From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 12/16/01-04:25:27 AM Z
One would never guess, reading this, that many gum printers have learned
their craft from these “discredited” sources and are doing just fine; I
happen to be one of them. Not Scopick; I didn’t discover Scopick until
long after I’d developed my own method, so he wasn’t one of the sources
that I consulted when I was learning, but Crawford was my companion and
friend while I mastered the process, and he’s still the one I would take
to a desert island if I had to pick one source. To suggest that because
of that pigment test, (which I don’t care about one way or the other ,
and don’t think is all that important, to tell the truth) Crawford or
any other source that cites it is useless and has no credibility as a
source, is just bizarre in my opinion.
As for the vaunted superiority of the wisdom contained on this
list.... When I discovered the list in 1998, after working for years
in complete isolation, I was so excited I was jumping up and down and
wagging my tail like a puppy dog. A community of gum printers to talk
to! Right away I was asked to describe my methods, and I shared what
I do, and by golly, it turned out that according to list participants,
everything I did was wrong. I was reading the wrong texts, using the
wrong materials, you know, there was an objection to just about
everything I did. I was thrown for a loop for a while, and went through
a lot of soul-searching, and then, as I said in a post that’s no doubt
still in the archives, I went to a gallery where my prints were hanging
and looked at them carefully to see if there was something wrong with
the prints themselves, that would necessitate a change in my practice.
I decided that the prints spoke for themselves, and that I should keep
doing what I was doing. But many times I’ve thought how lucky I was
that I discovered the list only after I was already an accomplished and
exhibited gum printer; otherwise I may never have developed the method
that has worked so well for me; I might have believed it when people
told me that what I was doing couldn’t be done.
The only thing “wrong” about my practice was that it didn’t follow the
list ideology about what works and doesn’t work in gum printing. I like
to think I’ve had some effect on softening that ideology, since there
seems to be at least more lip service given now to the understanding
that there’s a great deal of latitude in what constitutes good practice
in gum printing, and what’s more, that none of us can reliably predict
what would be good practice for someone else because different rules
apply depending on the combination of materials and equipment chosen by
the individual gum printer, and we don’t have a handle on how the
parameters change as the variables change.
Some of the world’s best gum printers and thinkers about gum printing
are on this list; many of them are not. If you were to take a poll of
gum printers (and I’m talking about professional gum printers) whether
the alt-photo list is the ultimate source for knowledge about gum
printing, from some you’d get a puzzled look (what is the alt-photo
list?) and others would laugh out loud. A little perspective might be a
good thing.
It’s been suggested here that to publish information without providing
test results to back it up is a really awful thing to do (I’m
paraphrasing here because I’m in Word not in my mail program and don’t
have the exact quote in front of me), and no doubt it’s a bad, but I
don’t think it’s the worst sin. Given that we know that people don’t
get the same results when they test; for example it’s been demonstrated
here that careful testers testing even the same gum and the same papers
can get completely different results, what I see as a much greater
danger, and the source of most of the confusion, disruption, dissension,
division in the gum printing community, is when one person’s test
results are inappropriately presented as universal truth.
The reminder that Gordon sends periodically says that the University of
Saskatchewan hosts this list "as a service to the academic community." I
like to think that the academic community served here is the total
community of experts and practitioners in alternative photographic
processes, and that the respect we're expected to show each other should
extend to the entire community of which we form just a part.
Katharine Thayer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 01/02/02-04:47:33 PM Z CST