The Magic Ink & Disposable Culture

[Ed K.]

Warning - a certain tone of Luddite exists here, and this is more about art than professional photography, or is it?

Progress has its ups and downs. So we find out that there is no 100 year CDROM, and no real 200 year inkjet print. No checks returned from the bank, no spare parts after 7 years.

Kodak built a household name in film, paper and reprographic supplies. This year, no longer will Kodak make the papers that turned out to be a sort of magic ink capable of outlasting so many hard disks, CDROMS, and computer systems to read them; a medium capable of communication with no special equipment required for the viewer. There is a big market for ink and paper, but will it always sell well without the magic, the working artists making great images that inspire others to at least put a battery in their digiwatzit?

After some years, the only good record of today's information age may be its waste matter. What will tell the story as we intended it to be told? Who will pass the moments of our experience on to the future?

After all the hype, and all the money spent, it turns out that a good fiber black and white print is still likely to survive, especially the carefully prepared Pt, or even the well done toned print. Alas, of my Epson prints have faded or changed a bit so far, even those Ultra ink ones. The quad prints turned purple. Yes, I do live in Los Angeles. The inkjets were sold to me as a sort of "virtual magic ink". That word ought to be banned! The hulks of their now unloved and inkless chassis will rest broken in a dump, again perhaps the most "permanent" sort of archive today. I wonder what will be thought of them when discovered some day. Okay, the ink was magic. The prints did fade after the secret viewing time elapsed, and they did so in better than the advertised specification of 200+ years!

Fiber silver prints I did in junior high school still look great, and well, the RC ones from that same time are going already. At the time, few people used the word "archival" much, although the word "permanence" was used.

Does anyone feel a bit criminal by selling someone an inkjet, or an RC color print that will fade in 15-20 years? Or is it more that at least some more immediate and less expensive option gives them joy for at least a few years? Well, perhaps there are some who might like the reprint dollars of a print that fades at exactly one year. How can anyone trust the current claims for print life?

It is said that all kinds of very long lasting images can be made, if one has enough money and time. Platinum photogravure plates, ceramic photos, and others offer long life. The ancients used stone, which worked remarkably well in spite of current acid rains and earthquakes. What do you find as the best way to go today?

There is the question of how long is long enough. For me, I hope that some images make it 200-300 years. Long enough for someone to have a moment musing over those funny things we did, or how we dressed, or even how many fingers we had or the odd shape of our non-optimized heads. For more gifted photographers, I wonder... I can't express what marvelous fun I get looking at old photographs or even paintings. Some of the most humble ones are the best - the ones that documented a place in a time.

This is a time that allows the LF photographer to produce some very amazing work about this century, or at least the turn of it. Sure, in 50 years, this will all be figured out, however where the print from LF won't have a little chip in it that erases it if there aren't enough credits in the owner's account, who knows if the same will be true of the solution that fixes the fading print, crashing hard drive or self-erasing CDROM.

When you work in LF, do you think of an end result suitable only for the immediate time frame, or do you find yourself wondering about communicating to others living far into the future? What sorts of subjects would you consider important to pass along through photography, using the magic ink of the photograph to travel in time? Do you wonder if perhaps one day somebody may only find your 'rejects' instead of your best work? And which medium would you select today, assuming you might do the work yourself, to convey your images to the future?

How important are print life and relevance to future generations in your work?

[Bill_1856]

It turns out that silver and carbon based prints aren't lasting all that long, either. Even Paul Strand's platinums from 1916 are fading. Digital pigment printing is the hope of the future. I'm sure that it will be getting even better. Soon, I hope.

[William Mortensen]

Julia Margaret Cameron wrote in the 1860's that she washed her prints until she could no longer taste the fixer in the wash water. Many of her prints are still around. Hmmmm...

Personally, I create my photographs for posterity. I once tried making them for the contemporary art world, but they took out a cease-and-desist order.

[Mark_3632]

Here we go again

I share your sentiments, E

[Mark Woods]

The half life of any electronic media is 15 years. One has to move their data over within that time. I.e, 7 years. One must consider the technological migrations, i.e., migrate beta max to vhs for example. Anything electronic is volital. There is no way to archive images in the electronic environment. One must output to some stable physical environment. Film is archieveable, electronic is not -- unless you make a print. But of course that is a second generatiion.

MW

[paulr]

"Does anyone feel a bit criminal by selling someone an inkjet, or an RC color print that will fade in 15-20 years? "

I don't know .. does anyone feel criminal about selling a watercolor? An acrylic painting? A mixed media piece made from materials with completely unknown aging characteristics? Half the things I see in galleries and art museums are made from stuff that will change with time. Somewhere behind the scenes there may be a conxervator who's losing sleep over it, but not anyone else.

Most things in this world change, discolor, fade. Look in the mirror: you're not archival, and neither am I. Nor are the people we sell the work to. It's really a silly obsession, unless your work is actually made for archival purposes.

