Re: Charcoal Prints

Mark,

You may well be right.

I am forever getting P.O'd. about photographically illiterate idiots who
call their inkjet prints "carbon prints" because they use carbon based
inks. Then there is another branch of idiocy who apparently they want to be
in the same league with Josef Sudek and call their inkjet prints "pigment
prints."

I got a call once from a platinum printer who was equally twisted about a
show of "platinum" prints in Santa Monica where the guy used a "platinum"
ink set in his printer and then put brush marks on the edges with Photoshop
to complete the fraud. Actually not so much fraud as the gallery owner said
what they really were so this guy, like the aforementioned, perhaps had not
a clue as to what a platinum print really was.

The shuck and jive is that folks really are not that comfortable with what
they are doing and look for terminology that obfuscates what the prints
really are. Cohn prints, giclee prints, piezographs, carbon prints,
platinum prints, microdispersion prints, Iris prints, and others I can't
remember, are used in place of the term "ink jet." Everyone knows what an
ink jet print is so my guess is the other terms are just used to put fog in
front of a naive buyer's eye.

The handmade will always have an add-on value because of it human element.
My first lecture to my classes in alt printing at the local college goes to
the heart of the idea of the handmade.

Many if not most come to the class after having taken a digital class. I
play devils advocate and ask them why do they want to take all this trouble
to make hand made alt prints. Most are dumb struck. They have a gut feeling
they want to but really don;t know why and can't verbalize it. Santa Fe has
a huge art colony and a very healthy fine craft furniture segment. You can
buy desks and chairs in the $20,000.00 and up range. When I point out that
much of that fine furniture has dovetails that are cut by hand and could be
cut finer and better by a dovetail jig, and that a dimensional drawing
could be made and the finest handmade rocker could be turned out in minutes
on a CMC wood mill-lathe, and in fact Gone With the Wind style staircases,
once the product of a year's worth of work by a whole crew of craftsmen is
now turned out in a day by computer driven machines. Why then does the
handmade furniture piece command such high prices. Because it reflects and
revels in the idea of craft. hand craft! Most of the students light up at
this point. In fact our digital department invariably tells students that
wet photography is dead and that there is no reason to do anything but
digital now. They came not believing it but not knowing why they didn't
believe it.

I ramble.

--Dick

--Dick

At 10:29 AM 3/7/2004, you wrote:
>Carl,
>
>The Luminos Charcoal paper is a beautiful Silver Paper. I have used it
>with digital negatives and had it toned so that the surface looked like
>brown sugar crystals, for lack of a better description... one of my
>favorite Silver Papers.
>
>Mark Nelson
>In a message dated 3/7/04 7:13:34 AM, cweese@earthlink.net writes:
>
>
>>Jim,
>>
>>It might be something special, or they could just be making a big deal
>>out of prints on Luminos "Charcoal" paper. It's a thick, expensive,
>>textured silver-gelatin paper with a unique look. I've seen shows where
>>prints on it were presented as though it were more than just another
>>manufactured silver paper with an unusual surface.---Carl
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Mark Nelson
>Precision Digital Negatives
Received on Sun Mar 7 13:12:48 2004