How good are contact prints in reality?

[duff photographer]

Thanks everyone for your input and discussion - it has been informative.

I now know I'm on the right track - contact printing in the range of 5x7 to 8x10, and possibly looking at alternative printing such as carbon printing (which I had an interest in a while ago but now should revisit) but that's a digression.

Thanks all!

Duff

[Vaughn]

In my opinion, the question is does one want tons of detail...

I'll stick with "need" only because the my needs are driven by what I want the final print to look like, and the amount of detail is just one of the factors I need to determine to arrive at that final print. But I think we are on the same page.

Being very near-sighted, I can see detail in prints most cannot without aid. I can be seen in galleries with my nose 4 inches from the glass!

DP -- carbon printing is a blast, and a challenge.

[Alan Gales]

Being very near-sighted, I can see detail in prints most cannot without aid. I can be seen in galleries with my nose 4 inches from the glass!

"Sharp at normal viewing distances" is fine for billboards. I'm with you though, Vaughn. I put my nose up to the print!

[Drew Wiley]

Detail, lack of detail - both are tools you can employ to your own ends. Vermeer deliberately painted things with "flawed" edges analogous to how less than perfect human vision actually sees things. Of course, you need to put you nose right up to these little painting to appreciate this fact! So we could talk about nuance and microtonality in a photographic print, and not just quantity of detail, and arrive at the same conclusion .... namely, if it is there, people will inevitably or eventually
approach the print to enjoy that. If it ain't there, then you might as well sub out the work to the billboard company. I never did believe in that "normal viewing distance" nonsense.

[Nitesail]

Plenty of food for thought here. Let me add a couple of additional things that may be relevant.

Contact printing restricts your choice of final size. That may sound like a downside to our 'choice is good' trained ears, but it liberated my own work. Since I was no longer thinking about what size the image would be when printed, which detail needed to be opened up etc. - 'seeing' became very, very direct. If it worked on the the ground glass, it was worth doing, otherwise, I moved on.

I also became more productive because I was no longer spending huge amounts of time chasing stuff in the darkroom - the more 'choice' in my enlarging days made me less productive. When enlarging, I would endlessly play the 'will cropping make this better?' and later I would play the 'will a different size make this better?' and other kinds of games. All of which kept me from being out making more work. Shifting to contact printing, things became much more direct for me - a failure when printing just served to inform me that my 'seeing' should have been better or taught me something I needed to learn, and I moved on.

Finally, all this helped to refine my own visual concerns to myself. A commitment to contact printing is unforgiving - if it doesn't work, you are forced to acknowledge that your 'seeing' failed you - you cannot hide behind an 'I'll make lemonade out of this later' attitude. The 'constraints' actually served to free me from myself - I know that sounds like a cheap Zen saying, a 'Yoda said that but he forgot his backward talking thing' kind of thing - but having experienced it, it was pretty powerful.

Cheers, DJ

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