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Thread: report from Chicago

  1. #11

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    report from Chicago

    What this forum needs is yet more pompous pronouncements from the self-appointed "professors" of large format photography.

  2. #12
    Old School Wayne
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    report from Chicago

    Kirk, are you sure you are the right person to be representing all of us on the Freestyle Advisory Board? This post is a childish and unprovoked attempt to stir things up between LF photographers and fauxtographers. Its pretty obvious you are taking great pleasure in dismissing , even ridiculing, opposing viewpoints.

  3. #13

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    report from Chicago

    "Are you able to make black and white ink jet prints which rival your wet chemistry prints."

    Since Kirk hasn't answered I'll answer for him. : - )

    With both processes it's the person doing the printing that's by far the most important ingredient and that always seems to get lost in these discussions.

    But having spent a lot of time making black and white prints both in a darkroom and digitally, in my mind there's no question that printing digitally carries the potential for most people to make better prints than they could ever have made in the darkroom. Whether that potential is realized or not depends on their inherent talent and on how much time and effort they're willing to devote to learning the process and making each print.

    So I would rephrase the question as follows: "do you think you can make wet chemistry prints that rival your black and white ink jet prints?" My answer would be "it depends." I think an exceptionally talented darkroom printer (somebody like John Sexton) will make great prints regardless of the method used. But I think the vast majority of silver printers making enlargements will be able to make black and white ink jet prints that are consistently superior to their darkroom prints, if (big "if") they enjoy the process and are willing to spend the very large amounts of time and effort needed to learn how to do it.

    Despite that belief I certainly don't think everyone should switch to digital printing. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons for making black and white prints in a darkroom. My problem comes with people who have little or no personal expeience making digital prints but who nevertheless claim that digital printing is an inherently inferior process. To those persons I'd say "try it, you might like it" (or if you don't want to try it, at least withhold judgement until you've seen a lot of digital prints made by a lot of very talented people).
    Brian Ellis
    Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
    a mile away and you'll have their shoes.

  4. #14

    report from Chicago

    Food for Thought as I try to verbalize what I feel re digital/analog process. ( I posted this in a similar forum at apug..

    For those who are not aware, there are traditional concert grand pianos that will record an actual performance and then spit it back out pretty much the way you played it. Now, would you rather sit in a room and listen to a "More Perfect" performance by Van Cliburn that is spit out by the piano from a previous recording ---OR--- would you rather be there in the room with Cliburn playing LIVE albeit a less perfect rendition. The latter is DYNAMIC and will be different every time. It has a pulse... it has energy... it has LIFE... and most importantly it is UNIQUE! The recording is static. It will be EXACTLY the same every time you hear it! Kinda like the twilight zone where the guy is on a toy train that goes round and round in circles stopping at the same place.

  5. #15

    report from Chicago

    Here's my opinion. I work as a photographer, teacher (at a small private art college, and as a assistant in the prints dept at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). At the museum inkjet prints are not considered archival and all recent evidence we have is that forty years is about the most we can expect. At best. Inkjet prints are NOT preferred or bought unless that is the sole medium the artist works in or if it is a piece that is important for other reasons. A similar situation happened a decade or so ago, when some Richard Misrach c-prints started to color shift. He produced new prints (on his own accord, with no prompting from us) on more stable color paper. One of my colleagues had an interesting comment about inkjets, "If Leonardo couldn't do it with ink on paper, what makes you think Epson can?" In my job as teacher, I see students abandoning the wet darkroom in droves. It's easier and cleaner to work in digital. It's easier to produce a nice print digitally than it is to spend hours in a b@w darkroom learning to print. Not to diminish at all, the incredibly hard work it takes to produce a FINE print digitally. In all the different arenas I work in, I see a wide variety of prints. Traditional black and white, color, inkjet, platinum. I haven't seen inkjets yet that have the dimensionality and tonality of conventional prints. They certainly can mimic the sharpness and color on traditional prints, but always end up looking like a photocopy of a really nice silver or color or platinum print. That being said, I love that people who don't have access to darkrooms, finally have a way of producing work. I firmly believe that is to better to produce things digitally than not produce at all. And soon the paradigm will shift, we will move from spraying ink on paper to some other method and that will be nicer or have more dimensionality. Then we can talk about how inferior IT is to silver, platinum and inkjets.

    good day!

