St. Maclou, Rouen before 1865

This photograph shows St. Maclou church in Rouen, and was made by Joseph Cundall, a British photographer, in the mid-19th century. The photograph is made using the collodion process, a technique that involves coating a glass plate with a light-sensitive emulsion. The image is then captured in a large format camera, allowing for incredible detail to be recorded. Look closely, and you can see the marks of the hand-made: the slight irregularities in the coating, the imperfections on the glass. Cundall was a printer and bookseller, and he likely took this photograph to be included in a book about Normandy. The photograph would have been printed using a photogravure process, a technique that involves etching the image onto a copper plate and then printing it using a traditional printing press. There's a lot of labor involved in the production of this image - not only the intellectual and creative labor of Cundall, but also the labor of the many hands that would have been involved in producing the book itself. So next time you look at an image, consider the social context that made it possible, and the many hands that brought it into being.