Reproductie van een schilderij van een collie before 1888

This is a reproduction of a painting of a collie, made sometime in the past using printing technology. Looking at this page, consider the labor that went into it. Obviously, there's the animal portraiture itself, now lost to us, and likely produced by an artist working on commission. But then there are the multiple processes of mechanical reproduction. The photographic negative, the etched printing plate, the press itself, the binding of the book – each step a complex mediation of the original image. The resulting black and white tonalities, caught on paper, reduce the painting to a set of tonal values, an aesthetic born of industrial efficiency. With this reproductive method, we may lose the artist's touch, the texture of the brushstrokes, but we gain something else. We see art entering the sphere of mass culture, bringing with it new forms of accessibility, and yes, alienation too. So next time you open a book like this, think about the many hands, and machines, that brought the image to you. It is a potent reminder that every image, no matter how seemingly simple, carries within it a whole history of production.