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The 1890s marked the beginning of a new era in visual representation. It was during this decade that photographic images were first successfully incorporated alongside written texts in illustrated weekly and monthly magazines. Photo relief reproduction processes, which had been developed over the previous decades, were refined to a level where they became commercially viable and culturally acceptable. Line methods had been in use since the 1870s. They produced an image which was fixed onto a sensitized metal plate, and etched to produce a type-compatible relief block. The halftone techniques first developed in the 1880s transformed the continuous tones of an original into tiny dots, which then were etched in much the same way as photo relief line methods. Halftone techniques could duplicate photographs, paintings, and wash images, while line methods were widely used for the printing of pen and ink drawings. Collectively, these photographic approaches were known as "process." These techniques were able to challenge the existing reproduction technology of wood engraving, which had dominated the illustrated press up to this point. This essay looks at one particular aspect of this shift in the mass-produced image: the depiction of art and design. It examines The Studio, a monthly art magazine which was launched in London in April 1893, and which used only photomechanical methods to visualize an extended range of artistic practice. I examine the meanings and effects of the reproduction processes as they relate to the status of design.Clive Ashwin has suggested: "The Studio was the first visually modern magazine to the extent that it adopted the reproductive medium which would dominate art publishing, indeed publishing in general, for the century to come." 1 Certainly, around this time, a number of English magazines were applying this new imaging technology. The Sketch, the first middle-class, photographically reproduced weekly was launched in February of 1893, just before The Studio. By the early-1890s, most magazines, including the specialist art monthlies, were using a mixture of reproduction methods including wood engravings and photographic halftones. So why did The Studio switch entirely to this new method? I will examine the early days of the magazine in some detail to analyze the significance of its image reproduction decisions. 2

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