If the negative is the score and the print the performance....

[Michael Alpert]

Photographers perform when they show work in a gallery or publish images in a book, brochure, periodical, or online. Everything else is composition. Film processing, proofing, final printing--it's all done in private and it's all composition. The musical analogy says almost nothing while seeming to say something (no one knows exactly what).

The question about master printers is a separate one. Many photographers are really terrible printers. For reasons that I will never understand, many photographers cannot even approximate what is needed for a given negative. They need a printer to help them--or a teacher to help them. Other photographers who are good printers cannot manage very large prints. They need master printers to realize such prints. I am sure there are many other circumstances where hiring a master printer is an excellent idea.

[Bill Burk]

For me, a photographer who prints his/her own work is like a singer-songwriter. The photographer who does the work but is not so talented as to be sought by museums, is like the singer at a local festival... when you look at the prints, for a moment, that can be the most beautiful art you see.

[ROL]

Photographers perform when they show work in a gallery or publish images in a book, brochure, periodical, or online. Everything else is composition. Film processing, proofing, final printing--it's all done in private and it's all composition. The musical analogy says almost nothing while seeming to say something (no one knows exactly what).

If you mean to say most photographers, you may be right. Right enough about the mostly technical aspects of photography, but if your intention was to indicate photography in general, or photography as it should be or photographers in general, I couldn't disagree more. I have no idea whether you print your own work or are any good at it, but I take strong exception to that broadside. In fact, you're dead wrong. Performance may be based on composition, but it is not composition. It is expression.

Making a fully expressed finished or fine art print that matches expectation or visualization is a performance. Whether the performance itself is seen by others is immaterial. One is still performing. I used to explain the process to the unwashed as a dance with light under the enlarger. I didn't think of that description myself. It was ascribed to me many, many years ago by those who observed me making prints – somewhat to my embarrassment at the time. I am physically exhausted, and increasingly injured as I age, after a session of making murals in the darkroom.

The properly realized fine art print can itself dance under balanced spot lighting, or lie languid under fluorescent ceiling light, or sing at the nexus of concept, great light, composition, tonality and contrast. The printer breathes life into the print given the matrix of the negative. The print's the thing.

I don't know what "photographers" are selling if they're not making their own prints (...and I don't mean machine printed) – I suppose images. The fine art print is fully realized performance of a physical manifestation of an image by a photographer. Frankly, I can't imagine showing work I hadn't printed. No one yet has ever even asked me for a fine art negative or image. Maybe I'm from another era, where people took pride in their work. I only wish I knew which era that was.

The musical analogy fits well enough for me, but then I make my own pictures. Sure, there are many grays of perception between the black and white extremes of any literal concept, as expressed in various posts. Then again, maybe that's also what Adams intended.

[neil poulsen]

Photographers probably think that printing a negative themselves offers the best chance of producing a photo that's true to their original intent, when they exposed the negative. (They're probably right.) Even in music, where eventually someone different from the composer must conduct the music if it's to live on, there's something sacred about trying to remain true to the composer's original intent. So, perhaps there's a rational reason for photographers to believe that they themselves are best fit to print their own work.

Perhaps for this reason, Adams sought to remind us that a negative can be interpreted in different ways. Do we really need to remain true to that original intent? Moonrise may be a good example. It can be argued that Adam's original intent was to print the sky lighter than that in more recent versions. But by printing the sky much darker, I believe, and I think that Adams believed, the print became better.

Of course, it was still Adams printing his own negative. But who's to say that, for a given negative, someone other than the photographer might not do a better job?

[ROL]

All of what you said seems to perfectly address the Adams' maxim, Neal. In fact, that was part and parcel of the setting up the Center for Creative Photography, for the study and interpretation of his negatives after his passing.

[Drew Wiley]

There are a handful of hired guns in the printmaking business who manage to work for a limited clientele who they communicate we;; with, and can somehow read
their minds and somehow come up with prints to their liking. This has long been the case with difficult color processes like dye transfer, quad carbron, and carbro, which take a lot of time and skill. But I'm personally one of those person who neither wants to print other people's shots, nor would want someone else to print mine.
Getting the correct composition and exposure on a piece of film is just the start of a very involved creative process, which can be very personal and at times
subconscious. I admire Brett Weston for burning his negatives so nobody else could mess with them.

[Kevin J. Kolosky]

I would much rather own a poor print of a good image than a good print of a poor image. And I would much rather own a poor print of a good image made by someone other than the person who made the negative than not own the print at all.

[Drew Wiley]

There are people who specialize in collecting poor prints. Then they archive them where they belong - in the landfill ! A poor print of a "good image" is not a good
image - the good image doesn't exist yet, not if you have to fill in with your imagination what is allegedly good about it. But then, I'm the type who would rather not hear a Handl symphony at all than hear it performed by a junior high marching band tuba player.

[Kevin J. Kolosky]

I disagree, but then I can only speak for myself, as can anyone else about subjective criteria. For me a good image sparks a feeling regardless of whether it is printed poorly or not. I have seen hundreds of very poorly printed images on this site (by some who claim to be very good photographers) that I would like to have on my walls in my home.

Certainly I can make a determination that the print is too flat or has too much contrast, or that there is not enough detail here or there, or that the lines are converging on a building where they shouldn't be. But if I like the subject of the photograph and it excites me in some way all of that other stuff can be excused.

Another poster here spoke of seeing some of Ansel's different prints of his Moonrise photo. I was once at a gallery in downtown Santa Fe where they had a progression of 4 of those Moonrise Prints. They were not for sale at the time. One could certainly have made subjective comments about each one of them. Nevertheless, I would have loved to have any one of them, not because they were made by Ansel Adams or printed by him, but because I had just been down the road to Hernandez and stood on the place where the photograph had been made and I thought it was interesting how the place had changed.

[Drew Wiley]

So what's good if it looks bad?