Re: The value of the handmade

From: Richard Sullivan <richsul@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: The value of the handmade
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 09:30:09 -0700

> I kind of switch around between using "historic processes" and "hand
> made photographs." Alternative just doesn't cut it with me, sounds
> too much like acupuncture or homeopathic medicine and has sort of a
> Mickey Mouse connotation now.

To me alternative photography sounds like pornography. (One of the
women for whom I took some portfolio/comp cards/etc. photographs
started an adult entertainment work and then started an agency called
alternative modeling or something.)

> Historic processes will soon add gelatin silver to its terminology
> as it is coming to mean just about anything but digital.

I think one thing that must not be forgotten is that silver gelatin
was just another photographic process and it is older than some other
"historic" processes. It is just that the technological factors
matched well with this process so that this process had become the
central focus of commercial production of photosensitive materials.

Needless to say anyone can mix KBr, AgNO3 and gelatin in a mug cup in
a hot water bath in a certain way to make silver gelatin
emulsion. It's just that not many people are willing to do such a
thing when films and papers can be bought for pennies per frame and
get a lot higher fidelity reproduction with ease.

Again, more on this later.

--
Ryuji Suzuki
"Well, believing is all right, just don't let the wrong people know
what it's all about." (Bob Dylan, Need a Woman, 1982)