Joseph Maria Eder, Austrian, 1855 - 1944
Eduard Valenta, Austria, 1857 - 1937
This beautiful, and important image is from a series of gravures produced using newly discovered X-rays and their applications in medicine and science. X-rays had been discovered by Röntgen in December 1895 while he was experimenting with a Crookes cathode-ray tube. Eder was one of the first to take up X-ray photography, and was also amongst the first to develop the use of X-rays in zoology, archaeology, and in forensics. The plates from this series are some of the most iconic images in the annals of X-ray photography, and have been often reproduced. The plates are: I hand a woman; II hand of an eight-year-old girl; III hand of a four-year-old child with rickets; IV foot of a seventeen-year old with toe deformities; V various metals and other substances, showing their relative opacities under X-rays; VI three cameos; VII a lizard; VIII a chameleon; IX-XI various fish; XII frogs; XIII a rat; XIV newly born puppy and XV a snake.
This plate is an outstanding example of photogravure. Photogravure is a photo-mechanical rather than a true photographic printing process. Still in use for high quality monochrome reproduction, the process involved transferring a photographic image onto a grained copper plate, which was then etched to depths corresponding to the shadows and highlights of the original. The resulting image could then be used as a printing plate in the normal way. Photogravure dates back to the early days of photography, when William Henry Fox Talbot devised a printing system which would produce photographic reproductions in ink. Talbot's process, which he termed 'photoglyphic engraving,' saw little commercial application until Karl Klic perfected the process in the 1870s, using carbon tissue as the etching resist.
This image is one of fifteen X-ray photographs published in Eder and Valenta's Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgenschen Strahlen (1896). While the work itself is primarily a documentation of the technical aspects of X-ray photography, these finely printed photogravures are elegantly beautiful images of both man-made and natural objects.
Josef Maria Eder was a pioneer in the field of photochemistry and instrumental in the development of specialised photographic films and papers. He founded the Vienna Training and Research Institute of Graphic Art, and the photography collection he assembled there became the core collection of the Albertina photography collection.