Ron
I was mulling over Dick Sullivan's comments
but the points you make have prompted me to reply.
As has been implied the necessity to acquire a taste for platinum prints of
restricted tones arises from changes in fashion among the knowledgeable. But
even they often do not have the breadth of view to appreciate more than one
fashion at a time. To appreciate that both the F 64 s and the secessionists
could produce work of of sublimity. Gallery owners almost tell one that it is
illegal and immoral to include both influences in one's work.
It is both the beauty and range of tone in a platinum/palladium print that make
it beautiful. That beauty is there whether the print depends for its appeal on
both gradation and range of tone or on gradation alone.
Note for Keith--the colour of the platinum/palladium print is easily controlled
with the level of humidity, easier here, although it is not raining today, than
in New Mexico.
The inference I draw from the comments on Whistler and Emerson, or rather the
confirmation of my own opinion, is that there was a healthy cross-
fertilisation( the spell checker wants a 'Z'.) of ideas between painters,
photographers, that is art photographers, and designers in the years from 1860
to 1910. They were all influenced by the Japanese print; the photographers
influenced the impressionists and subsequent movements; the painters influenced
the photographers and both hung their pictures in art nouveau frames.
Emerson influenced the secessionists and Whistler influenced Emerson but they
were both influenced by the Japanese print.
Is it just North American photographic puritanism that seems to have had such a
deleterious effect on the aesthetics of photography. I suppose one must avoid
averting one's eyes from decayed pictorialism, and admit that it exists.
This underlines the need for a broad understanding of image making to arrive at
one's own style. One of the most exciting 'photographic Exhibitions I have been
to of late was the Whistler show at the Tate. It was an interesting experience
to walk from that exhibition into the Rothko room
If the arbiters of taste cannot grasp more than one thing at a time what hope is
there for those who need a leader. One winces at the crude Victorian imitations
of genre painting, Henry Peach Robinson, but there are the slavish imitators of
surrealism even seventy years on.
And the, getting back to platinum, how does the great Frederick Evans fit into
all this.
Terry King