Digital BW, The Print

Tyler,

I'll rant with you!  lol  You are of course right.  The two issues are really convenience and "good enough".  I have never been shy to be shot down in flames on this users list. Although I admit I gave up on this list somewhere back a few years ago - and probably as a result of that, it is reverting backwards to printing with black ink only again. I should have been more thick skinned I suppose...lol. o'well

So, at SPE I reviewed a portfolio by a photographer that was marvelous. She shoots people who are shooting with cell phone cameras. The photography was incredible. Really unique. I loved it perhaps even the more because I happen to like shooting with cell phone cameras. I believe they are culturally important in a visual context. Anyway - she printed it with ABW on a baryta paper and the difference between ink and paper was distracting. It stopped me because it looked like ink sitting on paper, and it interfered with my ability to see the work. And it reminded me of a stern lecture I received in college from my lithography teacher who said my first prints looked like I had shi**ed the ink onto the paper. He said lithography should be the marriage of ink to paper and that statement has always been a strong influence on my development work in ink making as well as printmaking. I've printed editions since the 1970s for artists that I believe are marriages of ink to paper. Beauty first!

In terms of longevity - I should be touting my Carbon PiezoTones and Sepia K6/K7 inks all over my websites and marketing - but I also agree that longevity is not everything - and therefore neither is carbon everything. And I don't really mention the Carbon inks as anything other than an aesthetic choice.

Anselm Keifer, DeKooning, Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman just to name a few - along with Leonardo DiVinci have all used extremely fugitive materials in their art making that has not seemed to curb their careers nor influence.

My belief, and I may be shot down as a result of saying it, is that digital printmakers feel inferior still to traditional printmakers - and therefore jump on longevity as if its some way in which to attain the same level. That type of thinking is wrong in my opinion. If you set your sights on some level, you will never exceed it, and you will always be a slave to trying to attain the same level of something that you feel inferior to. This has plagued digital fine art printmaking for as long as I have been involved with it - which is 27 years. But, it is not something I have ever allowed myself to be swept up into.

I watched in the mid-1990s as some group tried to set "standards" for fine art digital printmakers - these same standards prejudiced against the most important and influential artists of the day - like Hockney who was doing some early digital work - and certainly against many of the editions I had been producing since the mid-1980s. It fell apart under its own weight. I affectionately referred to it as the International Association of Digital Fine Art Police.  They called themselves the International Association of Digital Fine Art Printmakers. I was asked to run for President.  icccckkkkkk!   I ran away from this group as fast as I could because it seemed like the anti-christ of fine art.

You can not put "fine art" into a set of parenthesis - ever. It only backfires on your intentions of promoting it. Fine art can be fugitive. Hockney said it best when he said something like what is the use of art that will last forever if it doesn't look particularly good.  or to that effect. You echoed it yourself. It really is a universal thought uttered by artists since they began working with material other than stone.

Is Cindy Sherman irrelevant because she likes C-Print? She gets $100,000 a photo that has a short chemical life. C-Print has a very certain look that some photographers prefer over more archival or/and fade-resistant alternatives. If art is important enough to preserve, someone will. But I would hate to see all of my customers only using my Carbon Sepia or my Sepia inks. It would be a terrible waste of creativity. I'm not opposed to making prints that will outlast the papers they are printed on as a practice - but I also do not want to see artists and photographers having to fit into a pre-determined set of aesthetics, or feel that they are not in some "club".  Digital printmakers do this to themselves over and over again. It's like we never learn - yet the day of digital is not tomorrow coming - its yesterday already. It's more than arrived.

We here are for all practical purposes the last vestige of material photography. Even inkjet one day, will be cast aside because of the pollution paper making causes. It will all end up one day on the big screens. B&W will eventually be a subset of color. Epson will be Kodak. They protect their LCD technology to such a point that they have been fined multi-millions by our own Gov't for market interference. Photography is temporal at this point. It should be made beautiful and it should be made to last without eating itself up in chemical deterioration. This is longevity vs archivability.  Roarke is correct in wanting to use papers that do not have inkjet coatings if his concern is to print on papers that will last as long as possible. But as one carbon supplier to a carbon promoter, if you print images of significant importance - history will preserve the work. It does it for you, so you need to concentrate on what it is you have to communicate. Even the Mona Lisa is fragile. DeKoonings often burst in sunlight because of his tendency to favor Joy dishwashing liquid as a paint medium. Art is imperfect. That is what makes it so ideal in a world which is often not.

My rant for today is if you can't make it as beautiful as possible, why make it?

Jon Cone
Piezography



--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "tboleyyh" <tyler@...> wrote:
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> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "piezobw" <jon@> wrote:
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> > However, if longevity is not so critical - and image fidelity is not the most important factor - than why not just print in color and use Epson ABW?
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> well because it sucks. I can get away with that, perhaps the backlash for you would be too great if you don't maintain a more civilized voice and stance, so thanks for helping to promote generous discourse in this community. 
> But I'm sorry, I don't want fine B&W printing to go backwards. I've argued and illustrated the superiority of the multi black systems I have access to, and compared the silver contact print, many times over the years to ABW. But that's just the technical stuff, I have to add that criteria for masterful photography has always had a technical element, it can't be helped, the process includes science. Add to that the visual impact differences. Now many don't see it, or if they do- don't care. Interestingly, often the people who are sensitive to it are those with a strong background in pre-digital fine print. Often people who don't care are new enthusiasts dslr, for whom good B&W was not even possible before ABW, so it is a revelation. We all welcome new photographers, but should they be who set the standards? Are we only trying to supply reasonable solutions to them?
> The variety of criteria, and expectations, are huge, why must any of us comply with another's? Why because one person argues to me ABW is outstanding I'm supposed to accept that? I don't expect them to use my setup. In fact, I'm somewhat jealous they have a readily available out of the box solution that makes them happy.
> I have old 3000 quad tone prints here I'd take over ABW, in a heartbeat. If it managed to force all other alternatives from the market, I'd make digital negs for platinum or head back to the darkroom. Oh wait, those solutions were crowded out of the marketplace as well. Guess what? ABW and many other "solutions" provided us now are not even as good as the old darkroom by some standards.
> Longevity has always been extremely important in photography, and historically one of the greatest scientific challenges. But what's the point of prints that last forever, that fall behind artistically?
> Thanks to everyone here working hard to develop systems that result in beautiful print, and/or promote longevity, hopefully we'll get it all, and make prints exceeding the photographic masterful quality of systems 100 years old.
> End of incoherent rant...
> ... and by the way, where the heck is spring?
> Tyler
> http://www.custom-digital.com/
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