Artists working in "print" media like etching, engraving, etc, work
through a series of "states" to reach the final print, and the process
is highly interactive. Study of the pulled print leads the artist on to
the next modification of the plate, or creation of further plates in
multi-impression work. This is actually parallel to the way a majority
of "straight" photographers approch printing in either platinum or
silver, in the process of making work prints. Critics and curators just
love getting their hands on early states of a Rembrandt etching. The
ones interested in photography get just as excited about a Strand work
print.
One should be careful about imagining how photographers work just
because they might claim to "(pre)visualize", and it would certainly be
incorrect to assume that most "straight" photographers actually believe
in that fallacy. The major prophet of this idea himself didn't actually
practice it. If you saw a gorgeous early 8x10 contact print from Ansel
Adam's first portfolio, and then saw the same picture as a 16x20
enlargement four paper grades more contrasty in an exhibition of his
late work, you'd be hard pressed to believe they were made from the same
negative. Ansel's interaction with some of these pictures continued for
about fifty years. (I like the early prints much better than the late
ones, but obviously he felt the other way).
In my own work I generally get the technical details reasonbly close so
that a technically adequate print, one that gets the full range of
subject detail and matches it to the range of the paper, can be made
pretty much on autopilot. But that's what's called a "first work print".
The beginning of the interactive process of photographic printing in
either silver or platinum (or maybe both for some pictures). It is very
much more rare for that first work print to make me say "yes! *that's*
what I saw, that's what I was looking at, that's what I wanted to
photograph". (This happy event is, oddly enough, much more frequent when
I print in platinum than in silver.) On the contrary, it takes the
interactive sequence of print after print to "find" --in the print
itself-- the interpretation that reflects my motivation.
Now, it happens that I've lived with an accomplished painter for over 25
years. We've of course watched each other work for all that time. I
understand what you are describing as interaction: Tina often hits a
point where she turns a canvas to the studio wall and refuses to look at
it again for six months. I don't find that there is an essential
difference between that and the work print sequence (which often has
six-month breaks in it): both are methods of working from feedback,
interactively, a give and take between the artist and the
work-in-progress.
The fact that a single object--a canvas or panel, or gum print--receives
each "layer" of feedback and response doesn't strike me as an important
difference from that feedback affecting a series of objects--Pt/Pd
prints or the states of an etching--which finally arrive at the desired
result. It's obvious that the physical activity of gum printing
resembles the painting interaction more than it resembles the platinum
or silver printing interaction, but you've not convinced me that it is
in any way more interactive, or interactive in some higher way, because
of that.
<As I see it, what you describe is fine tuning, or even
<broad tuning, but not the sense in which I would use the term
<"interactive."
If the difference between a masterful photographic print and a useless
one is mainly seen in its subtlety of interpretation, and it generally
is, then what you are calling "fine tuning" is the interaction that
counts.
---Carl