Dunno guys, I’d gladly hang an Ernst Haas, Joel Meyerowitz, William Christenberry or Stephen Shore on my wall any day, so not so sure about colour photography not being considered ‘fine art’ or even just plain old ‘art’. But that’s just me - I’m certainly not out to change minds or attitudes, although I’ll gladly entertain other points of view.
Now I’m just a fella trying to make it out there in the crazy world like everybody else, so I really don’t like it when threads like this devolve into a choosing of sides, and if you’re not on ‘our’ side then there’s something wrong with you, you’re misguided, settling for less, deluded, head stuck in the sand, blah blah blah. It’s things like this - aside from the 522 error - that make me want to leave RFF for good and devote my energies to another online photo forum I recently joined where this does not seem to happen. There’s already too much conflict in the world, but I do appreciate healthy debate and respectful discussion. So I’ll leave that here for consideration and will shut up about it.
I can only speak from my own experience, so here goes. I remember way back in grad school there was one classroom that was turned into a camera obscura — heavy dark curtains covering the windows with one small hole cut into one of them (the true meaning of a camera obscura!). The result was the street scene outside projected upside-down onto the opposite wall inside the classroom. A professor told me that once they covered that entire wall with photographic paper and made one giant, multi-print photo mural of the projected street scene. So see you can make a photograph (or at least one really big one made up of a lot of little ones) without a mechanical camera. A Man Ray photogram also comes to mind, even a round cardboard oatmeal can with a little brass shim stock and tiny hole punched in it would do the trick. But I digress, ever so slightly.
As far as prints go, I’ve had two interesting things happen to me over the last, say, 10 years that stick out in my little pea-brain, one of which just happened a couple of weeks ago. The first was when I was hanging a solo show at a local arts center back in about 2012-2013 — it was the precursor to my Mapping the West project, and I had recently gotten my Epson 3880 printer, so the first real foray into doing my own digital printing and no longer having to farm things out to be printed. As I was hanging the prints (admittedly matted, framed and behind glass), a resident professor and professional photographer (who BTW shot for and conducted workshops with National Geographic, so a seasoned photographer who was maybe a few years older than me) came up to my photos that are were already on the wall, stuck her nose against a number of them (as any photographer worth their salt would do), and asked me hesitantly: “Are these — are these darkroom prints?” No I replied, inkjet. Guess I could have been all fancy-pants and said ‘giclée’, but inkjet’s fine by me. Actually I’ve had that happen numerous times since - seasoned photographers, some older than me and who could rightly be considered ‘darkroom rats’ asking if my inkjets are gelatin silver prints.
The flip side happened two weeks ago - remember those two Marion Warren gelatin silver prints I mentioned in an earlier post that I sold? Well the dealer to whom I sold them — who incidentally has been a gallery owner for over 30 years, deals in Marion’s work among other notable photographers like Aubrey Bodine and has seen a fine photographic print or two in her career — looked closely at them and asked me if these were inkjets (Marion had been having someone do inkjets of his work for him near the end of his life). No I replied, they’re gelatin silver prints that I had him print for me. As you see it can go both ways.
So for those of you who think that the image quality of inkjets can’t even hope to approach the quality of a gelatin silver print, well I guess maybe you haven’t been looking at enough good prints, which is entirely possible. Or perhaps I should say that at the very least you haven’t seen mine 🙂
As far as digital black and white (and really I hate that distinction - it’s all just black and white to me) being some kind of ‘robot art’ or that those of us who do it haven’t taken the trouble to learn something difficult (i.e. printing in a darkroom), woo that’s quite an inflammatory statement to some of us. I mean people are certainly entitled to think that, and I appreciate the sentiment. Ansel Adams said that the negative is the score and the print the performance - I’d agree and also say that the RAW file is the score and the post-production and resulting print the performance. Even in his autobiography he talked about the future of digital printing and he seemed to indicate that he could head that way if time allowed in his life or if he was around 20 years hence (this was 1982 when he wrote this). Like a neg, a RAW file can be interpreted in many ways, and if it were simply ‘robot art’ (Hey Siri make me a perfect print!), then sheesh I could certainly sleep in a lot more — I mean why didn’t somebody tell me this sooner? And as far as us not taking the trouble to learn something difficult and expensive (had to laugh at that second part!), well I can only speak for myself and my personal experience. I started in the darkroom in 1980 and worked for about 25 years in one until I had a bit of hiatus and then got my Epson 3880 about 7 years later I think. From 1994 I also got into historic processes (platinum-palladium in particular), was schooled by a master printer of my own in grad school (Craig Stevens) and really learned how to print. I thought I knew how to print pretty well but lordy, once Craig had me under his spell I quickly realized that I really knew nothing. Actually you’d love this as a darkroom assignment: One of Craig’s major assignments for us was to choose one negative frame we liked, but did not love. He said ‘not loved’ because we’d grow to hate it by the end of the assignment. It was to have been a neg that would comfortably lay down on Grade Two paper, so no dodging, burning etc. A ‘straight’ print. We had to make basically a ‘cookbook’ for printing - using different developer and paper combinations (oftentimes making our own developers from scratch — DuPont 54D was my personal fave), as well as different toners and dilutions. I think we ended up with like 275-300 prints of the same image, then we had to write about and discuss each combination with (somewhat) intelligent analysis. I still have that ‘cookbook’ and cherish it, as well as the sticky note from Craig with an A+ and Superb! written on it. So if that didn’t make you a good printer by the end of it all, nothing would. Oh and the following year another professor had us do almost the same thing in colour!
I spill out all this verbal diarrhea because I find that the darkroom experience can help inform the inkjet/digital experience. Not to say that I won’t find my way back into a darkroom down the road (heck 10 years ago I said I was done with film!), but at this moment I’m doing what I’m doing and actually I don’t mind it. I personally don’t think it’s better or worse, just different (and I’ll tell you this much — it sure ain’t cheaper). I devote the same care, time and attention to an inkjet as I would a gelatin silver, and I’m sure that those who are committed to final image quality would do the same as well. And if we’re all misguided, delusional souls who are sleepwalking our way through our craft, well then hopefully you’ll take pity on us and maybe say a prayer for our possible redemption (though someone once said that “hell’s the hippest way to go”, so it might be better to leave us in our ignorant bliss). Just don’t forget to check back with us in 100 years to see if any of the fruits of our collective labour have survived.
