Re: Pond-moonrise (was: Re: Steichen image in April's 'Vanity Fair'
Judy wrote: Still, it hasn't been clear to me in this welter of parsings and possibilities that the met's print is actually on view.... does anyone know about that (I thought the one on view was at Howard Greenberg Gallery -- In fact, the Met is so "rich" in art, they never can show more than a fraction at any one time.)No, the Met's print is not on view; I didn't mean to suggest that it was. My fantasy was that you could get them to show it to you, privately, on the basis of your credentials as designated sleuth for the alt-photo list. I'm not sure about "parsings and possibilities;" you could strip away the whole thread except for the first post where I posted the link to my page with the three prints; that information was sound when I posted it and is still sound. The only interesting thing that happened in between was the realization that the Met's print, that looks brown and dull in its present reproduction, is the same print that, in its gorgeous blue manifestation, wowed the crowds in Chicago in 1989. Most of the rest of the thread was just static, people raising issues that had already been disposed of, or that were completely off the point. As is not unusual. But I'm disappointed, because the reason I posted the prints in the first place was to address Judy's observation that when she saw one of these prints in person, it seemed to her that the blue must have been printed with a positive, rather than a negative (sorry, paraphrasing, but I hope that's the gist). I think it's fairly obvious that must be true of MoMA's print, at the bottom of the page, where the blue ( in the form of cyanotype, if MoMA's description of this print is accurate) replaces all the light areas and the moon is obviously colored in, without a matching moon in the reflection. I'm not so sure about the auctioned print, the gum over platinum, where the light areas remain light; I think with that one, the gum layers were probably added using the original negative, or maybe a slightly altered negative, but still a negative. I asked what you thought about that, and haven't seen an answer. I'm still interested Katharine
|