Digital BW, The Print

For reasons I won't go into there is a silver fine art print by Carl
Chiarenza in my studio right now.
http://homepage.mac.com/chiarenza/Menu2.html
Like all, I am probably more biased than I realize, but none of the
quad prints here on good art papers that utilize much black suffer by
comparison. No doubt they have lower dmax, but they look rich and by
no means weak next to Carl's beautiful print.
You gotta pick the medium to make the particular image sing, instead
holding biases about particular materials. Or the reverse, pick
materials you love and make the images work on them, or some mix of
both...
I say this now because Carl is universally known as someone utilizing
a lot of black as part of his visual vocabulary, and also as one who
goes for as much dmax as possible. I could claim all day that the
quads here are as good as my silver, but it wouldn't mean anything
since you don't know if I had my silver together, we all know Carl does.
I'm positive I could not make Carl's image more impressive or even as
good with a pigment inkjet on matte. It wouldn't say what he intended.
On the other hand I venture to add that he could possibly not make a
silver print of one of my images as nice as my quad print.

At risk of angering people, I'd say that when someone says matte
prints suck, it really means their matte prints of their images suck,
or they've never seen a good one.
I could state my opinion, that there are no "photo" surface inkjet
papers that do not look artificial and cheap, and therefore inkjet
photo surface prints suck. But they probably actually don't, I just
lack user knowledge of them and an affinity for them, and such a
statement really provides nothing useful to anyone anywhere, does it?

Tyler