From: Richard Sullivan (richsul@earthlink.net)
Date: 02/27/03-02:29:34 PM Z
Jeff Buck Sayeth:
>Dick's making a point here that I can neither improve on nor resist
>elaborating a bit: So much depends on who has used the medium. There was
>nothing that special about albumen except when Atget used it, nothing that
>special about silver except when Adams used it, nothing that special about
>platinum except when Arentz uses it. Art is not about "arts and crafts" but
>rather about vision. At Platypus last year, as a number of people, including
>myself, admired Dick Arentz's recent prints, I heard him remark to a
>bystander, "This stuff isn't better than silver prints. It's completely
>subjective." Gum isn't better than platinum isn't better than silver isn't
>better than oil painting isn't better than cave painting. Art does not
>improve. If there is vision, there are means at hand to give it form. An
>artist chooses one means over another for any number of more-or-less
>imponderable practical, personal, and simply accidental reasons. -jb
and Dave Rose pronounceth:
>I agree. Gum is not necessarily better than other processes. (I thought
>Jordan's bombastic description of gum was really funny).
>IMO, it's the final result that counts, not how you got there. In 1995, one
>of my cyanotype/gum prints was awarded "Best In Show" at an open photography
>exhibition in northern New Jersey. As with all my alt-photo prints, the
>outside-edge brush marks were cropped out by the window mat. The judges,
>commercial and fine art photographers, had no idea what kind of print they
>were looking at. One asked if it was a C print. I thought it was great
>that they didn't care how my print (or others) were made.
>Contrast that experience to having a snobbish gallery owner in Manhattan
>dismiss my silver b&w prints with the question, "Nice, but do you do any
>printing in platinum?"
When was the last time anyone heard:
"Nice, but do you do any printing in gum?"
The point is: what makes a process great? It does seem that we are in
agreement here that "good" and "great" are two different things.
Gum, Van Dyke, and cyanotype get a bad rap due to the Alt-photo 101
classes. I had an intern from Smith College last summer and she wanted to
keep all the bad prints. Even got excited with the carbons that had stuck
together in the trash overnight that had "interesting" creases and smears
on them.
I've been known to do "extreme" photography myself so this in and of itself
does not bother me. It is when the student does not want to learn the craft
of making a good print that it begins to bug me a bit. My intern did
eventually come around to making good prints.
This pulling the prints from the trash can routine is part of the alt-photo
teaching scene in many colleges now. I do not think many here would
disagree that with virtually any alt photo medium, learning how to make a
finely crafted print is going to take a bit of time and some intense
one-on-one teaching. One teacher with 20 students in a 3 semester unit
class alt survey does not have enough time to teach fine printmaking. That
is 60 hours or at best 3 hours per student. So what do they do? They "John
Cage" it. Manure happens so make the best of it.
Some teachers manage despite the obstacles. But many just don't have the
time or the wherewithal to deal with teaching fine printmaking. Many I
suspect just hope that their students will all go on to get MFA's and they
won't have to know this anyway.<grin>
Dave's experience was in a way similar to mine. Last year I received an
award from the Royal Photographic Society. It was a big to-do and it was
not just me as many others got awards as well. It was In Accountants Hall
in London and they had a real high end three video projection system built
into the hall and when my time came they did a min-bio with some of my
images projected on the screens. I had provided a variety of slides of my
work for scanning and there were several gums in the group. One in violet
and and several in red. Amusingly all had been made into platinum colored
images as someone figured that pt all I ever did.
--Dick Sullivan
>
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