Really difficult to prove and enforce.Originally Posted by Paul Ron
Really difficult to prove and enforce.
I haven't spoken with Mark K. in a long time. He was making his living as an architectural photographer; printmaking was a sideline. But he gravitated to that understated image rendering which certain now long extinct Kodak papers provided. But even though I have favorite papers myself, I am always hedging my bets and exploring new papers as well, because as long as I can remember, films and papers inevitably keep changing. Where this whole "edition" talk starts sliding down a slippery slope is when one edition is made in medium A, then another "limited edition" comes out later on medium B, or slightly in different size, and so forth. That's especially a temptation with these new digital printing options. Well before that, it got so bad in the "lithograph" market that strictly-defined laws had to be put in place in several states (NY, CA, etc), making it illegal to call a photolithographic reproduction an actual lithograph. One type is basically just a fancy offset-printed poster, the other requires some kind of handmade plate. Then there was the infamous trick of Kincaid putting one or two tiny spots of real paint on his own assembly-line glorified posters with his own hand in order to call them original paintings. And things got so bad in one "gallery-row" town in this area that there was once an FBI agent assigned there full time just uncovering all the art fraud - another reason why the expression, "limited edition", became a flat tire.
Unfortunately, there are ways for the unscrupulous to bend or break the rules. A photographer could make 2 negatives of the same scene and sell the prints as separate editions. Or alter the cropping, I guess, for a subsequent edition. But in the art world, this one takes the cake: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/a...g-picture.html
all the time
many movies about it
https://www.google.com/search?q=movi...hrome&ie=UTF-8
Tin Can
Sometimes it really does help if one simply doesn't have enough money to go around recklessly spending it! And there are times I have difficulty feeling sorry for the conspicuous consumption crowd when they do get burned.
Unless it's printed off a stone with the edition limitations that incurs, the litho plates used for most photolitho on manual presses today are essentially identical to those used for regular offset litho - there are edition limits, but they're vast (think 6 figures). As 'editioning' relates purely to wearing out the master plate in litho or etching (40-50 pulls at best, unless steel-facing was used - which can be done temporarily - I think that's what was done with Strand's Mexican Portfolio both when initially printed & when reprinted), it's rather antithetical to the whole idea of the 'archival' negative - though I recall reading about a few alt-process folk finding that their neg densities had changed somewhat after 50-60 trips through a plate burner. For all that there are many reasons to critique Ansel Adams, his 'negative as score/ print as performance' is probably the smartest commentary about how to proceed - the problem is the often excessive preciousness (culturally conditioned, I'd argue) about the photographer having to be the sole printer of their own work - with editions being limited & negs destroyed afterwards- because it speaks to a terrible insecurity on the photographer's part that their performatively painfully wrought print might be equally well printed (or better printed) in less time by someone else.
But we're not talking fakes, just fakers.
Interneg, I would NEVER want someone else printing my negs. I realize that there have been quite a few highly talented photographers who for various reasons have farmed their originals out to skilled printing services, especially with respect to color imagery. That's their prerogative. Several photo lab owners were among my longtime friends. And interesting old negatives have been discovered in attics and so forth, inviting someone to print them. I've done some of that kind of printing myself. But my attitude toward my personal work has zero to do with "insecurity". As far as I'm concerned, if my negatives or chromes do happens to be the "score", and the print the "performance", well, then, I'm the conductor, the band, and all the instruments too. That's how its supposed to be. That makes it "my" print. My pictures; my rules. Other people are welcome to make up their own rules, or even have the decisions made for them. But I wouldn't even like the idea of someone else trimming and mounting my prints, because even that is integral to composition. Of course, if someone in the printing industry was making a book for me, my own prints, my own preferred rendition of the image, and how I specifically crop my own actual prints - would all serve as a very specific reference.
But I do often roll my eyes at that performance/score analogy of AA, who did indeed have a music background. And if he had written a musical score instead of film version, how would he feel about the local Junior High Tuba and Kazoo Marching Band performing it? - "We are not amused", as he himself sometimes quoted Queen Victoria.
As far as lithographs go, there are highly respected locals guilds doing that, as well as very conscientious dealers. And as I already noted, there are also real laws in place penalizing any abuse of that category of technique. But there's still plenty of fraudulent marketing going on in tourist venues too - posters printed in the tens of thousands, which galleries paid $15 apiece for, and worth less than the frames they are put in, sold to gullible "investors" for thousands of dollars apiece. A long as naive buyers exist, art crooks will also still exist, a kind of inevitable food chain, I suppose.
I saw an interesting interview with Neil Selkirk who made Diane Arbus' posthumous prints. It took him a while to figure out her methods--not straightforward at all.
I saw that interview too. It's quite a delicate dance finding someone else who understands your own vision. I tend to refer to them as "hired guns" rather than ordinary labs services. There aren't many of them, and they charge accordingly.
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