fascination with reliving the past; everyone should have a chance to time travel—at least once in a while. In the basements of many residential colleges, next to squash courts, cinemas, and computer clusters, there are ornate printing press rooms featuring technology from the 15th century where students use the past to make things permanent.

Half of Yale’s residential colleges—Berkeley, Branford, Jonathan Edwards, Pierson/Davenport, Silliman, and Timothy Dwight—have printing press facilities. Lining their walls are hundreds of trays of type, each piece made of lead and a uniform 0.918 inches high. Despite its deceptively miniature size, a single piece of type is comprised of many parts. The most obvious is the face—the letter or character cast in relief at the top. Type is mostly sorted on a tray known as the “California Job Case,” a user-friendly apparatus developed to move type across the country during the Gold Rush and separated into various compartments, the size and order of which are based on how frequently each character appears in the Bible. Upper cases are on one side, lower cases on another; numbers are in another area; commonly used letters have a larger compartment than lesser-used letters; letters that are often used next to each other are placed side by side. The ‘a’s, for example, are next to the ‘r’s. Though this setup is at first difficult to memorize, like the layout of a keyboard, it becomes easy to sort and replace type with practice.

In addition to the walls of type, there are also—of course—the printing presses themselves. Though all somewhat different, each machine resembles an awkward loom. The presses consist of impression cylinders to roll the paper, inking plates, levers, and several wheels.

Yale’s college printing presses are not far removed from their 15th century ancestors. The key difference between these presses is the reason for their usage—the printer’s motivation. Five hundred years ago, printing presses were the only publishing technique available; in 2006, letterpress stems from a quirky interest. It takes a certain personality to spend hours upon hours in a printing press room, pouring sweat, tears, and sometimes blood into a creation that could be seemingly replicated on a computer. Printers are committed to the creation of a certain aesthetic and enjoy a satisfaction that working with a mouse and a screen cannot match. Joseph Luna ‘06, a chief printer of Jonathan Edwards College, says that there is a “printer’s breed” of people possessing “infinite patience” who are willing to “strive for printer perfection.” This “breed” appreciates the subtle difference between a grainless, flat laser printout, and a thick, hand-pressed paper.

The tedium of the process cannot be overstated. During the Pierson/Davenport “Journeymen Course” in printing, the instructor and Pierson Fellow, David Rose ‘80 printed an announcement leaflet for the unveiling of a portrait of Pierson College’s Master Goldblatt. The final document was simple: an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of paper folded in half that read, “Pierson College, A Portrait of the Master.” Pressed for time, Rose was not working with his usual meticulousness, but it still took him two hours to assemble the type of only seven words and then additional time to print. One can only imagine how long it must have taken him to produce one of the crowning achievements of his printing career at Yale, Benjamin Franklin’s “Advice on the Choice of a Mistress.” When he first began, Rose had to teach himself how to print, so he started collecting printer manuals. Today, he has over five thousand manuals—more than anyone in the country.

By day, Rose runs a technology company. While his job and his printing hobby seem to be in opposition, printers are often well versed in the computer world, and many feel that their printing ability informs their digital graphic design skills. In the 21st century, printing is, after all, about turning the new into the old.