Enroute to Kamakura, Japan, I worked on a Great Lakes ore boat, graduated from Columbia College in New York, worked in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in the 1970's, then in Tokyo in the 1980's. These pursuits gradually morphed into a renewed interest in the graphic arts which had been quiescent since childhood. It crystallized in 1989 when I first saw some of the original Emerson gravures from the 1880's. In 1991 I built a workshop in Kamakura, and having no teacher, learned through trial and error, mostly error, how to do gravure prints. After a year of experiments, the first exhibit (of 12 prints) took place in a borrowed vacant store in Kamakura in 1992. Larger shows in Europe and the United States followed, together with acquisitions of the prints by museums, including the Sackler Gallery, America's national museum of Asian art."

Peter Miller, Where I'm From

WP: Are there things that you miss from the U.S.A.?
Miller: West to East: The fog rolling in through the Golden Gate, sourdough bread, artichokes, eucalyptus trees, lumber yards, eight-lane freeways, skiing at Tahoe, high desert air, thunderstorms on the Plains, drive-in movies, seedy diners, Panther Hollow (Pittsburgh), streetcars, pecan pie, alligators, dune grass, Rock Creek Park, K Street, Central Park, the ducks at Boston Common, the rocky coast of Maine.

WP: What are the most important/interesting things you have learned from the Japanese after living for years in their country?
Miller: That everything depends on human relations, a nexus of trust and, if you will, kindness. Rice agriculture from time immemorial needs community effort, or else you don't eat. The monetization of life has eroded this
sensibility, but it persists throughout Japan, especially in rural areas. I look for visible sites of this feeling, such as the thatched-roof villages of Shirakawa where the whole village takes care of roof reconstruction.

WP: Why art? Why printmaking? Why gravure prints? Did you have previous experience, or even inklings in the field?
Miller: In Japan art and craft are one. Photogravure etching combines the visionary with the practical work of putting ink on paper with conviction and authenticity. Just getting it right technically requires intense focus and concentration to coordinate a vast array of chemical, material, and environmental factors.

At first I did elaborate calculations of ultra-violet exposures, aquatint densities, etching times, etc., but now I've internalized all that so that instinct (very much a learned instinct, to be sure) takes over. The print grows out of the materials as much, if not more, than it comes from anything 'out there.' As I later discovered, this is a Zen way of looking at things. And the sort of intense concentration I develop in the workshop, where distractions simply don't exist, is akin to Zen practices that develop awareness or 'mindfulness.'

I had no previous direct experience, but the experience of living and working in Japan certainly develops one's patience! Early on I made a lot of mistakes, had to discard a week's work and start over. Being self-taught is really learning things the hard way, but in my case there was no alternative, nobody else was doing photogravure in Japan. I had done photography since childhood, but in middle age became dissatisfied with it.

Without knowing exactly what I was looking for, in 1989, I happened to see an exhibit of the 1880-era photogravures of Peter Henry Emerson in New York. An epiphany occurred: THATS's what I'm looking for! So I set out to learn how to do photogravure, without having the slightest idea of the complexity involved in it. And then I got caught up in the craft, the whole printmaking tradition, and here I am.

I like the notion of prints as multiples, which makes (or should make) them affordable; at the same time each impression is an original and the edition is limited by real physical constraints like plate wear, so the owner of the print has something rare and unusual. They're in a different league from both the stratospherically-priced one-of-a-kind works, and the questionable authenticity of mass-produced reproductions. I think the appeal of original hand-made prints in limited numbers will continue for a very long time.

About Photogravure
WP: What's the history of the medium? Presumably in the first place it was a way of publishing photographs in the newspaper. Is that it?
Miller: During and after the Age of Exploration in Europe, there was this tremendous hunger for realistic permanent images of faraway places. With the invention of Renaissance Perspective in Italy in the 1500s, artists had already begun to see things photographically. The luminosity and spontaneity we see in the paintings of Vermeer, Canaletto, and many others comes from their use of lenses, from their creative adaptation of photo-realism, Renaissance perspective, and their own genius for human observation and painterly composition. Later, printmakers sought tonal variety, chiaroscuro, and developed micro-dot aquatinting for this purpose. Light-sensitive materials had been discovered and dropped for want of suitable applications several times in history. In the 1820s and 1830s these three developments -- in optics, aquatint etching, and light-sensitive materials -- came together in the first photographs, which were photogravure etchings, by Talbot in England and Niepce in France.

WP: Then where did it go?
Miller: Their intention was indeed some form of commercial publication, and so they kept the details secret from one another and from everyone else. But early versions of the process were so technically difficult and time-consuming that it remained artisanal rather than industrial in nature for the rest of the 19th century. What made gravure possible for newpapers was the conversion from flat-plate to rotary-engraving (hence the term 'rotogravure'), and that launched the commercial printing industry. Fine-art flat-plate photogravure continued until the 1920s, but all but disappeared as faster and more efficient means of delivering current images to the public became widespread.

