Dogman
Mentor
If anyone wants to really go into the deep end of the pool on methods of printing since everything began, Richard Benson did a series of lectures at MOMA based on his book "The Printed Picture". The video quality is not the best, the sound can be awful and the subject matter varies from dull to amazing. Benson is entertaining with his lectures. I haven't viewed these videos for several years and my memory, being aged, is not the best. I did buy the book which I gather is now a classic. If you have the time and inclination, here is the link: https://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/
Dogman
Mentor
I respect your opinion, Erik. And I'm a fan of your photography. But if you truly don't want mechanized art, you have to give up the cameras. They're machines too.
That sounded snarky. Sorry 'bout that.
I'm just recalling that the Epson pigment inks I use to spray on various high rag content papers is closer to the art produced before the invention of photography than to photography itself. People used pigments and some of the same types of art paper centuries ago. Materials are very similar, just the method of application is different.
hap
Well-known
Several decades ago I contacted a master printer in or around Sacramento. He printed all of my LF and some 35mm. It was wonderful to collaborate with him. However, I have long forgotten name of the "him" and not in my files. i realize this is a "hail Mary" but do any body have his name or contact info?
Erik van Straten
Mentor
Photographing without a camera is impossible, but there are much better alternatives for digital printers.
Erik.
Dan
Let's Sway
Is the paper you use(d) in the darkroom handmade?
Erik van Straten
Mentor
Dan
Let's Sway
Then your entire "argument" goes poof, no? Because by that logic, nothing shot or printed digitally is "by machine" either since there's always a person behind the work.
hap
Well-known
someday (already) are AI generated images and some sell as NFT's. there is some human input but very little.
a Montecriste staw hat can be woven on an automated system when in the past only human weavers, often in poor conditions. Nobody yet, has bought a Montecriste or other straw hat for 4K to 45K that fell off the line.......but it does happen with artisans. Take straw and make it feel like cloth. this how I felt when I saw my first actual prints of Ansel Adams.....almost otherworldly. there is and will continue to be markets for artisans and AI.
Montecristi Panama Hats, Men's, Women's, Fedoras, Foldable (brentblack.com)
NPR Reviews Finest Hat Ever Woven | Brent Black Panama Hats
https://www.brentblack.com/vid/The Sorcerer of Straw4.mp4
a Montecriste staw hat can be woven on an automated system when in the past only human weavers, often in poor conditions. Nobody yet, has bought a Montecriste or other straw hat for 4K to 45K that fell off the line.......but it does happen with artisans. Take straw and make it feel like cloth. this how I felt when I saw my first actual prints of Ansel Adams.....almost otherworldly. there is and will continue to be markets for artisans and AI.
Montecristi Panama Hats, Men's, Women's, Fedoras, Foldable (brentblack.com)
NPR Reviews Finest Hat Ever Woven | Brent Black Panama Hats
https://www.brentblack.com/vid/The Sorcerer of Straw4.mp4
ptpdprinter
Mentor
Alfred Stieglitz was responsible for making photography a fine art 100 years ago.
I thought platinum/palladium printing was the noble process. Sounds like you are trying to sneak what you do under the tent.
Erik van Straten
Mentor
Erik van Straten
Mentor
I do not speak of 100 years ago. I talk about now, this moment. Stieglitz was not "responsible". He would laugh when he heard that and he would cry when he heard what is going on now.
Erik.
Harry the K
Established
Maybe rational arguments just miss the point of this (old) discussion.
To give a more subjective input: While I like digital color photography a lot (diapositives I always found difficult to handle, a color darkroom I never had), this is not the case with digital b/w.
B/w is a defined process, from loading the film into the camera to storing the fibre base print in an album, historically grown since the beginnings of photography.
No matter what the result looks like, the knowledge that a b/w print is made digitally for me takes away some value. To me it feels like holding a forged banknote in my hands, it may look perfect, but I know it is not the real thing.
So it is not only the result we are looking at, but also the way leading to the result.
What do you think (and feel) about that?
To give a more subjective input: While I like digital color photography a lot (diapositives I always found difficult to handle, a color darkroom I never had), this is not the case with digital b/w.
B/w is a defined process, from loading the film into the camera to storing the fibre base print in an album, historically grown since the beginnings of photography.
No matter what the result looks like, the knowledge that a b/w print is made digitally for me takes away some value. To me it feels like holding a forged banknote in my hands, it may look perfect, but I know it is not the real thing.
So it is not only the result we are looking at, but also the way leading to the result.
What do you think (and feel) about that?
Erik van Straten
Mentor
I can agree with that, exept that I do not like color photography, not on film and not digital. Color photography can be useful for advertising and can be instructive etcetera, but for me it is not an art.
