More on print quality, techniques and esthetics

[Kirk Gittings]

"willing suspension of misbelief"

Never having really studied literature, I found that a wonderfully convoluted turn on a familiar phrase, a kind of twisted double negative that might have come from a certain Texas politician we all know.

Anyway I agree with you about Witkin, I have known him since he was in graduate school and for many years I was undecided as to whether he was simply very clever at playing the art game or a twisted genius. Twenty + years later he is still at it with a kind of monkish focus. A friend of mine designed his new studio and at any given time it is full of all these bizarre props like a Heironymous Bosch painting. It is clearly not a game for him but his life's passion and a genuine reflection of whatever his inner demons are. His prints are almost hypnotic in their complexity and richness with these unnerving titles. Belatedly, I think he is the real thing.

[Mark S. Fields]

I recently came across Meriel's work and I was immediatly taken by them. Of course fairly soon after seeing them I realized how much he had done in the printing process to achieve their dramatic effects. Like all of the others who have posted, my mind immediately reviwed how I felt about his at times almost brutal dodging, burning etc...: certainly if he was after that effect on purpose, and he had to have been, one issue is whether he could have been more elegant and subtle ( correct?) in how he administered his hand. I do not feel threatened by what he has done. If any one of us wants to use a different way of "working" a photograph, we have that right.
Ordinarily I would admire a more subtle/invisable approach to printing, even when attempting something dramatic. Whether what he did was on purpose or whether he did it out of the inability to do it more elegantly... does it really matter.?
Speaking of Witkin, although his photographs are effective and he might very well be a genius, when it comes from deviating from elegant printing, his work is as far removed from the "fine print" as one can get. After he scratches the negatives and prints with tissue paper over the enlarging lens, they make Meriels the equivilent of refinement. How anyone would think Witkins prints are the opposite of Meriels I can't fathom. They ARE different of course, but they are both on the side of great maniputation of the negative, and very few would think that elegant printing
is there primariy goal. Altering in an almost destrutive way the filmed image is not what one things of when one thinks of an elegant print. I Like the work of both of them alot because they at least have a viewpoint, unlike so amy of those photographers who keep returning to those boring Arizona and Utah caverns, who are capable of incredibly beautiful prints that have no human meaning.
Of course in a perfect world, we'd have a photographer who produces images with great emotional content, intellectutally challanging and are gorgeously printed. I better get to work as I have alot to do.

[robert_4927]

Just think....what if?....What if the artist intention was to provoke emotion from his peers? Looks to me like he's doing a pretty damn good job......lol