From: Rocky Boudreaux (rocky@pdq.net)
Date: 08/18/02-12:18:46 AM Z
"similar to Suras at North American Platinotype"
I read the above phrase and have a couple of questions.
Is this Sura that had the Paladio Company?
Are they back in business under a new name?
I used some of the Paladio Paper and was very pleased with it.
If it is and you have additional contact information I would appreciate
you passing it to me either off list or on.
Also I do believe Judy was correct, at least toward the end when she
wrote "Ye gods -- we don't need permission to like what we
like...".
Good observation Judy. Thanks to all for speaking up.
Rocky
Houston, TX
Bob and Carla wrote:
>
> Brava Shannon!
> What a perceptive, objectively considered and eloquently
> written letter! Good questions and thoughts. Weston, was if anything,
> a purist. He loved photography as a tool for personal expession, but
> he was also an artist and a craftsman. He loved printmaking as part of
> the photographic statement. I think that this kind of printmaker
> tends to make prints that are elevating, whether they use silver,
> ferrics, albumen, or whatever. EW used pre-coated platinum paper,
> similar to Suras at North American Platinotype, but it was the
> discontinuation of that factory-ready paper that helped move him to
> the silver-gelatin, factory-made papers. But also, as a photographer
> and a printmaker, he was also in the middle of a move from the
> Photo-secessionist/pictorialist approach toward the so-called, f/64 charter.
>
> I don't think there is a question of should I use either/or.....
> For my own preferences hand-coated, ferric-salts emulsions and
> silver-gelation printmaking are both important to me, if I can make a
> print of the photograph in question, elevating. There is another
> museum-grade issue with the archival difference between PT/PD and
> silver-gelatin...the noble metals do have the upper-hand in material
> nobility. I have explored less than many that attend this list, but I
> may experience other processes too as I gain proficiency in what I am
> working with now, but for myself, it has to grow with my vision.
>
> There has been a distinct prejudice for decades now, between
> the East coast/West coast schools, with much of accademia embracing
> the eastern version because of the Street School vs. Idyllic Nature
> school, which for my money translates more into, "experimantation vs.
> mastery" orientaion. Everyone, please excuse me if I over-simplify or
> misrepresent anything... Shannon, your letter was just very
> interesting, amd I wanted to put my two cents worth in.
>
> I wouldn't say, "post-post-modernism".......it's still just
> modernism. I like EW's own statement as a pure reference to modernism,
> "if I want to photograph a rock, I want the photograph to faithfully
> represent the rock.....but I want it [the photograph] to be more than
> a rock", which shows a subliminal and subjective references which I
> think could be classified as both Modern and Postmodern. But if you
> use one of the distinctions of Postmodernism that I cite, "the process
> is part of the statement", that the essence of the photographic
> process is evident in the style, whether it is an optical distinction,
> film borders, a reflection/shadow of the photographer, or in the words
> of a group f/64 member, "the transcendence of the simple statement of
> the lens...." I would include members of this group in the earliest
> efforts also of postmodernism, which puts them at a leading edge in America.
>
> I think that he rolled liberally in the material essences of the
> world that he lived in...but yearned for the spiritual essences, or
> "what ELSE things were"....where what he was viewing on the
> ground-glass made him feel JS Bach...and what a great tool
> photography is for that!
>
> Shannon, I'm glad that you saw the show and gained so much from it!
> Robert
>
> Shannon Stoney wrote:
> >
> > 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
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