Kallitype: The Processes And The History

About the Book

The title of my current Book is Kallitype: The Processes and The History

The book is a detailed report of the major kallitype processes described with sufficient particulars for modem photographers to apply and work. The book discusses Kallitype I, Kallitype II, Kallitype III, and the Brown Print, tracing the published history of the invention, and improvements of all significant historical contributors to the development of each process. The historical framework of the book documents the original invention and the sale of each of the four processes. It discusses the many published kallitype printmakers from 1890 to 1930 who wrote about their way of working the process. It includes process information from kallitype entrepreneurs. It reports the critical responses to the published processes of many kallitype artists. Their writing elucidates approaches to the various processes, provides principles which govern successful kallitype practice and inform s current printmaker s about causes of failure and their resolution.

The book includes discussion of the social, techno logic al, and artistic milieu that led kalliltypists and many amateurs, to elevate photography from what it was-a basically reproductive medium-into a creative, expressive art characterized by media plasticity. The book attempts to enlighten why and how photography carne to be a pictorial art that displayed creative work heavily involved with radical manipulation of negative and print possibilities.

About the Author

Dick Stevens taught for 38 years at the University of Notre Dame in the College of Liberal Arts. He started the photography program in the Department of Arts in 1970. The courses included Beginning and Advanced black and white, Color photography, Studio and Old Process Photography. He also taught courses in the discussion of the Great Books.
He has two degrees in English Literature from the University of Notre Dame and studied for the PhD in English Literature at the University of Chicago.

His photographic experience includes work in advertising, publications and exhibitions in many art museums in the United States. He held two offices and served as a board member of the Society for Photographic Education. He is the author of Making Kallitypes, A definitive study published by The Focal Press. He also published an article on Kallitype in Modern Photography magazine. His current book, Kallitype: Processes and History is scheduled for publication late in 2012.

Born in Chicago, Illinois Dick returned frequently to photograph the changing urban landscape, especially the grittier sections of the city. Now retired to Sarasota Florida he finds the subject matter in the colors, textures and formal relationships of leaves, buds and blossoms of the tropical botanicals of the area.