Yes, I was impressed with the show and it was good to bring the GF to as well since she was into the environmental aspects of it. It kills me when I hear people dismissing this work and the show as somehow inferior. We should all be so lucky to do anything on the level he is working. I'm not saying people have to like the work, but you have to respect it IMO.
Have you thought of using LF film at all? I look forward to seeing the prints.
John,
The Salgado exhibition at ICP is a display of some of the creative and asthetic possibilities showing a rather inventive combination of analog and digital technics. On one level it seems to me a very brave/bold/move that true is a high bar that opens Salgado's work to criticism. If one questions if the work was intended to print big, one criticism might be. "Why didn't Salgado just shoot a large format film camera?"
I think Salgado displayed a lot of courage and fortitude to produce this body of work that spans about a decade. I also appreciate how he adopted and adapted mediums and formats that were out of his comfort zone. As an artist, a word I do not use lightly, Salgado made a personal challenge for himself that I think will add to his legacy.
If it were me, and if I had the intrastructure that Salgado enjoyed I would do things a bit different, but so what: I am a different artist. Anyways I found inspiration through the display of possibilities, and I did some serious forensics to understand all the possibilities and limitations that were presented in Salgado's hybrid technical challege of merging analog and digital.
I took in the show in three ways: one was an overview to see the range of work; another was to look for and analize the images that stood out as iconic, meaning the images that would persist in my memory; and lastly sorting out the images using 2008 as the boundry where image capture moved from analog to digital (Pentax film 645 to Canon DSLR).
What I found so remarkable is how close his printers could get the analog and digital to look the same. It took very careful examination to see the subtle differences that I somewhat expected: the digital image capture had slightly more resolution and contrast; but the film captures had more midrange and a a bit more highlight detail.
For me the iconic shots I will remember are the giant land turtle, the penguin shot with the converging sky with the rocky foreground that has this forced perspective, and the huge iceberg print at the beginning of the show.
Of course I looked close for the detail of the prints, and on some of the larger prints I saw a bit of fuzzyness that might make me ask might it be a better print just a little smaller because the scale of the prints was kinda over the top. For reference I judged using Richard Avedon's life sized prints that were shot with an 8x10 view camera that were displayed at MOMA in the 70's.
People who are dismissive of this body of work really I think can't really relate to a great accomplishment.
I think one day I might get into large format. Crazy as it sounds I was thinking 8x10 and contact printing instead of printing big. For me it is more about image capture and shooting because printing big is just about spending lots of money. Let's see those Digital Silver Imaging prints before I get too far ahead of myself.
Cal
