The pigments have much in common with the earlier pigment processes, but the process has little in common with the earlier pigment processes, and that is the salient point.
The pigments have much in common with the earlier pigment processes, but the process has little in common with the earlier pigment processes, and that is the salient point.
This debate reminds me of something we did in the late 60's while in art school. One of the processes I was very involved in was photo silkscreening. Using the identical facilities, equipment and inks, we were making political posters (on cheap paper) for demonstrations on one hand and fine art prints (on good rag papers) for classes and exhibitions on the other hand. The first were known popularly as silkscreen posters or screenprints, the later were known as serigraphs. It was an accepted distinction then and now. Serigraphy was a relatively crude process (with its own charm surely) compared to stone lithography which had its own institute on campus (stone lithographers definitely looked down their noses at serigraphy), but I don't remember any effort by the lithographers to define what serigraphs should or should not called.
The history of the term "serigraphy" seems to say allot about the situation we are in now with "inkjet prints":
"A group of artist who later formed the National Serigraphic Society coined the word Serigraphy in the 1930s to differentiate the artistic application of screen printing from the industrial use of the process.[8] "Serigraphy" is a combination word from the Latin word "Seri" (silk) and the Greek word "graphein" (to write or draw).[9]" Wikipedia
Last edited by Kirk Gittings; 5-Dec-2008 at 16:39.
Thanks,
Kirk
at age 73:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
Which is why I only said "wrong in a way"Originally Posted by David A. Goldfarb
I guess many of us agree that the current terms used in digital prints can be very misleading. Some of the problems are compounded by the manufacturers of Inkjet inks (dyes), pigmented inks, and also paper suppliers. One supplier sells Platinum paper (Inkjet), they also sell analog photo products, that really doesn't help.
Kirk makes a good point about prper distinctions.
Ian
What is quality of an image?
To me, there are three major elements involved (in order of importance)
-What you see (object)
-How you see it (your interpretation)
-The way you show it (medium)
All are important and somehow correlated. People seem to underestimate the last step of printing, by lack of knowledge of the traditional or historic processes, as well as understanding of a good ink jet print.
See it that way: If only visual content quality matters, maybe we should just sell our work online, as Jpegs or Tiffs, and have our art admirers print them by technique of choice.
Sidney
Isn't the big divide between continuous tone and half-tone processes?
Half-tone dots (as in printer's screen, inkjet, digital negatives, etc) being for mass production and Tone (as in silver and sensitized gelatin) being the Real Thing.
A quality factor I personally like about 'non-ink jets':
Hand made.
Sidney
I have a great piece done by an old friend. It's a drawing on newsprint, done with a ballpoint pen (blue, even). The strength of the work is in its content and execution, not its materials. When my prints are shown they are labeled "Archival Inkjet Prints." I don't think that turns anyone off too much, and if it does, well, f#*k 'em.
It's funny, because by most standards of art making, photographic prints are very much machine-made.
Some of them completely. Others with a bit of intervention by the darkroom technician. The promise of photographic printmaking has been the same as that of other printmaking processes: mechanical production of identical multiples.
All the fussing around we do in the darkroom is really about establishing the inititial print values: working with the chemistry and development times, choosing the paper, deciding overall and local exposures etc.
Once this is done, a monkey (or darkroom assistant, or automated machine, using a burn/dodge mask) could turn out flawless multiples.
Speaking as someone who's spent a major chunk of my life under safelights, I feel that digital printing just inches photography closer to its early promise of mechanical reproduction.
Anyone is free to call their prints whatever they want but IMO "archival" is a marketing term, not a word that serves any useful purpose in print identification. It might be useful in identification if there were some industry standard that sets standards for processing to "archival inkjet print" status, but so far as I know there is no such thing.
Sandy King
It separates it from the clearly non-archival ink-jet prints (most dye prints).
You're complaint is pretty unfair; there are no industry "standards" for any other process term; at best there are norms.
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