LensWork: repro superior to original print

[Brian Ellis]

I read Brooks Atkinson's essay. I think it's clear that he meant the Bullock print he made was technically superior, not aesthetically. As I recall he had a couple measurements that formed the basis for his statement, one I think was dMax, I forget what the other one was. So as I recall he had at least a personal standard for his statement.

Unfortunately I can't double check my recollection because I threw this issue of LensWork away. I thought the portfolios were the most uninteresting I've seen in over ten years of subscribing to LensWork. Am I the only one getting tired of these portfolios of inhabitants of exotic countries or people in some sort of oddball occupation or location? I don't mean to demean the photographers who make these photographs, they're excellent work, it's just that every issue of LensWork seems to contain one or more portfolios of this type. Or maybe I'm just getting bored with the magazine after reading it religiously for so many years but lately it's just seemed to be the same ole same ole every issue.

[tim atherton]

Pretty much Brian - been that way for a while now

[Doug Howk]

Any time you convert an image from one media to another, you lose information. Converting from negative to print is most obvious. If one digitizes a negative rather than the print, the resulting file could have more information; but then you would have lost the photographer's efforts in the darkroom.

Agree with Brian E. above, the magazine is becoming more dispensable.

[Marko]

And personally I think it's one of the best LensWork issues in some time for both the articles and portfolios. LensWork keeps showing it's not about equipment, but the photographer. It's seen in the range of equipment each of the photographers uses to capture and produce their images. To me, it simply blows the rest of the magazines off the magazine racks. Ok, I'm biased, but aren't we all?

If the image turned you on - everything else is superfluous.

Aparently, the folks over at apug strongly disagree - there are 18 screens full of indignant rants about Lenswork betraying the holy cause and - gasp! - introducing digital at the same level as analog in the magazine! To them, the equipment is obviously sufficiently more important than the photographer or even the photograph itself that they are swearing to cancel their subsciptions to Lenswork because of it.

To be fair, there are a couple of rational souls who beg to differ and, to be even more fair, they have not been banned or even deleted yet. Which is a tremendous change in attitude. Tremendous enough, when I stop to think about it, that it may cause mass cancelation of subscriptions to apug itself...

[Marko]

Any time you convert an image from one media to another, you lose information. Converting from negative to print is most obvious. If one digitizes a negative rather than the print, the resulting file could have more information; but then you would have lost the photographer's efforts in the darkroom.

True, but then you introduce photographer's efforts in Photoshop. Which, if done properly, amounts to the same thing - the artist's touch.

[tim atherton]

BTW, this is nothing new at all.

Richard Benson has often said that the plates they produce via photo offset lithography for the likes of the Gilman Paper Company book with his precise and sophisticated printing at times "looked better" than some of the originals. Lee Friedlander has said the same, comparing the "original" silver gelatin prints with the plates in some of the books Benson produced for him, such as Factory Valleys.

Bearing in mind that a.) "looked better" was subjective and in such cases of "looking better" they also sometimes look b.) quite different from the originals

(for the Gilman Paper Company book, they used different papers and different inks for almost every plate - and it has about 480pp and covers photographs from across the whole history of photography)

[Turner Reich]

What ever floats your boat; This is just another approach to promote the magazine.

[Wayne Lambert]

As I read through the article I kept thinking "but what if the photographer didn't want his blacks that black?" Obviously to him the lithographic reproduction would not be as good as his original. I agree with Kirk: that would have been for Wynn Bullock to decide. Personally, in these days of sufficiently black blacks in both ink-jet and traditional prints, I tend to judge print quality more by whose got the most gradation in the whites rather than by whose got the blackest blacks. Re Brooks' other criterion for print quality, sharpness. Is he saying a reproduction is sharper than a contact print? And re his statement on p. 13: I for one wouldn't find it ridiculous at all to ask the lithographer "to hold back ink" so as not to make the black in the reproduction darker than in my platinum/palladium print. The print would not have left my darkroom if it did not have the black I wanted. And finally, I have to put my faith in the supremacy of the print that the photographer actually held in his hand. I wish Brooks had addressed this issue in more detail and how the collector might view all this.

[reellis67]

True, but then you introduce photographer's efforts in Photoshop. Which, if done properly, amounts to the same thing - the artist's touch.

Not entirely true, at least for everyone. The artists touch as Doug put it make the print worth having for me - the end product was made by the artist themselves rather than by some machine. I think that a magazine is a very appropriate use of mechanically produced prints, but I would never pay more than ten or twelve bucks for a machine-made print regardless of how moving it was. Someone may have created the image after hours of hard work at the computer, and their touch is certainly there in that electronic work, but the printout of that effort is just a mechanical reproduction of that effort regardless of how technically perfect it is.

Before anyone feels the need to play the Luddite card, obviously I recognize that not everyone feels the way I do, and I applaud them for making that decision as long as they didn't blindly adopt it from someone else, but for me personally, without the direct hand of the artist in creation of the object itself, all you have is mass produced identical copies no matter how moving the original might be...

- R

[tim atherton]

Not entirely true, at least for everyone. The artists touch as Doug put it make the print worth having for me - the end product was made by the artist themselves rather than by some machine. I think that a magazine is a very appropriate use of mechanically produced prints, but I would never pay more than ten or twelve bucks for a machine-made print regardless of how moving it was. Someone may have created the image after hours of hard work at the computer, and their touch is certainly there in that electronic work, but the printout of that effort is just a mechanical reproduction of that effort regardless of how technically perfect it is.

Before anyone feels the need to play the Luddite card, obviously I recognize that not everyone feels the way I do, and I applaud them for making that decision as long as they didn't blindly adopt it from someone else, but for me personally, without the direct hand of the artist in creation of the object itself, all you have is mass produced identical copies no matter how moving the original might be...

- R

You just excluded a lot of artists who didn't or don't print their own work themselves for one thing.

And aside from contact prints, most photographs are mechanical (essentially machine made) reproductions...