From: Lukas Werth (lukas.werth@rz.hu-berlin.de)
Date: 03/14/01-04:54:15 AM Z
At 11:26 13.03.01 -0500, you wrote:
>Luc Novovitch wrote:
>
>
>>A reflexion about permanence... if I may. After being a photographer for
>>more than 25 years (read making a living from my photography) it seems to me
>>more and more that permanence is a would be photographer/sunday
>>photographer/I have a day job photographer obsession. After almost 3 years
>>running my own gallery, selling my own pictures (silver prints and pl/pd and
>>soon carbon if I can master the &^%#@$@ coating!), no one, nobody, never
>>asked about permanence of my images. I'm not talking about the average
>>person pushing the door. I'm talking about buyers. I do have pix in museums,
>>private collections, on people's walls, in people's drawers probably, etc...
>>And nobody never asked about permanence. So my question is: who cares?
>
>
>Luc,
>
>There is another possibility other than the one you suggest, i.e. that
>people don't care about permanence. It could be that most of these persons
>are so ignorant of process that it never even crossed their mind to
>question the permanence of a photograph? In other words, they might not
>even be aware that there is a problem of permanence!! You can't be
>concerned about a problem if you don't know there is one.
>
>Sandy King
>
>
>
>
>
>
A somewhat belated thought on permanence: I don't know whether this is
proven by historical sources, but I once read in an autobiography of
Leonardo da Vinci that he was concerned in his lifetime about the already
noticable prospect of dammage for his fresco "The Last Supper". However,
without digging deeper in my shaky knowledge of art history, I think the
point can be safely made that permanence has been a concern among
occidental artists for a long time who tried to make their products to
last, and the same goes for other cultural products.
Japanese aesthetics is, I think, interestingly different in this respect:
transiency is taken as an intrinsic part of beauty.
So, I think, whatever the general public demands, a concern for permanence
is not completely out of the way, and IS an artistic statement, an
acknowledgement of a certain tradition, if you like.
Again, this is not debating the value of kallitypes!
Lukas
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