Ted Kincaid: Gravure, Digital, and the Space Between
When Manneken Press was first establishing its publishing program, one of the early projects set the tone for the studio’s adventurous approach to printmaking: a collaboration with Dallas-based artist Ted Kincaid. The resulting body of six large photogravures is not an edition in the conventional sense, but a sequence of related monoprints—each impression unique, each one a meditation on the hybrid possibilities of image-making across centuries of technology.
Kincaid’s starting point was a series of drawings created on his computer, printed out on an inkjet printer, and then deliberately blurred by photographing them out of focus with a film camera. These layered mediations—digital, mechanical, optical—were themselves translated into copper photogravure plates at Manneken Press. The process deliberately collapsed the temporal distance between 19th-century gravure traditions and 21st-century digital drawing, underscoring Kincaid’s fascination with photography’s unstable status as both document and invention.
From the six plates, Kincaid directed the printing of twenty-five impressions each. But rather than producing a standard edition, he insisted on variation: no two prints are alike. For every impression, Kincaid selected both an ink color and a sheet of Moriki handmade paper, whose luminous tones became active agents in shaping the image. The chine collé process fused these translucent papers to a Somerset backing sheet, the image transferring and the papers bonding in a single pass through the press. Some impressions were layered twice, registering new colors atop earlier ones, while others forego chine collé altogether, relying instead on the stark depth of ink on white paper.
The result is a series of transformations: six plates generating 150 unique works that hover between photography and drawing, reproduction and singularity. Kincaid’s project resists the fixity of editioned prints, embracing instead a model closer to painting, in which each object embodies a distinct set of decisions, accidents, and material relationships.
In this way, the collaboration points to larger questions that run through Kincaid’s practice: What does it mean for an image to be “original” in an age of digital reproducibility? How can historical processes be reanimated, not as acts of nostalgia, but as tools for invention? The photogravures made at Manneken Press enact these questions materially, offering not answers, but a sustained encounter with the instability—and the beauty—of images that refuse to stay still.
Twenty five unique impressions were taken from each of the six plates. The prints are signed and numbered verso, in pencil.