The art in wet plates is not in the flaws, not at all. Is in how clean your plate and silver bath are, how carefully you pour the collodion and sink the plate in the silver, how carefully you take it out, how good your exposure is, how gentle you develop, wash and later varnish the plate. When you do all that, there are hardly any flaws. Therein lies the artistry.
Art is way more than good technique, but good technique never hurts.
Tin Can
Nicely put, Randy.Originally Posted by Randy Moe
Art and craft (good technique) don't always go together, often they do, but not always. In my day job I am a craftsman, not an artist.
I do a lot of solarization work, where there is no real rules or expectations.... I do throw out all the images with flow marks as I know I can do these types of prints without process error.
I would argue that what you are describing is the craft of wetplate, being able to produce a technically clean plate. The art is in the image itself.
~Joe
The photograph and the thing being photographed are not the same thing.
Agree that the art is in the image but if the flaws are so much that they detract from the image or even become the art, then isn't the craftsmanship as important as the image?
I really don't understand how people like flaws in anything but they do, for example in some of my salt printing it seems people like to see brush strokes around the edges that actually break the image up (they say that is cool looking) than for everything to be nice and evenly covering the paper
"WOW! Now thats a big camera. By the way, how many megapixels is that thing?"
You can also take a technically perfect image that looks like crap because it's boring. Sometimes the beauty is in the intrigue the image evokes. A technically perfect image doesn't make you consider the medium, especially when you know nothing about the process, but one with flaws notifies you that this isn't just an ink jet digital image, it makes you wonder about how it was made, and let's you know this isn't an ordinary image.
In the sense that it surprises you when people post flawed images, it surprised me when people post boring images that look technically perfect, but have no soul.
I'm certainly guilty of that, I'm working to improve on that front, but it's something to consider.
No.
Ruther has been a shameless self-promoter seeking fame and fortune by being "bigger" not better. Just like the portrait photographer who did highly mediocre WP portraits of Hollywood stars at Sundance last year for Esquire (they sucked) the magazines and NYT will gush all over their bulls$it to the exclusion of really talented WP artists that actually mastered their craft.
Emphasizing the flaws and imperfections of WP is just a marketing game, an excuse, laziness. It's like the hipsters who think they deserve a medal for shooting a roll of 35mm film and then they post photos with all the dust and hairs from the scanning process as if it gives them authenticity when we all know they are just slobs.
At least Peter Lik cleans his crap up. Be brave enough to call a turd a turd.
If you feel otherwise then OK, I have a Starn Twins piece to sell you for $10 million.
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