Lecture 37 - Susanne Klein

Susanne Klein, Associate Professor, EPSRC Manufacturing Fellow, Chair of the British Liquid Crystal Society

Overview

One of the technological achievements of the 19th century was the mass reproduction of photographic images. Woodburytype was the first commercially successful photomechanical continuous tone printing method, of unsurpassed quality until today. Along with Collotype and Goupil gravure, it used the relief of dichromated gelatin exposed to light as the basis for the printing plates. In this talk, we will discuss the historical printing processes and present how modern embodiments of the printing plates can be made by either CNC milling or using photopolymer plates.

About the speaker

Susanne Klein is an EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Manufacturing fellow and an associate professor at the Centre for Fine Print Research. She is a physicist by training and has lived and worked in the UK for the last 25 years. She studied physics in Germany and came as a Royal Society Research fellow to the University of Bristol where she worked on 19th century optics. In 1998 she joined Hewlett Packard Labs and specialised in liquid crystal display technology, new materials for 3D printing and optical cryptography. Her research interests now are 19th century photomechanical processes and their 21st century incarnations, from Woodburytype to photo lithography, from Lippmann photography to photogravure and everything in between and beyond. She is also exploring the interaction and feedback between maker and the materiality of the creation and how colour is generated in the brain.