LA Times Article: The Getty Collecting Photographic Prints

Gee... I was happy to see the article yesterday but it got removed. Hmmm.

Here's my summary (and commentary):

Weston Naef, curator of photography at Getty is on another buying spree. This time he's spending his foundation's fortune on news photos. The one's getting the headlines are those of famous killings that once were front-page news.

Naef has built great collections of photography before. First at the Metropolitain Museum and again at Getty. He is expanding the Getty's current world-class collection into something even better by going into this genre that typically is viewed in fleeting media rather than preserved for the eternities in a museum.

Despite the buzz about the "famous killings" pics, I'd bet that the collection is much, much more comprehensive and will be quite useful to scholars and not just a "freak show attraction" for the masses.

Naef is a true photographic scholar and has the money to do a top-class job at whatever he collects.
 
Hidden Message of the Getty Article

Hidden Message of the Getty Article

To me, the hidden message of the article,
more important than anything that was actually written,

Is that the big collector / collection bucks are being spent on traditional photographic prints (with real lifetimes in hundreds of years),

NOT some photoshoped digital wonder seconds off the latest Epson or HP printer.

In my opinion the commercial value of traditional prints over digital prints has profound importance to the serous photographer who wants their work to have long term commercial value

1) to their immediate income
2) to their estates
3) to the photographic industry which will continue to provide these materials
4) in five years traditional print processes will become the "new digital" -- an art area little known except to the forward thinking experimentals who realize they can make substantal incomes with it in commercial combat with digital prints.

Stephen
 
*That* was your great revelation and intent in posting the original mesage??? I never saw that much written between the lines and I doubt too many other people would reach the same conclusion after reading the article... especially if they know anything about Weston Naef and the goals of the major art museums.

Wait 20 or 50 years and you'll find both ENG (Electronic News Gathering) and EFA (Electronic Fine Art -- a term I just made up) being collected by major museums just like "traditional" news/art images are being collected.

The big news is that a major museum is spending lots of money collecting FUNCTIONAL imagery in the same way they have historically been collecting ARTISTIC imagery.

Your traditional vs digital "hidden message" is nothing more than a timing issue. How about if we revisit this thread in a couple of decades and see if Naef (or his successor) snubs his nose at historically-significant photographic imagery just because it was collected/processed/printed digitally.
 
So the controversy is over whether or not prints should be 'doctored', eh? Does there exist a painting that wasn't? And museums love paintings. In other words, art is art. If the Getty's thrust is toward journalistic work, that's another story - just ask a few people who have at one time worked at the NY Times. And even they are sometimes known to crop or airbrush things out of photos.

As for this business of having to 'register' to get anything out of a newspaper's website, that's just another way of saying they want to know who you are, so they can hound you to subcribe, thus not needing the website. A number of papers are doing that nowadays. Of course, they will probably claim it's for copyright reasons.

I long lived in the Los Angeles area and never was fond of the LA Times - I used to figure that what they came out for told me how NOT to vote. But the paper was bought out some time ago by a Chicago paper, so whether or not that has influenced editorial content, I'm not sure. I never personally subscribed to the Times, but it was always in the faculty lounge at school.

The Getty Museum is quite an enterprise. Their new version, along the San Diego (405) Freeway (which is used to go to LAX, NOT to San Diego - that's I-5), is a real experience. The older museum in Malibu has been refurbished and I think it is being given over to ancient times art.
 
BrianShaw said:
*That* was your great revelation and intent in posting the original mesage??? I never saw that much written between the lines and I doubt too many other people would reach the same conclusion after reading the article... especially if they know anything about Weston Naef and the goals of the major art museums.

Wait 20 or 50 years and you'll find both ENG (Electronic News Gathering) and EFA (Electronic Fine Art -- a term I just made up) being collected by major museums just like "traditional" news/art images are being collected.
.
Click to expand...

maybe, but I don't think so.
no doubt ENG and EFA will be collected
people collect anything
including Pez dispensers, which supposedly is why Ebay was originally started

I think as the digital medium becomes ever more popular
traditional prints will only skyrocket in price over time

fine art photogs who want the most bucks
will stay with the traditional print mediums to get them

especially as the older medium starts outlasting today's ink jet prints often claimed 100 + year lifespans

of course, time will tell.

Stephen
 
No doubt some people will want to pay a premium for traditional silver/barite/platinum/etc prints but when I look at the auction prices of inkjet prints by renowned photographers then I don't see much difference in price. Inkjet prints go for similar prices as traditional prints. If you don't believe me, check out the prices at recent photography auctions at Sotheby's or Christie's.
 
CameraQuest said:
To me, the hidden message of the article,
more important than anything that was actually written,


Is that the big collector / collection bucks are being spent on traditional photographic prints (with real lifetimes in hundreds of years),
Click to expand...
Make that 100 years, what we use as paper is not as archival as the egyptian papyrus. Especialy when it's bleached.
CameraQuest said:
NOT some photoshoped digital wonder seconds off the latest Epson or HP printer.

In my opinion the commercial value of traditional prints over digital prints has profound importance to the serous photographer who wants their work to have long term commercial value

1) to their immediate income
2) to their estates
3) to the photographic industry which will continue to provide these materials
4) in five years traditional print processes will become the "new digital" -- an art area little known except to the forward thinking experimentals who realize they can make substantal incomes with it in commercial combat with digital prints.

