handmade digital prints

[paulr]

"where is the enjoyment factor? Is it really there?"

Yeah, it is. So is the frustration factor. It's all more similar than I would have imagined.

I used to assume that working digital would feel sterile and would be an unrewarding experience, but that hasn't turned out to be the case. There are some differences, both good and bad: I miss the sense of alchemy, and of working with hundred year-old formulas. But I also enjoy the advantages: the more pleasant working conditions, the lack of toxicity, not fighting the clock as chemicals go bad, being able to hit 'save' and go eat a sandwich, taking a break at any time, never having to use spot tone, etc. etc.

And the most basic, most important challenge is the same as it ever was: deciding how best to express an image in physical form.

[Ron Stoecklein]

"You all make good points, but I ask, where is the enjoyment factor?
Is it really there?

Just curious."

Personally--I immensely enjoy sitting down watching my monitor and watching the image change as I use my "digital darkroom". If I only had my own drum scanner and Lightjet printer I'd enjoy it even more I think.

For now I have to do with an epson flatbed scanner and printer--but I believe at least for smaller prints --up to 13x19---the prints I turn out are better than prints I turned out in the last30 years before digital printing--maybe says something about the photographer--but none the less thats my thought on the subject.

[Keith Laban]

" the results are very satisfying and my point is that these digital prints are ironically far more "handmade" than any traditional process that i have used"

Agreed.

[darr]

I find I can control dodging and burning in the digital darkroom much better than I ever could under the traditional enlarger. I started out as a graphic artist and maybe that is why I prefer using PS. Just my 2 cents.

[adrian tyler]

i'm sorry, let's cut this hear, i'm off to shoot some polaroid!

[paulr]

"Computer prints are produced in a way that is not analogous to gelatin-silver prints. They can be appropriately compared to the way in which photographic illustrations are made for books; that is, both are ink-film prints produced with fine dots through the use of complex equipment."

that's possibly true, though i wonder what the significant differences are. i think of the work that someone like Richard Benson does when making the quadtone and tint and varnish separations for beautifully printed book. his hands aren't in contact with the final pages, but i think many aspects of the final product show evidence of his hands-on craftsmanship.

[adrian tyler]

richard benson is an artist, as was edward weston, it is really down to what your mental, social and emocional conditioning will allow you to appreciate.

[Paddy Quinn]

" I hope you find my analysis helpful."

well - it's a bit of a red herring. There is no real absolute dividing line as it appears you would like there to be.

For workers and artists coming from other traditions and practices many darkroom prints and processes are not exactly "handmade" by their criteria either. It's seen as a photo-mechanical process much more than a "hand-made" process.

I have an old friend who is a studio potter and artist with an international reputation. He is also a photographer (and the son and grandson of photographers). His apprenticepship as a potter was 10 years. He considers what he dsoes in the studio with clay to be hand-made. And although he makes equisite photographic prints, he doesn't see really the process as a "hand-made" one. In conversation about this he refers to it as "photo-mechanical". In your terms, he would regard what most processes use in the darkroom as using equipment and not tools and so they wouldn't fit your definition either. Possibly contact processes where the paper is hand coated and so on - but not the majority of darkroom and silver-gelatin work.

"Computer prints are produced in a way that is not analogous to gelatin-silver prints"

I would disagree. That aside, perhaps a much clearer analogy is the production of prints by many photograhphic artists who work in color.

The point that has already been made - for a good darkroom technician or craftsman, the ability to produce nearly identical prints is one thing that sets photography apart from most other art forms. And unless the photographer choses to print radically differently for each image, whenever I see a portfolio of images that make much of the "handmade-made" aspect of the work - where "each print is individual and unique" etc is often a selling point in an edition - the differences really are minimal and insiginificant

[paulr]

This is actually a discussion that's been going on for as long as photographers have wanted an equal footing with other artists. Much of pictorialism was rooted in photographers trying to prove that their work required as much skilled handiwork as oil paintings!

The whole debate sets up a curious conflict. On the one hand, one of photography's claims to uniqueness among art media is that it allows perfect multiples to be made mechanically. On the other hand, we have photographers going to great lengths (with their darkrooms or with their rhetoric) to prove that this isn't so. Yet these same photographers often boast about their techinical ability to make an edition of perfectly identical prints!

On another note: I believe that a lot of what gets considered hand work in printmaking is really quite separate from the printmaking. Especially with alternative processes. Much of the work that goes into platinum printing is the coating of the paper. But is this really part of printing? Most of the great platinum printers of the early 20th century went to the store and bought their paper, just like I do gelatin silver paper. They didn't start coating their own until the commercial products vanished (and most of them actually jumped ship and just went with the new product they COULD buy at the store). I think you can argue that coating the paper is a related but separate craft--you're manufacturing your printing materials. Of course this is hard. Making your own gelatin silver paper paper would be hard too ... but I've never had to do it because it's still at the store. Same with coated inkjet paper. So for me, printmaking has had nothing to to do with the labor intensive manufacturing of my own materials.

Similarly, I've been working on a difficult and labor-intensive process to hand varnish my inkjet prints. This is more hand work than I ever had to do on my silver prints. But I also think it's separate from the printmaking process itself. Related ... in that it influences the final look of the prints, and I need to compensate for the coating well ahead of applying it ... but it's still not really part of printmaking.

[Paddy Quinn]

"The amount of time you have spent altering what your camera recorded is beside the point; and, in fact, extensive time spent at a task might be more a reflection of a photographer's newness to the camera and to Photoshop than to anything else. (I'm not saying that this newness is the case in your situation.) I hope you find my analysis helpful."

I'd add that this is one of the earliest arguments made against photography in general - against it being a true art (one still made in some quarters today). That the focus of creative energy is in the secondary printing process and not into the initial taking of the photograph - not in the creation of the original matrix. Going back to your "hand-made" argument, many artists have said (and some still say) that photography lacks the true involvment of hand and eye that other arts require.