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Toyon
25-Jan-2009, 10:17
I just went to a photography exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. They had a print by Margaret Bourke-White in which she had experimented with a new technique. She "projected" an image onto a 16x20 sheet of film, then contact printed it. According to the description, this created a more "rounded" 3-dimensional look to the work than working with a negative and an enlarger. Does anyone know how she developed and refined this technique? It sounds strange that projecting a film positive onto negative film to create a paper positive would create different results than projecting a film negative onto a paper positive.

Gene McCluney
25-Jan-2009, 10:25
I am not familiar with her work in this area, but I can comment. The act of projecting a small image onto a large sheet of film to make an internegative introduces another lens into the chain, and this projection lens can introduce distortions, softness (lack of sharpness) and other things that may be what she is talking about.

John Cahill
25-Jan-2009, 13:02
The 16x20 negative may have allowed her to contact print on papers unsuitable for enlarging purposes?????

George W.
25-Jan-2009, 13:15
is there a link to these images?

I could imagine some unsharp masking during contact printing;
it is difficult to make an educated guess when one has not
seen the pictures.

Bill_1856
25-Jan-2009, 17:06
It was a common proceedure to get large negatives for contact printing.
Edward Weston enlarged his Graflex negatives by copying them with his 8x10 camera. The famous Paul Strand images of 1916 were shot with a hand camera (6x9?) and then contact printed onto Platinum after enlarged negatives were made by Projection.