Fotoreproductie van een prent, voorstellende een portret van Johannes Gutenberg before 1872

This photogravure by B. Erdmann reproduces an earlier print of Johannes Gutenberg. The original would have been made by cutting into a block of wood or metal, and the dense hatch marks you see here, these are traces of that process. But there’s a doubled remove: the original print, and then its photographic reproduction. This blurring of origin is key to understanding its cultural significance. Gutenberg, as the inventor of printing, stands at the origin of our media-saturated world. This image, like all such portraits, participates in the cult of the individual – a notion that really took off in the Renaissance. The image testifies to this historical transformation. It represents the origins of mass production, while being made through the industrial process of photogravure. So, while this may not be ‘fine art’ in the traditional sense, it gives us a chance to consider how images are made, and how they circulate in our world.