My point about Atget is "technical" imperfection from a craft perspective. I've never seen his negatives but they are almost certainly mottled/blotchy/uneven due to his alleged tray/stand-development technique. Does that aspect of image/print quality have any effect - positive or negative - on the end results? Depends on who you ask, I suppose. Of course one could also argue he developed his negatives that way deliberately to get exactly the mottled effect he wanted, in which case they could be considered technically perfect. Who knows.

Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
Atget - he was meticulously irreverent about scratching dates in his negs, but a compositional fanatic. The best ever in my opinion. The oddities seem quite deliberate, even studious, hardly sloppy. I've seen a lot of original Atget prints in person, and own the full four-volume Hambourg MMA set on Atget. But a lot of the "flaws" which people sterotype about his prints are actually due to poor storage - mold stain and foxing etc.

Don't forget Steiglitz - obsessive about technique. Yeah, people will cite his little ladder tray development system his office closet and basic contact printing frame. But he went to great lengths to master gravure when it came to reproduction. I've seen what he considered as his master set of prints from that era, and anyone of his caliper who states, "There is only one best of anything" is pretty darn fussy.

Strand was apparently the influence behind the f/64 crowd and AA, now seemingly so despised by some.

Eggleston didn't print anything. But he was fussy about how they got printed. Going DT was not just for sake of better permanence in the eyes of collectors than chromogenic prints, but for sake of specific color repro. I believe some new editions of some of those old classics might get re-issued from the last commercial DT lab still standing, in Germany. Eggleston, despite the early "non-color" criticisms of him, actually had a rather sophisticated color eye. The intervening inkjet ones certainly lost all that earlier charm, and seem to me to be a capitulation to big for big's sake. I do know that Meyerowitz is having some of his early 35mm color street photography reissued in DT to specifically revive some of that early verve; his 8X10 work has an entirely different feel.

But gosh - now attacking matboard cutting technique? Just in the last month I heard someone complaining about how poorly squared overmats annoyingly distracted them at a particular AA museum venue. Any neighborhood frame shop would go out of business in a month if they didn't know how to properly use a matcutter. Might as well be trying to sell new cars having flat tires.