Digital b+w is in my eyes a kind of robot-art for people who don't want to take the trouble to learn something that is difficult or expensive and therefore settle for a product that is automatically generated and that in my eyes therefore is - as an art - uninteresting, kitsch.
Erik.
ptpdprinter
Mentor
Why is color photography not an art?
Why is digital photography kitsch?
kitsch (noun) - art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.
Erik van Straten
Mentor
gelatin silver print (elmar 50mm f3.5) leica 1a
https://www.flickr.com/photos/erik_v...posted-public/
Erik.
Vince Lupo
Nobody's Mentor
Dunno guys, I’d gladly hang an Ernst Haas, Joel Meyerowitz, William Christenberry or Stephen Shore on my wall any day, so not so sure about colour photography not being considered ‘fine art’ or even just plain old ‘art’. But that’s just me - I’m certainly not out to change minds or attitudes, although I’ll gladly entertain other points of view.
Now I’m just a fella trying to make it out there in the crazy world like everybody else, so I really don’t like it when threads like this devolve into a choosing of sides, and if you’re not on ‘our’ side then there’s something wrong with you, you’re misguided, settling for less, deluded, head stuck in the sand, blah blah blah. It’s things like this - aside from the 522 error - that make me want to leave RFF for good and devote my energies to another online photo forum I recently joined where this does not seem to happen. There’s already too much conflict in the world, but I do appreciate healthy debate and respectful discussion. So I’ll leave that here for consideration and will shut up about it.
I can only speak from my own experience, so here goes. I remember way back in grad school there was one classroom that was turned into a camera obscura — heavy dark curtains covering the windows with one small hole cut into one of them (the true meaning of a camera obscura!). The result was the street scene outside projected upside-down onto the opposite wall inside the classroom. A professor told me that once they covered that entire wall with photographic paper and made one giant, multi-print photo mural of the projected street scene. So see you can make a photograph (or at least one really big one made up of a lot of little ones) without a mechanical camera. A Man Ray photogram also comes to mind, even a round cardboard oatmeal can with a little brass shim stock and tiny hole punched in it would do the trick. But I digress, ever so slightly.
As far as prints go, I’ve had two interesting things happen to me over the last, say, 10 years that stick out in my little pea-brain, one of which just happened a couple of weeks ago. The first was when I was hanging a solo show at a local arts center back in about 2012-2013 — it was the precursor to my Mapping the West project, and I had recently gotten my Epson 3880 printer, so the first real foray into doing my own digital printing and no longer having to farm things out to be printed. As I was hanging the prints (admittedly matted, framed and behind glass), a resident professor and professional photographer (who BTW shot for and conducted workshops with National Geographic, so a seasoned photographer who was maybe a few years older than me) came up to my photos that are were already on the wall, stuck her nose against a number of them (as any photographer worth their salt would do), and asked me hesitantly: “Are these — are these darkroom prints?” No I replied, inkjet. Guess I could have been all fancy-pants and said ‘giclée’, but inkjet’s fine by me. Actually I’ve had that happen numerous times since - seasoned photographers, some older than me and who could rightly be considered ‘darkroom rats’ asking if my inkjets are gelatin silver prints.
The flip side happened two weeks ago - remember those two Marion Warren gelatin silver prints I mentioned in an earlier post that I sold? Well the dealer to whom I sold them — who incidentally has been a gallery owner for over 30 years, deals in Marion’s work among other notable photographers like Aubrey Bodine and has seen a fine photographic print or two in her career — looked closely at them and asked me if these were inkjets (Marion had been having someone do inkjets of his work for him near the end of his life). No I replied, they’re gelatin silver prints that I had him print for me. As you see it can go both ways.
So for those of you who think that the image quality of inkjets can’t even hope to approach the quality of a gelatin silver print, well I guess maybe you haven’t been looking at enough good prints, which is entirely possible. Or perhaps I should say that at the very least you haven’t seen mine
As far as digital black and white (and really I hate that distinction - it’s all just black and white to me) being some kind of ‘robot art’ or that those of us who do it haven’t taken the trouble to learn something difficult (i.e. printing in a darkroom), woo that’s quite an inflammatory statement to some of us. I mean people are certainly entitled to think that, and I appreciate the sentiment. Ansel Adams said that the negative is the score and the print the performance - I’d agree and also say that the RAW file is the score and the post-production and resulting print the performance. Even in his autobiography he talked about the future of digital printing and he seemed to indicate that he could head that way if time allowed in his life or if he was around 20 years hence (this was 1982 when he wrote this). Like a neg, a RAW file can be interpreted in many ways, and if it were simply ‘robot art’ (Hey Siri make me a perfect print!), then sheesh I could certainly sleep in a lot more — I mean why didn’t somebody tell me this sooner? And as far as us not taking the trouble to learn something difficult and expensive (had to laugh at that second part!), well I can only speak for myself and my personal experience. I started in the darkroom in 1980 and worked for about 25 years in one until I had a bit of hiatus and then got my Epson 3880 about 7 years later I think. From 1994 I also got into historic processes (platinum-palladium in particular), was schooled by a master printer of my own in grad school (Craig Stevens) and really learned how to print. I thought I knew how to print pretty well but lordy, once Craig had me under his spell I quickly realized that I really knew nothing. Actually you’d love this as a darkroom assignment: One of Craig’s major assignments for us was to choose one negative frame we liked, but did not love. He said ‘not loved’ because we’d grow to hate it by the end of the assignment. It was to have been a neg that would comfortably lay down on Grade Two paper, so no dodging, burning etc. A ‘straight’ print. We had to make basically a ‘cookbook’ for printing - using different developer and paper combinations (oftentimes making our own developers from scratch — DuPont 54D was my personal fave), as well as different toners and dilutions. I think we ended up with like 275-300 prints of the same image, then we had to write about and discuss each combination with (somewhat) intelligent analysis. I still have that ‘cookbook’ and cherish it, as well as the sticky note from Craig with an A+ and Superb! written on it. So if that didn’t make you a good printer by the end of it all, nothing would. Oh and the following year another professor had us do almost the same thing in colour!
