“Toward What Sun? Vol. I” is the first installment of a four-part online exhibition of photogravure prints by Philip Van Keuren, presented by Manneken Press.
In 2009, Van Keuren began working with Manneken Press to create photogravure plates from his original 35mm camera negatives. This collaboration, which remains ongoing, has resulted in an archive of forty copperplate photogravures that explore the expressive potential of the medium while remaining faithful to the photographic source.
Philip Van Keuren has been making photographs for many years, guided by everyday observations that reveal the world as both sublimely beautiful and fundamentally unknowable. His images form a sustained meditation on time, memory, and place, unfolding slowly across decades rather than moments.
Limited editions printed from the plates have been issued in sets of ten images; Manneken Press released the first set, Toward What Sun? Vol. I, in 2016, followed by Vol. II in 2019 and Vol. III in 2025; Vol. IV, scheduled to be released in 2026, will bring the project to a conclusion. Each volume consists of ten photogravures, hand-printed in black ink from etched copper plates on 18 x 14 inch Hahnemühle Copperplate paper, with image dimensions of 12 x 8 inches. Individual impressions are available, as are complete portfolio sets housed in custom cases with letterpress-printed title pages and colophons.
The photogravure process, developed in the 1870s, is a hybrid of photography and intaglio printmaking. Unlike halftone reproduction methods, photogravure renders images in continuous tones rather than breaking them into dots, allowing for exceptional depth, subtle gradations, and fine detail. Printed from inked and wiped copper plates, photogravures possess a tactile richness and tonal range long prized by photographers associated with the Photo-Secession and Pictorialist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the context of contemporary digital photography, photogravure has experienced a renewed relevance, offering a materially grounded and historically resonant alternative which illuminates the dialogue between photographic image and printmaking tradition.
Philip Van Keuren
Philip Van Keuren was born in Dallas, Texas in 1948 and lives and works in Dallas. He received his B.F.A. (1974) and M.F.A. (1977) in studio art from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, where he has also served as Professor of Art. From 1991 to 2012, he was Director of the Pollock Gallery at the Meadows School, curating numerous significant exhibitions.
Van Keuren attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 1975 and has been a fellow of the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire (1978, 2009), as well as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome (2023). During the early 1980s, he constructed architectural models for architects including I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb, and Philip Johnson, and he was a visiting artist at Brown University in 1989.
In addition to his visual art practice, Van Keuren is an accomplished poet. His book Monody: Selected Poems 1978–2009 was published in conjunction with the exhibition Philip Van Keuren: Forty Years of Works on Paper 1969–2009 at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas. Since 1971, his work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally.