A photogravure is not just a photograph. It is a print.
Printmaking is ancient by comparison to photography and through its long history it has been used to disseminate information, entertain, inspire, and to both reinforce and challenge authority. Prints have been made for education, religion, advertising, decoration, fine art, and politics. The common denominator of all of these is communication. The ability to reproduce an image meant the ability to distribute ideas beyond a single object or a single viewer. Those who had access to the press now had the ability to circulate their message.
Josephine Sacabo is a photographer who builds her printed imagery from photographic elements that are then converted into a transparent film. The film is placed atop a light-sensitive photopolymer sheet which serves as the printing plate, and the two are exposed to ultraviolet light. The light either travels through, or is selectively blocked by the transparent film, burning the image onto the plate. Where the light passes through, the plate hardens. Where the light is blocked, the material remains soft and soluble. The plate is then washed, removing the soft material and creating a topography of microscopic hills and valleys. The deeper the valley, the darker the printed area.
Greasy ink, made of pigment suspended in oil, is then pushed into those microscopic hills and valleys. The plate is carefully wiped clean, and the remaining ink creates the darker values that make up the image, and the white of the paper creates the lighter values. The plate is then covered with a damp sheet of paper and run through an etching press where a large, heavy steel roller applies an enormous amount of pressure. That pressure forces the paper to stretch into the microscopic hills and valleys, allowing the fibers of the paper to pull the ink from the plate, embedding it both within and on top of the paper. Once the print is pulled, the plate can be re-inked, wiped, and printed again, allowing multiple impressions to be made from the same plate.
Through this process, the image is no longer a photograph. It has been transformed into an original hand-pulled intaglio print. That transformation matters; the tradition of the printed image is now part of the content of the work.
In Óyeme Con Los Ojos (“Hear Me with Your Eyes”), Sacabo creates a series of photogravures about the life and writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century Mexican nun, poet, playwright, and intellectual who championed women’s right to intellectual freedom. Working from behind the walls of her convent, Sor Juana wrote poetry, music, and philosophical works before ultimately being silenced by the Inquisition. Sacabo writes that it is her hope these images will “break that silence and we will once again hear her with our eyes.”
When reading these prints, and I use the word reading deliberately, Sacabo builds her imagery much like a graphic artist. These prints are meant to be read; the viewer reads the inscription, then reads the image, allowing each to shape the meaning of the other. Rather than illustrating Sor Juana’s life, Sacabo constructs a symbolic world through which the viewer encounters Sor Juana’s writings. The meaning of the prints unfolds through the relationships between recurring figures, architecture, light, smoke, books, religious imagery, and other symbols. The inscriptions are not merely captions, they are drawn from Sor Juana’s own writings, framing the viewer’s reading of the image while allowing Sor Juana’s own voice to remain an active part of the work. This format is similar to Goya’s Los Caprichos, where image and text work together in a sustained critique of superstition, ignorance, corruption, and institutional authority. That connection feels especially appropriate in a series about Sor Juana, whose intellectual freedom was ultimately stripped away.
In Tagged, Sacabo shifts from preserving a voice to confronting the language used to define people. She describes walking from her home to her studio, where she is repeatedly confronted by misogynistic graffiti. The work gives the viewer a sense of what it feels like to be confronted with this demeaning language spray-painted across public spaces.
The work is also about the act of putting these hateful words on a wall. What kind of person feels so empowered that they would do that, knowing that ordinary people just trying to live their lives are going to have to walk past it every day? The language becomes part of the environment. It becomes something people are forced to encounter whether they want to or not. Throughout the series, the graffiti is layered directly onto the female figure. Within Sacabo’s images, it becomes impossible to separate the language from the women to whom it is directed.
Sacabo asks, “Where are the graffiti messages by women meant for men?” These prints are that response. Graffiti and printmaking share something fundamental. Both place messages into the public sphere. The difference is that graffiti is temporary. It can be painted over, weathered away, or removed. Prints can be printed again and again, exhibited, collected, and preserved. In that way, Tagged transforms these temporary acts of vandalism into a permanent response that can continue long after the original graffiti has disappeared.
In both series, Sacabo uses printmaking to engage with social and political issues. Óyeme Con Los Ojos addresses intellectual freedom, censorship, and institutional authority through the life and writings of Sor Juana, while Tagged confronts contemporary misogyny and the language used to diminish women. By choosing to transform her photographic works into hand-pulled intaglio prints, Sacabo places these works within the centuries-old tradition of graphic art that articulates the human experience, questions authority, records history, showing us who we are or who we may have been.
(Printmaker Jesse Shaw, an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Visual Arts Program at Texas A&M International University, teaches art and printmaking. His work in linocut relief prints is based in the narrative, satirical, political, and social commentary tradition of the graphic print. Prints from his “American Epic” series of linocut prints have been exhibited nationally in Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Ft. Lauderdale, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and North Carolina.)
