Presence in 8x10 photography

[Bernice Loui]

Brings up the question of Photographers that are "into" photography due to the hardware aspects be it HUGE camera or the latest digital camera or ? -vs- those only interested in the Photography hardware as a means of artistic expression.

In the universe of smaller format camera 35mm or majority of consumer digital cameras, tooting the latest and greatest Foto hardware is a means to sell their stuff.
Others who consider the Foto hardware as nothing more than a means to their end might not have Narry-A-Care about the latest-greatest Foto hardware, they carry on making visual based art with the tools that work for them.

Photography as a technical and hardware side as well as an artistic-expressive side, individuals get involved with Photography for the technical-hardware side, others strictly as an artistic-expressive potential medium. Fewer combine both and more as their means of artistic expression.


Bernice

Interesting perspective - the opposite of what I’ve observed. I can’t argue with the enjoyment part though. Some people might simply enjoy working with the biggest camera/ground glass they can physically manage.

[Michael R]

In my experience it’s not so much that they are simply into hardware for the sake of hardware. It’s a more genuine belief than that, and comes from an artistic place. It just seems to me even though they truly want to make the best art they can, the belief that the greater technical challenges of the larger camera/film, which may or may not cause them to concentrate more, leads to better photographs - that’s the part I disagree with.

Then of course there are the mega formats. In those cases it can be worse, where the challenge of using the camera becomes so consuming the photographer might totally mistake the act of successfully taking the photograph with making a good photograph. Someone once posted a video here (or maybe it was on APUG, I can’t remember) several years ago made by two or three guys of them lugging this gigantic camera to some spot to make a photograph, going back to the studio, developing this big sheet of film etc. It was a nothing picture, something anyone would normally dismiss as a boring, random snapshot if it had been made with an iPhone. What was the point, besides being able to get an image out of this thing? Of course that’s an extreme example and I’m not saying everything happens this way. But in general I think beyond a certain format size the art often suffers. In this very forum I usually enjoy the pictures in the non-LF image threads most.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, I seldom contact print, but still prefer 8x10 over smaller formats for enlargements. Alas, it's been cold and windy, and I've got a bit of shoulder bursitis, so the next break in the weather, I'll hike with a 6x9 instead.

[Michael R]

Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who is superb with the 8x10. They do exist. Tice, Burkett, Shore, to name a few.

[ColonelKurtz]

I love this quote from 8x10 experimenter Stephen Shore: "Some photographers go out and want to make beautiful photographs. I think that puts the cart before the horse. Good photographs are the by-product of some other exploration, or some other intention. If I'm following through on those explorations and intentions, I can't help but ultimately create what is being referred to as the arc of an ouvre - there's nothing else, in fact, that I can do." The best advice given to me was by a big famous photographer I assisted, who said: "No matter what you do, just keep making pictures."

[Drew Wiley]

Well, although I've never printed in the Vericolor L genre of Shore except for a few portrait commissions, and do admire what he's done within that particular vein, he certainly wasn't all that great of an 8x10 camera technician to begin with, or as a darkroom printer (most of his color negs were printed by a pro lab). When you're only talking about 2X repro onto 16X20 prints, or about contact prints, or book repro, you can seemingly get away with a lot. But he kinda got stuck in that specific dated genre the rest of his life, it seems. He would have fallen flat on his face with chrome film and the high-detail Cibachrome revolution, which appealed to me a lot more.

I saw the works of quite a few of those muddy Vericolor gurus when they first started out doing only contact prints - not only Shore, but Misrach, Meyerowitz, many others well known experimenters of that time. Some were abominable printmakers. Meyerowitz was the best of the lot; but even he farmed out enlargements once he had the funding for it. Friends of mine printed Misrach's works here on the West Coast, but weren't happy doing it for long. It wasn't false humility when he claimed his 8x10 negs were miserable. Nonetheless, I've got books on all of them. It was a very interesting season. Probably all the early Ektacolor R prints have badly faded or discolored by now. Meyerowitz is having his earlier 35mm color street photography (slides I think) reissued in limited edition dye transfer by the only remaining lab currently able to do it, but those have a very different feel from the 8X10 Vericolor ones.

[Corran]

Oh for heaven's sake

My eyes hurt from rolling so hard

[ColonelKurtz]

I feel that the point of my quoting Stephen Shore was missed. The dilemma for the person (often and almost exclusively photographers) who will walk into a gallery, put their nose right up against a print, and look for all the usual technical "problems" is truly a hell that I'm glad I got over fairly quickly. What Stephen Shore is about is ideas, more than anything. I recently viewed his newest work which he is making on some new Hasselblad digital camera, and I don't agree with his claim that its out resolving his 8x10 camera (I DID walk right up to his new prints at the show), but its no longer that important to me. I'm interested in his ideas about photography. To each his own though. I enjoy these discussions. Thanks

[Drew Wiley]

Ideas mean nothing without a matching level of craft. That doesn't necessarily mean some penultimate level of detail or scale, etc; but the glove has to somehow fit. As I already explained a couple days ago on a different forum, Shore had a very specific color strategy based upon inherent flaws in the Vericolor L film the era. He very cleverly
played off a clash between the tendency of all warmish yellows and tans to dump into fleshtone pumpkinish, versus the "poison green" cyan-inflected green hues of most color neg films until relatively recently. But to produce an actual clash, the two opposing hues need to exist in similar degree of saturation or area. Shore knew how to keep these disproportionate, and create a deliberate subtle tension between them instead. But that strategy also implies the ability to make that same effect come across in the print as well; so craft skill per se is integral to brining the underlying concept to fruition. Just because a number of people in that generation seemed to make bland colored prints of seemingly ordinary subject matter, the fact some of those images succeeded so well is that the concept carried itself through clear into the presented print or in-print book representation itself.
In a way, having a more flexible medium like digital capture and post-editing really kills off the goose that laid the golden egg, in the case of people like Shore or Misrach. It was the color idiosyncrasies of their original limited color palette that put them on the map to begin with.

[Michael R]

I think Shore is a great photographer, and was great with the 8x10, but I’ve never been able to make heads or tails of most of the things he says

In response to Drew’s comment, it is complicated to describe but there is something about the colour rendition in all that late 1960’s-1970s work by Shore and others, especially in relation to the subject matter, that has always grabbed me. I love it. It’s like it is just “off” enough (I know technically it is pretty far off, but you know what I mean) that it looks almost unreal. Etc. Whether this somewhat muted and strange colour balance is something the photographers wanted or not remains a mystery to me. Yes it is a totally different aesthetic than what comes to mind when one thinks about masters of processes like Ciba.