WP: When did it become fine art?
Miller: Photogravure from its inception had a dual career, as both fine art and (precursor of) commercial publication. In this it is like other printmaking media. In the 1970's a few people in the United States and Europe revived photogravure as a fine-art medium. Now it is practiced by perhaps a few dozen printmaking workshops and individuals around the world. Many of these are contract workshops which do only the platemaking and printing. There are relatively few people who do the entire process from visualization and design to platemaking and etching to printing and publication. In my case the printing is an essential part of the artwork, so I do the entire process.

WP: What does the photogravure process add to a straight photograph? What qualities are attained. Why do people like it?
Miller: Depth, archival permanence, an ink-on-paper look rather than the monoculture of shiny plastic surface-coatings. The availability of a rich variety of inks and hand-made papers, to create the tones and hues and mood that are right for each image.

It's hard for people to articulate why they like it, because the response is visceral. One thing they are responding to in photogravure is the tonal variety, which exists in no other medium except mezzotint. The copperplate is actually etched to different degrees of depth, so that the ink in the shadows is far deeper than the ink in the highlights. (This variable depth of etching cannot occur in photo-etching, which is merely a spray-on grain, or in 'polymergravure', which is not gravure at all since there is no etching.)

People also respond to another aspect of tonal variety in photogravure, the spectral appearance of shapes emerging from deep shadow and the ethereal delineation of highlights such as clouds or snow shadows. These near-blacks and near-whites are lost in ordinary photos because silver-nitrate cannot see them. The ultra-violet materials register these very minute differences in luminous intensity completely faithfully. Viewers who really look at the prints respond to them without necessarily knowing the technical reasons why.

WP: What is "the secret" (or secrets) in making a fine photogravure?
Miller: Seeing the world in terms of how it looks in ink on paper. Getting to know, intimately, the tones, the shadows and highlights, the overall composition, the authentic look of each print that you make. In a good year I can do maybe 20 editions. You have to be really dedicated to each particular image to make it work. Mistakes are inevitable. They happen because I did something wrong; I can't blame them on anyone else. At the same time, some (but not all) mistakes are artistically interesting, and these chance effects can enliven the work. Cherish the unexpected!

WP: What kind of papers do you use? Normal etching papers, or something else?
Miller: Japanese washi, especially ganpi colled to European fine-art papers such as Rives, Magnani, Fabriano, Lana, Somerset. I like to experiment with various papers, but because I don't print the entire edition all at once, I like to make sure the paper I start with will still be available next year and the year after. There's some security in using the papers from these firms that have been in business for hundreds of years.

WP: What would you say to people who suggest that photogravure is rather a long involved process to make a print which is quite a bit worse than a photograph?
Miller: I would say 'Look beneath the surface. And look at it from a different angle.' Literally. Almost holographically, the way a photogravure print takes the light varies depending on the angle of view. Sometimes it even appears backlit. Sometimes the image seems to be floating in space somewhere in front of the paper. I would also say 'Forget about the posterized or Day-Glo imagery that the mass media show us, to the exclusion of all else, and think outside the box about contemporary visual conventions.'

WP: Tell us a bit about your marketing system, if it's not a secret. Who buys photogravures? What makes people want them? What's the most important factor in selling them?
Miller: No system and no secret. People buy my prints because they like them and want to live with them in their homes or offices. That sounds simple, but the decision actually requires a lot of confidence in one's own judgment, as opposed to the dictates of fashion or some other agenda. The people who buy my prints are 'inner-directed' rather than 'other-directed' types.

I try to find galleries and dealers whose clientele includes a good number of such people. Categories of medium, nationality, or chronology are of little or no importance in my marketing 'system.' I try also to structure exhibitions of my prints according to some broad philosophical theme, such as 'The Art of Memory' group show that I participated in, in London in 2001.

In Japan, sales are about half to Japanese and half to resident expats or visitors. The older Japanese tell me the prints remind them of a world they thought was lost. The younger Japanese like the 'shibui' (austere) quality of photogravure. Westerners appreciate a view of Japan that is neither sentimentalized (geishas and Fuji-san) nor cynical, just a personal take that blends the traditional and the contemporary. There are some sales to collectors, restaurants, corporations, and to the print and Asian art departments of museums.

I supplement the exhibitions and gallery/dealer sales with education and information about my particular version of photogravure. I do workshops occasionally (rarely); the next one is in Gubbio, Italy in early July 2004. I would like to organize a museum exhibition of contemporary photogravure, to promote better understanding of the
medium.