  6. #16

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    report from Chicago

    Not being a Professional, I'm certainly out of my league here but really, does it matter what museums want to collect" Or what galleries want to sell? If I want to share my photographs with others, is it significant that they'll fade away in twenty years? Perhaps, but only if money is the issue---or historical record. If a museum or collector pays the big $$$ for a print it is reasonable that they intend to have it around for exhibition or as an investment for 100 years or so. It has been proven in practice that prints from a wet dark room can hold out in the long run. New technology is speculative. Does it matter to me that a viewer appreciate what I do in the dark room? No, not really but I enjoy it---not because of the control (after a night of printing in the Barbie darkroom the phrase that comes to mind is "Out of Control") but because I feel I've truly made the print from start to finish (critics can say I didn't make the film or paper, but I'm headed there---a 8x10 glass plate holder is on the way from cyberspace to join my 5x7s, and I'll someday start coating my own paper when I can manage pt/pd in my budget) If I ever want to sell a print, is it reasonable to expect that I can cover the cost of my labor in producing it? I hope so if I want to stay solvent. I'll wager that it takes more time to print in the wet dark room than to press a print button, so at a very basic level, is a darkroom print more costly than an inkjet? Is a carved stone statue more cosatly than a resin cast one? Is an illuminated manuscript more costly than a paperback? Passion and craftsmanshipp aside, If you apply a like value to the content of the finished works ( hey, an intesting ink jet is better than a bad photo, right?) then you've got your answer. The question then is, will the public buy it? My 2-cents.
    "I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White

  7. #17

    report from Chicago

    Is it me, or was Kirk simply making an observation? I didn't interpret his post as a childish and unprovoked attempt to ridicule those who prefer wet chemistry prints. I found his comments to be an interesting and highly relevant source of information about this important issue.

    As Brian pointed out, it's the skill of the printer, more than the medium itself, that is the critical issue in print quality. I've never set foot in a wet darkroom and thus can't compare my own chemical prints to my inkjet prints. I have seen side-by-side comparisons of color landscape (not B&W) prints at galleries and high-end art fairs and have found inkjet prints to be at least as good as traditional darkroom prints, while Lightjet/Chromira prints are even better. I have also been in low-end galleries where the inkjet prints were awful.

    I can understand how traditional darkroom printers believe their finished products to be superior because of the work and skill that is required in this process. However, I wonder if these individuals appreciate that the amount of work and skill required to achieve an optimal inkjet print is also extensive? Most art buyers don't purchase a print out of reverence for the method by which it was created. This is where I think Bobby's grand piano analogy fails. Buying a print is not like sitting in a room listening to a pianist (or a recording of the pianist). It is like buying a CD of the recording - what's important to most buyers at this stage is the quality of the finished product, not the method by which it was created.

    One last point - can someone point out the practical advantage of a print that lasts 500 as opposed to 150 years?

  8. #18

    report from Chicago

    Thank you Samuel! It is good to read the opinion of someone who actually works at a museum as opposed to the sales clerk at the Calumet counter.

  9. #19

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    Mar 2005
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    184

    report from Chicago

    Kirk was not expressing an opinion, or a preference. His observation was that from the perspective of the gallerists, buyers and curators he spoke with, any preference or bias about the print medium has become a non-issue. Not that they favor one process. Or have abandoned another...they are doing what they always have. Showing, collecting and buying photographs.

    His point about the argument being dead was specific to those who assert that they won't use inkjet because the art world won't buy it. There are plenty of reasons for and against... but that particular one seems to have been refuted.

  10. #20

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    Jul 2005
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    953

    report from Chicago

    I take a really simplistic view on this topic.

    A Photograph is produced by projecting light on to paper (or other medium) and then developing.

    A Digital Print (in the context of this discussion) is produced by a computer spraying a programmed array of ink droplets onto a piece of paper(or other medium). The output is not a Photograph.

    Logically, a Digital Print can never be a "Photograph" since its production does not include the light element of the word Photograph. Whether it the image was captured in camera or not is irrelevant since the finished print is NOT a photograph, it is a Digital Print.

    I challenge you all to give a logical and reasoned explanation of why you think digital printing has anything to do with Photography.

    Personally, I think there are a lot of very confused people out there who can't tell the difference between the two or more probably are trying to convince themselves that the two are the same thing.

    Whether a digital print or a photograph produces a better result is a highly subjective opinion. One small observation I have made is that you rarely hear people on digital print forums discussing whether digital prints are better than photographs. I wonder why?

    If I'm not mistaken, the purpose of this forum is to discuss Large Format Photography.

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