I spill out all this verbal diarrhea because I find that the darkroom experience can help inform the inkjet/digital experience. Not to say that I won’t find my way back into a darkroom down the road (heck 10 years ago I said I was done with film!), but at this moment I’m doing what I’m doing and actually I don’t mind it. I personally don’t think it’s better or worse, just different (and I’ll tell you this much — it sure ain’t cheaper). I devote the same care, time and attention to an inkjet as I would a gelatin silver, and I’m sure that those who are committed to final image quality would do the same as well. And if we’re all misguided, delusional souls who are sleepwalking our way through our craft, well then hopefully you’ll take pity on us and maybe say a prayer for our possible redemption (though someone once said that “hell’s the hippest way to go”, so it might be better to leave us in our ignorant bliss). Just don’t forget to check back with us in 100 years to see if any of the fruits of our collective labour have survived.
Now I’m just a fella trying to make it out there in the crazy world like everybody else, so I really don’t like it when threads like this devolve into a choosing of sides, and if you’re not on ‘our’ side then there’s something wrong with you, you’re misguided, settling for less, deluded, head stuck in the sand, blah blah blah. It’s things like this - aside from the 522 error - that make me want to leave RFF for good and devote my energies to another online photo forum I recently joined where this does not seem to happen. There’s already too much conflict in the world, but I do appreciate healthy debate and respectful discussion. So I’ll leave that here for consideration and will shut up about it.
I can only speak from my own experience, so here goes. I remember way back in grad school there was one classroom that was turned into a camera obscura — heavy dark curtains covering the windows with one small hole cut into one of them (the true meaning of a camera obscura!). The result was the street scene outside projected upside-down onto the opposite wall inside the classroom. A professor told me that once they covered that entire wall with photographic paper and made one giant, multi-print photo mural of the projected street scene. So see you can make a photograph (or at least one really big one made up of a lot of little ones) without a mechanical camera. A Man Ray photogram also comes to mind, even a round cardboard oatmeal can with a little brass shim stock and tiny hole punched in it would do the trick. But I digress, ever so slightly.
As far as prints go, I’ve had two interesting things happen to me over the last, say, 10 years that stick out in my little pea-brain, one of which just happened a couple of weeks ago. The first was when I was hanging a solo show at a local arts center back in about 2012-2013 — it was the precursor to my Mapping the West project, and I had recently gotten my Epson 3880 printer, so the first real foray into doing my own digital printing and no longer having to farm things out to be printed. As I was hanging the prints (admittedly matted, framed and behind glass), a resident professor and professional photographer (who BTW shot for and conducted workshops with National Geographic, so a seasoned photographer who was maybe a few years older than me) came up to my photos that are were already on the wall, stuck her nose against a number of them (as any photographer worth their salt would do), and asked me hesitantly: “Are these — are these darkroom prints?” No I replied, inkjet. Guess I could have been all fancy-pants and said ‘giclée’, but inkjet’s fine by me. Actually I’ve had that happen numerous times since - seasoned photographers, some older than me and who could rightly be considered ‘darkroom rats’ asking if my inkjets are gelatin silver prints.
The flip side happened two weeks ago - remember those two Marion Warren gelatin silver prints I mentioned in an earlier post that I sold? Well the dealer to whom I sold them — who incidentally has been a gallery owner for over 30 years, deals in Marion’s work among other notable photographers like Aubrey Bodine and has seen a fine photographic print or two in her career — looked closely at them and asked me if these were inkjets (Marion had been having someone do inkjets of his work for him near the end of his life). No I replied, they’re gelatin silver prints that I had him print for me. As you see it can go both ways.
