>What exactly defines this "organic" involvement? How far back does the
>artist need to go to be considered an organically involved Renaisance
>printer? Handmade prints? Handmade paper? Handmade Film? Handmade
>camera? After all this work is one divinely transformed into a better
>artist? For some this may be true, but certainly not for all.
(First I'd like to apologize for those who might be bored with this discussion, and I am sure there are some who believe it belongs in the PhotArt List. Wrong. This is one of those areas where art and technology strongly interact and I believe the issues discussed here go to the core of what handmade photographic printmakers are all about.)
A.D. Coleman in a 1981 essay "Weegee as "Printmaker": An Anomaly In The Marketplace discussed some of these very issues and I'll shamelessly appropriate some of his ideas.
Walter Chappell (A Santa Fe area resident) back in 1960 in his book "Under the Sun" proposed that photographic imagemaking had two components, "camera vision" and the art of "printmaking."
Coleman says of this:
"From this we can infer a dialectic: Each photographer establishes his or her personal vision of the relationship between camera vision and the art of printmaking. This choice determines the inherent significance of any physical form in which the photographers images are objectified."
Coleman then goes on to compare the work of Weegee with that of Weston. Weegee who saw prints only as an imtemediate form for publication and whose prints looked as if he had slept with them, and the pristine prints of E. Weston, final objects in themselves. Weegee's esthetic could have been satisfied by sending his negs to Photomat, and in fact, he may have gotten better prints, but that was not what he was about. Weegee was about the book "Naked City" of which I have a treasured mint copy bought for $5.00 in an suspecting bookstore. Weegee was about the N.Y. Daily News. Weegee was about vision. Sid Kaplan, master printer, once printed a fine print edition from Weegees negs and I am sure Weegee would have been thoroughly amused. Weston, however, would not have been amused if his negs had been sent to Photomat.
For myself, I define fine art photography as making objects (photographs) that are destined to be displayed as the objects themselves rather than for publication or other uses. Thus it is this objectification that Chappell and Coleman refer to that is at the core of the dialectic. I place film, camera, lightmeter, and the rest, in the realm of "camera vision." Note that the list is primarily concerned with the "object" and its *gestation*, not the equally important "camera vision" part of our craft.
As for the printmaking part of our craft, I prefer natural childbirth to surrogate motherhood. I feel more organically involved when I make my own prints. (Sorry, I couldn't make a fatherhood metaphor work). Does this make me a better artist than one who does not make his or her own prints? Maybe, but that is not the question, the real question is: Am I a better artist when I make my own prints than if I don't? Presumably, most of us on the list have defined our relationship between camera vision and the art of printmaking as printmakers. Therefore I have a better chance of being a better artist when I am one who ties the thread between camera vision and printmaking. One need not go back to the film and camera to achieve this holism, it can be achieved at the print itself.
Palladio one goes halfway to meeting these needs, and as a halfway measure, falls short. To me it's sort of like setting out to climb halfway up Everest. Palladio does, however, get a bad rap frequently because it is often misused. Some negatives ("camera vision") should not be printed in palladium and a good example was the Richard Gere sponsored "Tibet Portfolio." Printed by Silver Labs in L.A. Many of the images donated by famous photographers were unsuitable for palladium. Here the images were printed by a master printer (who incidently committed suicide just after the portfolio was finished) but the thread had been broken between vison and print.
So Sal, it isn't about apples and oranges but about vison and printmaking. I don't foresake the non-printmaking Weegee or Robert Frank esthetic. But when people adopt the platinum esthetic, using Palladio is like sneaking in the back door, or going half way up Everest, or Rosey cutting through the park. One has presumably chosen the printmaking esthetic by choosing Palladio so why not go all the way.
>Controlling variables is just what Palladio paper is all about.
If so it falls short in a lot of categories.
Paper surface? All palladium? All platinum? Paper color? Internal secondary materials? Printing out?
Dick Sullivan
<center>Bostick & Sullivan
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