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> To me, those high class (and high price) coffe-table books, which want
> to imitate a photograph's qualities by tri-tone high-gloss super-perfect
> printing in fact are often doing a bad job: The try to make believe that
> they can replace the original.
Klaus, your points are well taken, especially the following ones about
photogravure... but no one has mentioned what to me is the crucial
overriding difference, compared to which all else pales (so to speak).
You cannot compare or equate an image in *phospors* or light, with one on
reflective material. It's a different medium, effect and feel. It's a
*transposition* -- more or less "accurate" -- but simply something ELSE.
It's my fear that continually showing "art" as light will vitiate the
actual art experience beyond rescue.
Of course there are attractive images in light...But their relation to the
art is problematic: I'd say they're a gloss on the original, but hardly a
desireable replacement. When young people who learned art on the monitor
see the real things not lit up, it will be in some ways a let down for
them. (Hard enough these days to get them to appreciate anything not on
"the tube".)
But let me add a point we discussed & more or less agreed on last year --
about how books do or don't supply the "experience" of the original
photograph. Peter Marshall said and I agreed (or maybe it was vice versa)
that in some cases the *book* actually looks better. Better or worse,
the experience is MUCH closer to the original photograph, and the
disjunction in no way so complete.
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> .... We don't have a Hal yet. A printed image in a publication
> which still says: "Look at me, but be warned: I am not the original, I
> am just an idea of it" gives me more. And might be a good reason to stay
> with printed hard copies for certain publications for a while...
> Klaus Pollmeier
>
cheers,
Judy