Digital BW, The Print

Todd & Jennifer, 

I suspect that if a "traditional" printer making silver prints could ever get the "perfect" print made (using whatever tools...masks, dodging, bleaching...papers...exposure settings...toning solution mixes...etc..)  then they themselves would want to "duplicate" that perfect image.  If Kodak or another company made a gizmo that could be used in the chemical darkroom to duplicate that perfect image...it would be used....(consider the machine print in all its glory).

Think about it another way. 

If there are so many variations involved in the 'hand printed traditional print'  it is perhaps because the printer (the person) is incapable of making more than one "perfect" print.  In other words, all others are "imperfect" and flawed to some degree.  

As for the time involved in the pursuit of the image/print....I believe that I spend enormous amounts of time on my digital prints and digital artwork (literally hours!)...and I throw away many "imperfect" prints (or cover my darkroom walls with very expensive mould-made watercolor 'wall paper')...all in the pursuit of what I consider the "perfect" print. 

I am not in the business of producing hundreds of prints (whether the print is considered fine art or not)...I produce very small quantities of what I consider "perfect" prints.  In some cases it is a true "mono-print" as there are no others made of the image.  

Now...when I attain that perfect print/image....I can offer it to my client.  

Why would I want to sell my clients anything less than the very best I can produce? 

Or...consider an artist like Rodin.  He did the clay study, the clay study was made into a scale model at full size by an assistant...and that was then used to make a mold...that was then used by the foundry to produce a series of statues.....the final product may have never been actually "touched" by Rodin.  Yet, each is considered a masterpiece of art...(ok maybe this analogy is a different medium...)

With a different perspective, 

Steadman
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Todd Flashner 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 1:12 PM
  Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Some additional thoughts Carbon v. Silver



  > So why, other than a bit of time, and the fact that one is done in the dark
  > with chemcials, the other in daylight with inks is a digital print any less
  > valuable than that of a silver print? I may understand it 10 years from now
  > when there are fewer and fewer silver prints being made thus making them rare,
  > but right now I just don't see it.

  Maybe it's that further prints from the darkroom will all have subtle
  variations between them, as it's unlikely that a person has the precision
  for repeatability that a machine has, making each darkroom print, however so
  slightly, different from the next?

  I think we need to consider where the nay-sayers are coming from even if we
  ultimately reject it.

  What if we were discussing a piece of fine furniture, a wood chair? If you
  were looking at two seemingly identical chairs, and you knew that for one
  the artist/artisan stood over a lathe and personally carved each leg, and
  used chisels to hone out the indent in the seat, and put his latex gloves on
  to hand rub the oils - would that chair have anymore value for you than the
  other, that was from the same artist, but off his automated machine shops
  production line? 

  That's a question we each need to decide for ourselves. Some buy art for the
  final piece, some buy to support a process. Most just don't buy. ;-)

  Todd


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