Digital BW, The Print

> At this point I'm only talking subjective, I'd better be clear about that.
> One point I was trying to make is that the Matte vrs Glossy may not
> always equate to density range, and the experience of an impressive
> gamut and dramatic density range on a beautiful paper surface is
> beautiful. Hopefully something we can get to one day with inkjet.
> Tyler


I know exactly what you are talking about here. I studied with Todd Walker 
who was an innovator in just about ever alternative process there was. He 
used almost all  of them at one time or another including carbro, photo 
etching, photo litho, etc. But his specialty in the 60's and 70's was photo 
silkscreen. He would act as a consultant to Rauchenburg and others of the 
time who were also interested in possibilities of silkscreen.

Todd would make many enlarged kodalith negs derived from one original 
continuous tone neg ( technically a form of posterization ). They often involved 
more than 20 registered printings on one sheet, with each negative carrying 
different color and tonal information. This allowed him to build up the density 
in layers, dryed between each printing. He called it "arbitrary" color because it 
was assigned color. An edition could take a month or more. But the results 
were worth it. I've never seen anyone work with color in such a controllable 
way at that time. All the type c prints of that era are gone and his prints are as 
good a new. His pigments were oil pigments, and later often acrylics. The 
color and black density was amazing on cotton rag papers like ones used for 
etching or litho work. 

Before Todd died he was working on an early pc with his own software. If he 
were alive today I have the strange feeling he would be finding a way to run 
the prints back throught the Epson printers again and again to build up color 
and create unique pieces that way. He was woking with offset printers that 
way and achieved amazing density and transparency out of fairly low end 
offset printers. He would be amazed at what we have to work with these days. 
We are so lucky and spoiled.

John