![]() ![]() ![]() The toner then sticks to the negatively-charged particles until the paper passes through and attracts those charged toner particles, which are then heat-sealed. The negatively-charged metal drum is covered in the light-sensitive sulfur, activated by a halogen lamp that reflects light back from the white parts of a document. ![]() Now, “he copier created an electrostatic image of a document on a rotating metal drum, and used it to transfer toner-ink in a powdered format-to a piece of paper, which would then be sealed in place by heat” (Thompson 2). The first commercially available photocopier from the Xerox Haloid company was the Xerox 914, which hit the market in 1959, a good twenty years after that fortuitous moment in Astoria. While a gentle blow and whip of the handkerchief sound more like a magic trick and the powdered duplicate some alchemical wizardry, the commercial photocopier stands in contrast as a contained, innovative, and automated method that helped modernize the buttoned-up world of the 1950s office. As with photography decades earlier, the now crude indexical trace of this moment is a tantalizing piece of evidence, a premonition of industrialization entering the white-collar sphere, in scrawling characters. Finally, Carlson proceeded “y gently blowing on the surface” and thereby producing “a near-perfect duplicate in powder of the notation which had been printed on the glass slide” (Eichhorn 13). The process included laying the glass slide on top of the surface, exposing it to light, removing the slide, and then sprinkling lycopodium powder on the sulfur. The first official electrophotographic image-that is, an image produced through xerography, a term coined by its creator literally meaning dry (xeros) writing (graphein)-marks its own date and place of creation: “10-22-38 Astoria.” Written in India ink on a glass slide by his assistant, the US inventor Chester Carlson produced this image in his darkened apartment, not quite with lightning, but rather a charge of static electricity created by the sweep of a handkerchief on a sulfur-covered, light-sensitive surface. The history of the modern photocopier reads like so many other invention stories: a doggedly focused inventor working furiously in their home, apartment, or garage eschewing personal relationships until lighting strikes and their experimentation results in something viable. These limitations are meant to get at some of the essential qualities of photocopy art while also attempting to keep the discussion in the realm of fine arts rather than expanding into political activist art, mail art, or literature, for example, although such an accessible tool as the photocopier undoubtedly creates overlap between those and many other genres. Although, as will be shown, the differences are sometimes purposefully difficult to discern. The scope of artworks under consideration will be limited to those produced on some of the earliest machines, only capable of black-and-white copies, and to image-based artworks rather than text-based. In this essay, a brief history of the photocopier and outline of its process will be discussed followed by a more in depth look at the unique aesthetic qualities of photocopy art and what techniques artists used to achieve them. Because of that, it presents particular questions and challenges to the artist. Regardless, photocopying is a photomechanical process rather than the photochemical process of analog photography. Some refer to the process as Xerography, referencing the first and most common machine produced by the Xerox Haloid company in the late 1950s, while others may call it electrophotography, a more general term that takes into account the scientific process whereby the copy is produced through the use of static electricity. Copy Art is a genre of photomechanical paper-based art created through the use of the common office photocopier. ![]()
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