From: Robert W. Schramm (schrammrus@hotmail.com)
Date: 08/17/02-11:39:22 PM Z
Shannon,
I don't think most alt process printers dislike silver/gel. The reason
for using other processes has to do with getting a different look i.e.
different from gel/silver. Also by coating your own paper one has a choice
of multiple sensitizer formulas and different papers.
I think you question on the different color of platinum prints has to do
with the spicific fomula used and, more important, the developer.
Some platinum prints are also toned.
Every school of fine art photography, like the f 64 group, has been a
break with what has gone on before. Of course there exists snobbery in art
so there will always be those who critisize one method over the other.
Personally, I pay little or no attention to those who would tell be what it
correct and what is not. Art is all about the freedom to do whatever you
wish in order to create the image you desire. The more choices, the better.
BTW, my understanding of Weston and the other silver/gel f 64
people is they did a lot of planning and even created maps for dodging and
burning. I had an interesting conversation with a woman who like I had won
an award for photography at a regional art show. She was in to large 16 x 20
gel/silver prints which were beautiful. She was asking me questions about my
work (alt process) and I was asking her about her techniques. She did a lot
of dodging, burning and local development control. Each print was a project.
She told me she made 22 prints before she got one she liked. The other 21
went in the wastebasket. I don't know about you, but I've also thrown away a
lot of prints. Those who are not informed, think we photographers turn out
prints like cookies from a cookie cutter. Well, maybe some do, but Weston
didn't.
Bob Schramm
>From: Shannon Stoney <shannonstoney@earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>Subject: Weston, and why not print silver gelatin?
>Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 20:16:34 -0700
>
>I saw the Weston show today in Chattanooga, and it brought up some
>questions
>for me about why we do what we do. I mean, if somebody could make a silver
>gelatin photograph that is that beautiful, why look anywhere else for an
>emulsion? These were as beautiful as any platinum prints that I have ever
>seen . Not that I've seen a huge number of platinum prints, but I've seen
>some really good ones, like some by Kenro Izu, and there were some by
>Weston
>himself in this show. The platinum prints in this show were sort of sepia
>colored, unlike the more modern ones I've seen, and that's another question
>the show brought up: do they age to that color, or did Weston just use an
>emulsion or developer that made them look that way?
>
>Of course most gelatin silver prints are not as beautifully printed as
>Weston's. Which raises the question: how did he do it? Besides being
>totally obsessive, I mean. I know that he used a pyro developer, but were
>there any other crucial things? There was a good video where various sons
>and lovers talked about Weston, and there was a picture of his darkroom, a
>very small and primitive affair, with apparently only a lightbulb for a
>light source. Or am I mistaken? Somebody on the video said that the paper
>available in Weston's time was different, so that Brett and Cole's later
>prints from his negatives couldn't look the same as the prints from the 30s
>even if they printed exactly to his specifications.
>
>If anybody knows of a good book about Weston, I'd like to know about it.
>I've read some of the daybooks, although not every word.
>
>The other, perhaps unanswerable, question the show brought up was: why do
>some academic types diss this kind of work? I mean the super formalist,
>super fine-print, f64 mentality? It seems that for a while--that is, the
>70s through the 90s--it's almost been politically incorrect to make that
>kind of work. I kind of understand that theoretically--that is, the
>rejection of modernism as too other-worldly--but it's hard to understand it
>when you're standing in front of the most beautiful, sensual prints you've
>ever seen in your life. Maybe you can only reject that kind of work when
>you've only seen it in reproduction, or at least, you haven't seen it in
>person recently and you've sort of forgotten the effect it has on you.
>
>Anyway, I don't think this was the same show that Jed Perl reviewed,
>because
>the one he saw was "Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel," and the show
>I saw was a retrospective of Weston's whole life. Perl does say that
>Weston
>is enjoying something of a renaissance. He writes:
>
> "There is something to be said about the prominence of Weston,
>a tough-minded West Coast aesthete, in the age of the blockbuster show.
>This artist who believed that a piece of driftwood could be more beautiful
>than the Venus de Milo has emerged as a hero for the fashion-and-design
>crowd that has cashed in on a growing taste for minimalist Americana, and
>perhaps Weston's new admirers are not incorrect to think that he was, in
>his
>own way, a materialist. Weston's photographs might be said to describe
>precisely the bleached decor that you need if you are setting up a certain
>kind of ivory tower."
>
>Is there really such a growing taste for minimalism and a kind of New
>Formalism, or shall we call it New Modernism (seemingly a redundancy)
>afoot?
>(Or shall we call it postpostmodernism?) Not knowing anybody in the
>fashion-and-design crowd, I couldn't say. If this is true, though, it
>seems
>like a good thing that people no longer feel guilty, as they were made to
>feel in the seventies and even into the nineties, for enjoying purely
>aesthetic, even formalist, pleasures.
>
>--shannon
Check out my web page at:
also look at:
http://www.wlsc.wvnet.edu/www/pubrel/photo.html
_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : 09/19/02-11:02:49 AM Z CST