From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 07/23/03-07:37:47 AM Z
Ed Buffaloe wrote:
His [Stuart Melvin's] prints
> are extremely detailed, with clarity and gradation rarely seen in
> gum.
I'm sure Ed made this comment in good faith, believing it to be
accurate, but the fact is that detailed gum prints with clarity and
gradation are NOT rarely seen in gum, and to say so tends to stick in
the craw of gum printers who have been making such prints for years. For
example, see Dave Rose's work at
http://www.alternativephotography.com/dave_rose.html
Whenever I do a presentation about gum printing, I spend the first ten
or fifteen minutes showing examples of other peoples' work; the idea is
to convey the enormous range of expression that gum is capable of, and
at the same time to make the point that my pictures don't look the way
they look because they're gum prints and that's how gum prints look; my
pictures look the way they look because that's the way I want them to
look, and gum is the medium that allows me to realize my aesthetic goals
for my work, just as it allows other people with very different
aesthetic goals to realize those goals equally well. The problem with
Ed's statement is that it rest on the belief that "most" gum prints have
a characteristic look and that that look is marked by a lack of detail
and tonal gradation and color clarity and depth; this assumption is
simply not an accurate reflection of the world of contemporary gum
printing.
As I've said before, gum printing isn't difficult. Any serious would-be
gum printer who applies him/herself can come to an understanding of how
gum works and reliably produce the kind of prints he/she wants to make.
The difficulty always comes in when people start promoting their own
particular method as the end-all and be-all, that's when the wars start.
As long as it's being presented as just another way among many to
reliably print beautiful, detailed prints with subtle tonal gradations,
not as the only, or even the best, way to do so, I don't have a
problem and I say welcome Stuart; the more the merrier.
>You can view some of Stuart's work on Kerik Kouklis' site at
> http://www.kerik.com/swmelvin/.
This link doesn't work, BTW. I saw this work when Kerik posted it
earlier, but wanted to look at it again to double-check my memory of it,
but it's not there any more.
Katharine Thayer
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