Remember that standards of archival permanence have to do with things changing visibly ... not with them spontaneously combusting or leaving the planet. None of those Rennaissance oil paintings you've seen in museums look anything like what they did when they were new. But they're still here, and they still work their magic on us. Permanent, no ... beautiful, yes.

For what it's worth, Bill's point is a good one. A lot of the materials we've been sold on permanent aren't, at least not always, and not predictably so. And some of the new materials are among the best. Black and white carbon pigment ink appears to have amazing longevity ... better than silver in some circumstances. The best color inks do seem disappointing ... until you compare them to any of the traditional color processes. Then they start to look pretty stable.

[John Berry ( Roadkill )]

It is of no relevance to me. I shoot LF for my personal pleasure. The chance observe the world, and wait for that instant, when it presents something that moves me. I am still under the illusion that I can capture the emotion. I am able to make a pretty good reference to help me remember the event though. Others can look at it and say that's beautiful, and I'm thinking yea, you should have been there. After the looking, shooting, souping, and printing, if it was like mission impossible, and this print will self destruct in 10 seconds. I would still do it the same. It's the process, not the result or how long it last, that drives me to haul 50# of 8x10 around.

[William Mortensen]

NASA is a prime consumer and recreator of extremely outdated computer technology, as they need it to access their old data.

There is currently one form of computer storage expected to last 100+ years as a first generation copy: punch cards (aka IBM cards). All other forms must be periodically recopied. This is not an issue data-wise, as there is no loss of information. However, there is no original artfact of use.

RC color prints may last 50 years, carefully stored, RC silver b/w, perhaps 100 years. Fiber-based silver prints may last 200-300 years if properly processed and preserved. Inkjet/giclee prints have a "questionable" lifespan.

Given the state of contemporary post-modern fine art photography, this may be a good thing...

[Donald Qualls]

Ah, data migration. And what happens when you find you have so much data to migrate, that you'll spend the rest of your life doing only that, and never create anything new again?

Linseed oil, earth and metallic salt pigments, and natural lacquers and varnishes to protect them have done well -- a lot of paintings as old as five centuries still look great when the accumulation of centuries of lamp soot and industrial air pollution is removed. And there's still a living in applying those media to coarse woven cotton, at least for a few; a potentially heartening view, given what seems to be happening to analog photography.

When I make a picture, what do I think of? Usually the technical stuff -- exposure, focus, whether to process N, N-, or N+. Somewhat less often, the compositional elements; those get left to chance or instinct perhaps rather more than they should. Always how the scene, in natural color, will appear on panchromatic film as translated into either a scanned image or silver gelatin print; perhaps not frequently enough about how the content relates to life and humanity.

Yes, I'd like my images to last -- that's why I still record on film and, as much as I can, print in silver gelatin or similarly permanent alternate processes. If there comes a day when I can no longer afford photography, because the reduced demand has pushed the prices of materials out of reach by destroying the economies of scale, perhaps I'll once again take up brush, and knife, and palette, and my hands will smell, not of fixer, but of turpentine.

[John Kasaian]

I have a cardboard box full of prints from the teens, twenties and thirties that were stored under horrible conditions and the prints still look great--most are silver with a few palladium and all are mounted(with what materials I have no idea) while color wedding photographs from the 60's have turned orange and the inkjets I have from two years ago are looking rather shabby. The Dead Sea scrolls are still readable but some of my books printed in the 20's are turning into dust

Now this may not be a bad thing, but it certainly isn't a good thing. Do I really want my photographs to be immortal? I'm not so sure but I'd like them to outlast me at least. Or I think I do...but I don't really know why.

Its seems like your problem, E., is that you've fallen for the Siren's song of Technology and the marketing thereof. The temptation of immortality (for your images, anyway) isn't a very hard sell. Thats why people freeze themselves, I suppose. It works pretty good for pizza anyway but you can eat pizza. I don't think Uncle Floyd or Aunt Elvira would be as palatable 50 or 100 so years down the road but then neither would a Red Baron or Tombstone.

Maybe our civilization is doomed to be remembered by bits and pieces like the Minoans or Etruscans, I don't know. Blogs have replaced diaries and digital fonts have replaced penmanship.
Even the plastic trash that we'd been told back in High School that dosen't decompose and will fill our landfills to capacity seems to me to rot away quite nicely as witnessed by the dashboard of my 1979 Mercedes 240D.

Getting back to your issue of mistakenly investing in planned obsolesence---I think that it says a lot for Large Format Photography that a lot of us are using stuff that should by all rights be sitting in a museum somewhere and even stranger that there are craftsmen like Canham and Deardorff and others building more LF cameras out of dead men's furniture to meet an apparent demand for a technology that hasn't changed much since the early industrial revolution, back before factories even considered the idea of planned obsolesence.

As Bart Simpson would say, "Don't have a cow, man."

Get yourself a box of B&W panchro and another box of graded FB and go out and play---then go home to a room where you can turn off all the lights and play some more. If you have a basic LF kit then you've got all the "weapons of art" you need in your arsenal.
My 2-cents.