A LETTERPRESS FINE ART PRINT OF THE “PILLARS OF CREATION”

Nb – Due to the halftone nature of this art piece, our camera had difficulty capturing it, and some screens are having difficulty displaying it! Apologies if it appears with strange crosshatching or “webbing” on your screen.

In 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope – a joint venture between the American, Canadian, and European space agencies – launched into orbit. It soon began relaying extraordinary images of outer space. The telescope is so powerful that it can capture light hundreds of millions of lightyears away – meaning that it literally sees back into our cosmic past. Our imagination has been captured by the imagery from this awesome invention. The “Pillars of Creation,” a formation of gas and space dust in the process of creating new stars, are particularly striking.

We have printed the “Pillars of Creation” letterpress. Yes, letterpress.

Today, letterpress is usually used for fine typography, woodblock and line artwork. But it has always been capable of reproducing photography through a painstaking process of halftone platemaking, four-color inking, and overprinting with exact registration. For “Pillars of Creation”, it felt worthwhile to resurrect this process.

This is, so far as we can tell, the first time that an image from the James Webb Space Telescope has been reproduced letterpress. This art print is extremely limited. It is actually No Reply’s smallest limitation of any edition yet – only twenty six lettered copies.