James Craig Annan

Hamilton and the T. & R. Annan Workshop

James Craig Annan was the son of Thomas Annan who operated a photographic studio and printing business in Glasgow. He grew up in a setting where taking photographs and reproducing them for print were part of the same workplace. The National Galleries of Scotland records that after studying chemistry and natural philosophy, Annan traveled to Vienna in 1883 and learned photogravure from Karel Klíč^*1. After his return, T. & R. Annan and Sons put the process into practical use in Britain, incorporating it into the family firm’s portrait, reproduction, and publishing work^*20. For Annan, exposure and printing belonged to a continuous production process from the outset. Converting a negative into an inked plate and circulating multiple impressions in magazines and portfolios was built into his understanding of photography from the beginning.

The Linked Ring and Stieglitz’s International Network

From the 1890s onward, Annan participated in the Linked Ring, worked and exhibited across Europe, and became closely involved with the international art-photography network around Alfred Stieglitz. The Art Institute of Chicago’s Stieglitz materials describe how Annan acquired photographic skills from a young age and came to be recognized both as a photogravure technician and as a photographer in his own right^*14. The National Gallery of Art’s artist records show that portraits, people encountered in travel, and views of Venice and Lombardy all formed substantial parts of his work^*7. MoMA also holds his photographs and photogravures, and major public collections in Scotland, the United States, and Japan now preserve his work^*17.

Making Photogravure the Final Stage of the Work

Soft tonal transitions and atmospheric effects are only part of Annan’s work. What he required was a printing process that allowed a negative to be reinterpreted as the blacks, grays, edges, and open areas of the final sheet. Because photogravure formed the image on a copper plate and printed it in ink, it could produce a matte surface, deep blacks, and continuous tonal gradation unlike ordinary photographic paper, while also lending itself to editioned publication. The Getty’s artist record identifies Annan as both photographer and printer^*12. That dual role underpinned his treatment of vintage prints, plates, and published impressions as different material forms through which the same work could develop.

The Etching Revival and an Aesthetic of Selection

In his 1910 essay “Photography as a Means of Artistic Expression,” Annan argued that even a medium made with a machine could become artistic expression through the photographer’s intelligence and judgment. He emphasized the ability to recognize, within nature, a configuration that could become a picture.^*26 Anne Hammond analyzes the photogravures of Annan and Alvin Langdon Coburn in relation to the British Etching Revival, connecting their control of focus and ink contrast—and the emphasis of selected areas—to an etching aesthetic based on selection and omission.^*29 Photogravure allowed Annan to continue making decisions about emphasis after exposure, extending authorship into the stages of ink and paper.

Hand-Camera Moments and Editing on the Plate

The Franciscan shows particularly clearly the distance between taking a photograph and constructing the final image. The NGA holds the work as a photogravure^*5. Production material discussed by Photogravure.com explains that a scene of monks that appears to have been caught casually in the street was in fact the result of careful work involving multiple negatives and the arrangement of figures^*19. The Met’s Group on a Hill Road, Granada likewise gathers figures on a road into a deliberate composition, reinforcing that Annan’s travel scenes were not simply improvised snapshots^*10. On a Hill Road, Granada also places figures at different distances within the rhythm of the road, producing an image that resembles an instantaneous travel snapshot through sustained compositional decision-making^*3. Annan’s Pictorialism therefore depended on photography, negative selection, combination, plate work, ink, and paper as successive means of shaping a moment from the world into the final printed image.

Paper, Ink, and Tonality as Forms of Authorship

In The Riva Schiavoni, the Venetian waterfront and groups of figures are held within a low-contrast tonal field. The Met relates its tonality and atmosphere to contemporary painting and printmaking^*8. The NGA’s impression of the same work provides a concrete example of how one negative could take on different papers, plates, and publishing forms as photogravure^*6. In this process, the boundary between photographic “original” and finished work was not fixed. Annan extended authorial judgment from the negative through every stage of the final print.

Venice and Lombardy: Turning Travel into a Portfolio

Venice and Lombardy, made from Annan’s travels in the 1890s, shows how his method took form through the medium of the photographic portfolio. The National Gallery of Art holds it as a series of eleven photogravures that sequence urban views, labor, figures, and members of religious orders within a single group^*4. In Ploughing on the Campagnetta, a low horizon and long furrows organize the horizontal composition; the Art Institute of Chicago situates the work within Annan’s Italian travels and photogravure production of the 1890s^*16. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo also holds The Little Princess, with catalog information and an image available through Art Platform Japan^*21. Lombardy Ploughing Team is likewise preserved in a Japanese public collection, showing that Annan’s travel photographs entered public collections in Britain, the United States, and Japan^*22.

Reprinting Hill and Adamson: Bringing Earlier Photographs to New Audiences

Another major part of Annan’s work concerned photographs by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson: half a century later, he reprinted their calotypes from the 1840s as photogravures. The National Galleries of Scotland explains that Annan’s editions and their presentation in Camera Work brought Hill and Adamson’s photographs before a new international audience and played an important role in their subsequent reassessment^*2. The Art Institute of Chicago similarly notes that when Stieglitz presented them as nineteenth-century precedents for artistic photography, Annan’s photogravures served as the medium through which the works circulated^*15. The Met preserves impressions made by Annan as printer from negatives by Hill and Adamson^*11. Material on Photogravure.com, including Annan’s tests of which tonal values to retain from the original negatives and later correspondence, shows that reprinting involved interpretive decisions about tone and printing beyond mechanical copying^*18. Roddy Simpson’s study of the 1901 Glasgow photographic exhibition examines how Annan exhibited original works by Hill and Adamson alongside his own photogravures, reintroducing increasingly forgotten nineteenth-century photographs as important precedents in Scottish photographic history^*23.

Photographer, Printer, and Mediator of History

The reprinting projects make the category of Pictorialist alone insufficient for describing Annan’s place in photographic history. He was a photographer making his own images, a printer interpreting other photographers’ negatives into finished impressions, and an editorial mediator introducing earlier photographs to new magazine audiences. In works such as The Dark Mountains, he reduced a mountain range to a dark mass against a pale sky, making the density of photogravure ink part of the image’s effect^*9. In the Getty’s A Blind Musician, Toledo, subdued tonal values bring figure and wall into the same field, with the planes of the composition and the subject’s posture taking precedence over travel photography’s emphasis on the “exotic”^*13.

Research in the 1990s: Reading the Photographs and Writings Together

William Buchanan’s 1992 monograph, published by the National Galleries of Scotland, became a major study of Annan as photographer, photogravure maker, and mediator of photographic history.^*28 The 1994 J. Craig Annan: Selected Texts and Bibliography assembled his writings and bibliography, allowing the photographs to be compared directly with Annan’s own ideas about photography and printing.^*27 Together, the two publications made it easier to assess Annan beyond the familiar image of a Pictorialist with soft tonal effects and to examine his work across photography, plate making, publishing, and the writing of photographic history.

Photogravure and Authorship: Printing as Part of Making the Work

The plate notes in Camera Work no. 19 (1907) state that, for the five works by Annan in that issue, he was “practically” responsible for both plate making and printing, and emphasize the degree to which photogravure could approach the quality of an original print.^*25 Camera Work no. 32 (1910) reprinted Annan’s own essay “Photography as a Means of Artistic Expression,” in which he also addressed in words the conditions under which photography could function as artistic expression.^*26 By refusing to locate the completion of a photograph solely at the instant of exposure and instead controlling plate, printing, publication, and exhibition, Annan treated authorship as something carried by both material process and circulation.

The 1901 Glasgow Exhibition and Camera Work: Selecting the Origins of Photographic History

Annan’s mediation was not a neutral act of preservation. The 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition of Photography, which he helped organize, brought together roughly 500 works by 201 photographers and included nine works by Hill and Adamson, presenting the 1840s as a historical origin for Pictorialism.^*24 Research published by Oxford University Press examines how Annan’s reprints and exhibitions returned Hill and Adamson, then largely forgotten, to the history of artistic photography.^*23 The photogravures later published in Camera Work brought the photographs to an international audience and established them as works available for later photographers to study.^*2 The National Galleries of Scotland, however, notes that this history of early photography was constructed at some distance from photography’s development as science and industry, and that Camera Work repeatedly underplayed Robert Adamson’s technical role.^*24 The photographic history Annan helped construct was influential, but it depended on editorial decisions about which earlier works would be selected as ancestors of artistic photography.