Department of English

• Monday, September 23, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center

Julie Mellby writes: "During the nineteenth century, publishers, printers, artists, and chemists struggled to make fugitive photographic images permanent. Ernest Edwards solved this problem by developing the heliotype, a method of printing photographic negatives in ink, without a screen or need for cropping, making it the ideal solution for illustrated books and journals. Among the most important publications to use this process were Charles Darwin’s seminal 1859 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, followed by Edward Muybridge’s massive eleven volume Animal Locomotion begun in 1883. This is an overview of the Edwards process and how it was used."
 Julie Mellby is the graphic arts curator emeritus at Princeton University. Recent papers include “Never Fade Away: the Permanent Photograph,” National Gallery, Washington D.C.; “Edward L. Wilson and the Mechanical Photographers,” Royal Photographic Society, Bristol; and “Printing Big: Audubon, Havell, and the Double Elephant,” The Centre for Printing History and Culture, Pescara, Italy.