So for those of you who think that the image quality of inkjets can’t even hope to approach the quality of a gelatin silver print, well I guess maybe you haven’t been looking at enough good prints, which is entirely possible. Or perhaps I should say that at the very least you haven’t seen mine
As far as digital black and white (and really I hate that distinction - it’s all just black and white to me) being some kind of ‘robot art’ or that those of us who do it haven’t taken the trouble to learn something difficult (i.e. printing in a darkroom), woo that’s quite an inflammatory statement to some of us. I mean people are certainly entitled to think that, and I appreciate the sentiment. Ansel Adams said that the negative is the score and the print the performance - I’d agree and also say that the RAW file is the score and the post-production and resulting print the performance. Even in his autobiography he talked about the future of digital printing and he seemed to indicate that he could head that way if time allowed in his life or if he was around 20 years hence (this was 1982 when he wrote this). Like a neg, a RAW file can be interpreted in many ways, and if it were simply ‘robot art’ (Hey Siri make me a perfect print!), then sheesh I could certainly sleep in a lot more — I mean why didn’t somebody tell me this sooner? And as far as us not taking the trouble to learn something difficult and expensive (had to laugh at that second part!), well I can only speak for myself and my personal experience. I started in the darkroom in 1980 and worked for about 25 years in one until I had a bit of hiatus and then got my Epson 3880 about 7 years later I think. From 1994 I also got into historic processes (platinum-palladium in particular), was schooled by a master printer of my own in grad school (Craig Stevens) and really learned how to print. I thought I knew how to print pretty well but lordy, once Craig had me under his spell I quickly realized that I really knew nothing. Actually you’d love this as a darkroom assignment: One of Craig’s major assignments for us was to choose one negative frame we liked, but did not love. He said ‘not loved’ because we’d grow to hate it by the end of the assignment. It was to have been a neg that would comfortably lay down on Grade Two paper, so no dodging, burning etc. A ‘straight’ print. We had to make basically a ‘cookbook’ for printing - using different developer and paper combinations (oftentimes making our own developers from scratch — DuPont 54D was my personal fave), as well as different toners and dilutions. I think we ended up with like 275-300 prints of the same image, then we had to write about and discuss each combination with (somewhat) intelligent analysis. I still have that ‘cookbook’ and cherish it, as well as the sticky note from Craig with an A+ and Superb! written on it. So if that didn’t make you a good printer by the end of it all, nothing would. Oh and the following year another professor had us do almost the same thing in colour!
I spill out all this verbal diarrhea because I find that the darkroom experience can help inform the inkjet/digital experience. Not to say that I won’t find my way back into a darkroom down the road (heck 10 years ago I said I was done with film!), but at this moment I’m doing what I’m doing and actually I don’t mind it. I personally don’t think it’s better or worse, just different (and I’ll tell you this much — it sure ain’t cheaper). I devote the same care, time and attention to an inkjet as I would a gelatin silver, and I’m sure that those who are committed to final image quality would do the same as well. And if we’re all misguided, delusional souls who are sleepwalking our way through our craft, well then hopefully you’ll take pity on us and maybe say a prayer for our possible redemption (though someone once said that “hell’s the hippest way to go”, so it might be better to leave us in our ignorant bliss). Just don’t forget to check back with us in 100 years to see if any of the fruits of our collective labour have survived.
Deardorff38
Mentor
Thanks for the post Vince. I admire your work. I agree. Posts that troll ....don't make RFF a place to visit. Erik...... If colour prints aren't art..... then what makes coloured painting art? I much admire the work of photographers like Wm A Allard, & many other National Geographic photographers. I've seen great BW digital prints by William Clift. I've seen some by S Salgado that paled beside the silver gelatin prints of Bradford Washburn. Film photography and darkroom prints are what I do....simply that. It's my choice, but I have no interest hearing the constant battle of one practice vs another.
Harry the K
Established
The core of these discussions seems to be reducable to personal taste. This taste very often comes disguised as knowledge, as education, what leads to endless and often painful discussions. Taste can be developed by education, of course, but cannot be discussed. It is, in other words, what we like or dislike.
It should be possible to say(write) what we like or dislike without insulting persons with a different taste. And it should be possible to hear(read) what other persons like or dislike without feeling insulted.
It should be possible to say(write) what we like or dislike without insulting persons with a different taste. And it should be possible to hear(read) what other persons like or dislike without feeling insulted.
Erik van Straten
Mentor
I think the oldest visual art form is painting, but that could also be sculpture. Color photography is certainly an art, but because of the poor durability of color prints in daylight I do not include these. This discussion was about printing as far as I am concerned. Oil painting can be very durable as we all know. Durability is in my opinion fundamental for every art.
Erik.
Harry the K
Established
What do you think of Banksy´s works?