This other type has been mentioned in discussions of painting, and we can
easily adopt it to identify qualities of certain types of photographic
printing processes. The art historian Heinrich Wolfflin describes the
*visual* sense of touching objects in paintings. Just as the hand moves
across a sculpture, he suggests that the eye caresses or grasps objects
presented in an image. Whether found in a painting or photograph, when we
have clear, distinct separate objects we can feel them as we visually
"bump up" against them. We may say that we feel their surfaces. The
example that comes to mind for me is a Kodak catalogue which has an image
of a boxer's face: we see the skin pores close-up. Kodak creates this
effect to show-off their products.
The important point is that the tactility of platinum is *very* different
from what Wolfflin describes and what Kodak suggests you'll achieve with
their papers. In fact I would say that having a sense of feeling objects
in an image is the opposite of the feel of a pl/pt print.
Feeling the surfaces of objects comes from a visual movement through parts
of the image. I call this Kinetic Tactility.
Tactility associated with the look of platinum/palladium is not from the
separate surfaces of the image's objects. Pt/pl offers the viewer a
feeling of the entirety of the print. I call this Atmospheric Tactility
because of its pervasiveness.
Kinetic Tactility is in response to particular parts of the image and
Atmospheric Tactility is a result of the holistic feature of a print.
Now the nice thing for me (I hope you can sense the excitement when ideas
begin to gel) is that the two kinds of tactility are associated with two
ways by which we view photographs, perhaps two ways by which we create
photographs.
Sometime back Klaus Pollmeier distinguished the Glance (associated with
platinum) and the Stare or Gaze (relating to silver gelatin). [I can't
seem to find that posting as I look through my notes, so I hope I remember
it correctly.] Klaus's distinction seems entirely fitting for the two
kinds of tactility. We need only a glance to absorb a sense of the visual
touch of the entire surface of the print: an atmospheric quality. But we
need to stare at the silver gelatin in order to move among the surfaces of
the objects in the image: a kinetic quality.
If the two kinds of tactility are associated with different durations of
viewing (glance vs stare) the question becomes, what is it about these
different printing processes that produces the two tactilities? Is it
because the image rests below the surface of contemporary silver gelatin
paper whereas pt/pl processes yield an image that is its own surface? Is
it because of the amount of fine detail possible--re: Judy's historical
reference on platinum's comparative inability in this regard? Does albumen
confound the distinction between the overcoat and the image as surface in
offering Kinetic Tactility? Do all prints have both types of tactility
and highlight one and suppress the other, or do they have but one type?
Here, the message breaks off....
Ron