After over 35 years in LF and 20 teaching, I have made or seen pretty much every mistake in the book and learned to look closely for flaws and their sources. Generally I have learned not to critique anyone's work unless they ask me too. It is only then that they will be receptive to constructive criticism. But over the years I have also been in circumstances where I saw some obvious processing or printing flaws in the work of someone famous and debated with myself whether I should say something. In the ignorance of youth I did comment a couple of times and got very defensive angry responces and put downs except for Elliot Erwit in about 1971 who exclaimed with a smile "you caught me". I was recently in someone's home who had some their "famous" work on the wall and one of the prints showed some faint repeated bands in the midtones on one side of the print (silver) that I could only guess was an internal refection off the bellows pleats. To me it was obvious but he couldn't see it at all. I backed out of the awkward situation by saying that without my reading glasses I couldn't be sure, though I wasn't sure of the cause, but was sure there was a problem.
This evening I was surfing the web and went to a site of a close aquaintance who's lead image showed obvious uneven processing flaws in an even grey sky at the upper corners of a scanned print. I know the signs well. I have seen it in my work occsionally and student work commonly. This person in particular is kind of an arrogant putz, thinks they are a technical guru, does not take criticism well and is a bit of a narcisist. So I resisted the temptation to email a comment, but I really wanted to and may yet. However ther would probably be a price to pay down the line a ways.
How have some of you handled this?
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