Stephen
Click to expand...

Stephen, we're talking news photography here. The traditional print media face serious competition by online media and you yourself point to online media.

There a print is worth nothing! Try selling a print to the NY Times.

So much for point 1 outside of fine art photography.

The heirs, yes, if they are interested at all, they'll probably have everything scanned to show it around on their blogs 🙂.
My fathers and grandfathers prints up to the 60s are fine, my fathers slides from the 60s on aren't, projected to often you know.
My prints from the 80s and 90s are deteriorating, I thought I washed them properly but PE paper is not Baryt 🙁
My C-41 prints and negs are deteriorating damn fast! Especialy the Kodak negs are very brittle and I have to handle them with great care when I scan them. The prints are mostly a brown mush although they are in binders.
So I consider archival qualties proven for glas negatives and classic B/W negs and papers. Even the nitrocelulose films my father and grandfather used up to 1953 where fine, but they are highly flamable and are considered hazardous here so I turned them over to a local museum.
Guess what, they scanned them and put the negs in a bombproof and cooled shelter!

So for point 2), the stuff we have now is unproven at best, let's talk about it in 100 years.

The photographic industrie, like Agfa? Where do you get Kodachrome processed? Got any Ilford HP5 in 220 lately?

If you buy batches and test the batch to get exposure and development right you can get great results from Efke, Foma etc.pp. But you may be in for a bad surprise if you think Efke 25 from last week behaves like Efke 25 from last year. Been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt.

So the industrie is not as it was some 10 years ago, oh, by the way, how many film camera models does Nikon produce at the moment?
How many does Minolta or Konika?
See a trend there?

So to point 3) film makers will adapt to a niche market, less choice for more money probably mostly mail order.

So back to Getty, who equip their PJs with Canon Digital by the way, they collect prints because up to 2000 digital imaging was close to nonexistent in news photography.

Oh, and another thing.
On thursday our local 6 Days bicycle race will open, in 2001 we had the first digital PJs there, in 2002 I saw a guy with two leicas the last time shooting celebs. Since 2003 no film camera was used by Pjs, just me. And I'm not realy a PJ, I manage the press centers IT infrastructure. This year we have a 155MBit/s internet conection so the PJs can send their pictures out.

I shoot film, because I can and because I don't make a living with pictures. Those who have to bring food on the table with news shoot digital, faster, easyer and the media want it that way.

Fine art is different, there film will have its niche for a long time to come.
 
I understand what Stephen is saying about "purity of traditional photographic methods/materials" and "archival materials/processing" but come on Steve -- we're well into the 21st Century and things aren't changing... THEY'VE CHANGED. I don't like it either, but it's a fact. And yours and mine feelings about keeping to traditional photographic methods has absolutely nothing to do with the Times article or the Getty's new acquisitions.

Volker said (amongst many other things) said "So back to Getty, who equip their PJs with Canon Digital by the way, they collect prints because up to 2000 digital imaging was close to nonexistent in news photography." And guess what... it's the Metroplitain and virtually any other museum you care to mention that's using digital capture and digital storage. I didn't know about them equip their PJs with digital, but they are well known to be archiving with digital... very high quality digital. And they know as well as you and I know that if they want an archival print they can have it - whether the "neg" is silver-based, dye-based, or 1s-and-0s-based.

On the collector market there certainly are collectors who see additional value in archival prints and value traditional methods. Likewise there are artists who have the same values. That's great because I tend to agree, but my observation has been that this is an artistic, emotional and philosophical value more than a real cash-money value difference. And there are some images that just wouldn't be the same printed on an ink-jet printer vs. Platinum or silver or gum bichromate or ...

So back to the Getty, as someone else said... who ever said that these prints had one iota of archival value to them in the first place. First thing to remember is that these were functional photography. The image, in reality, only needed to last until the presses ran... and then it had no more value. Okay, but some of these images were indeed great images... some of them were even Pulitzer Prize winners. Surely that makes them worthy of being archived. So the newspaper printed them, made some notations on them and stuck them in a store room. That gave them enough of an archival edge that they survived until today. But there has been no mention of any 1000-year archival processing/materials in these original prints.

I'd be willing to bet that Naef's lab guys will take each one of these paper images and shoot a digital neg for long-term archival storage. In fact, I'll bet that he'll shoot (or is that 'photograph') both sides so he preserves both the image and the notations. I doubt that he will send them to the Getty conservation center and have them mumified in whatever that stuff is that they used on King Tut to make him last so long.
 
Socke said:
(snip)

There [media] a print is worth nothing! Try selling a print to the NY Times.

(snip)
Click to expand...

Actually, I'll bet that if you walked up to the editor of any newpaper with a really newsworthy photographic print they'd buy it.

And before the ink is dry on the check, they'd slap it on a scanner and make a mediocre-quality digital file that they would rush off to their "layout" department so they can publish a 75 lpi picture in the paper, or post a teeny-tiny lo-res image on their web site. They might even be nice and return the original print because all of this would be done before you made it back out the door.

What they, the news media, really prefer it to be emailed a cell phone snap!

Nobody wants today's news tomorrow morning like they did in the good old days.
 
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