Given a couple of related threads recently on inkjet, I thought I would share this experience. Six years ago I started fooling around with digital ink jet prints. A friend of mine was an early practitioner showing around the country and I felt his prints showed real promise.
In the ensuing years I have put a ton of time into this process as the process itself has matured. I also continued doing silver prints. Knowing what a fine B&W print looks like helped drive my quest. This year I put about 5 months into making 5 16x20 Piezography prints for the Contemplative Landscape show in Santa Fe. this was the highest profile show I have been in for along time and will be up for 14 months in the premier exhibition space in Santa fe. 4 of the 5 print well on gelatin silver and one won't and needed a digital solution-so that one print drove the production of the entire suite. I have shown digital prints side by side with GS over these years at less important shows.
I worked on them so long that I delivered them 6 weeks past the hard deadline. I wanted them to be perfect, which of course they never were-though I reached a point where I was about 95% satisfied with the results and that my final issues with the prints were limited largely by the mat inkset. At one point I completely started over and had Lenny Eiger drum scan all the film.
Now I am an old hand at this-this is my 80th exhibit and generally I think if I am happy thats all that matters. In this case though I had more anxiety than I have had for years about an exhibit. I had been submerged in these prints for so long that I was worried that I couldn't judge them objectively......
With some trepidation I delivered them to the curator-anxious because i was worried that all my excuses about needing more time (because the prints weren't perfect yet) would seem like hollow excuses if she didn't think the prints weren't stunning. Well she thought the prints were stunning and thanked me profusely in writing for my dedication to her vision for this show. That was one sort of emotional hurdle to cross. Today was another.
One of my photo heros over the last 40 years is Ed Ranney, an institution in New Mexico photography (who amongst other successes was featured in Szarkowski's Mirrors and Windows). Today I had to give a joint talk with Ed at the exhibit to some students. Ed is more of a fellow traveler than a friend and he is a hardcore 5x7 film/gelatin-silver guy. Ed is also a no bullshit kind of guy and says exactly what he thinks. I was very curious what he thought of the prints. Well he loved them and quizzed me in depth about the process. It was a nice affirmation of my own thoughts on the prints.
So......why am i sharing this? Because today....finally (without any question way back in the recesses of my ego) the viability of injet as a quality b&w print medium is totally settled for me. I like to think that I am beyond the need of affirmation of colleagues, but in truth I think I'm not. To some extent that thinking is just a bit of defensiveness.
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Originally Posted by Kirk Gittings
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