Zetmachine in de drukkerij 1921

This black and white photograph by T. Kaneo captures a scene from inside a print shop. Look at the way the printing press commands the space. I wonder what it was like to be Kaneo, setting up this shot, probably with a heavy camera and tripod. What does this process tell us about how we make art? In the olden days it was a craft that could produce multiples, an edition. You had to set everything up just so, like the printing press. And then think of the operator sitting there, feeding pages into the machine, how many hours at a time? What was it like to create something back then, the long hours? How the body would have ached, and the mind drifted off to something else, perhaps to other works of art. We make marks, layer by layer, in a conversation with those who came before, and those who will come after.