Also just as a side note, for those of you who have never seen any prints made by carvings/engravings, it's a real pain to get everything to work well. From personal experience carving linoleum in art class, first you start with what you want you finished product to look like, then you transfer it onto your new medium but backwards. Then you begin the long and tedious task of carving everything out. Keep in mind the whole you're carving the mirror image of what you want your final product to look like. I just think from my personal experience the wax engraved maps still deserve to be considered craft, whether or not mass produced.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
My thoughts on cerography
After reading through "Maps for the Masses," and seeing how atlases produced through the cerography process "involved no formal training," I couldn't help but think to myself how hard could it be to make my own map? At the height of its popularity, the atlases made through the wax engraving process had about a 95 percent market share. This meant that not only were there a lot atlases being made by this process, but also that they being made quickly, cheaply, and almost certainly by people who you would assume didn't have that much skill. When the text mentions that this new technique changed cartography from a "craft into an industry" I wanted to know if it was no longer a craft because of it being mass produced, or because it didn't look as nice as the atlases made by the copperplate technique. Personally, I think that although the new atlases are being made at a quicker rate, it still does take a considerable amount of skill to make these maps. I just don't like how the text made it out to be like the makers of the wax engraved maps and atlases were far inferior to makers of the copperplate maps. Think about it, how many times in your life have you been asked by a teacher to draw what California looks like on a piece of paper, and then you end up drawing this misshaped, out of proportioned mess that oddly resembles a banana. What I am trying to say is that although the maps/atlases made with wax engravings were less aesthetic than its copperplate counterpart, it's not like you have complete amateurs making this maps. Map making takes a bunch of skill to get all the geometry right and to get all the cities and towns to fit on there is an entirely different and challenging task. Also, to sort of answer my question from earlier, it can be really hard to make a map between all the drawing that has to be done and the extensive research, making a map of any kind truly is a craft.
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I just want to mention that your reference to the map of California resembling a banana was really funny. But as an actual response, I thought this was an interesting approach to responding to this reading. Even though cerography is certainly a cheaper and more efficient way to make maps, skill is still required- I would even call these mapmakers to be artisans, making history along the way.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate you pointing out that those making wax engravings are still artists. The atlas work is art and it does take skill to do that type of work. I had not thought about it from this point of view even though I have taken a printmaking class in the past. I was just assuming that the people making wax engravings were not as skilled as those who had done copperplate. Though copperplate is considered more difficult, it does not mean someone who had done wax would not have had the capability to work on copper-they just may have never had the opportunity to work in that medium or to be trained in it.
ReplyDelete-Michelle Finch