Digital BW, The Print

Bellis wrote:
     
 "I don't make a conscious effort to duplicate the look of a gelatin silver 
 print but my aesthetic sense of what any given b&w print should look like 
 was formed by many years in a darkroom and I think it's natural to carry 
 that over to ink jet. In fact I don't think I could change it even if I 
 wanted to." 
 
  And there is no reason to. All the skill and knowledge a photographer brings from the traditional wet darkroom to inkjet printing is valuable. At the core of beautifully made photographs--in any medium--is a refined vision of what a print should look like. 
 As deeply invested is digital printing as I've become, over the past ten years, I can honestly say that the "digital" part of the digital darkroom is least important to me. I simply want to make photographs by using ink on paper, and all the learning curves I've had to grapple with to make that possible are just the price of admission. 
 Personally, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a photographer; either film-based or digital. The options--including the range of media we have to work with--are amazing to anyone who remembers trying to master the Zone System and make beautiful silver gelatin prints in the mid-70's-to-early '80's. 
  
  The Texas Photographic Society, a wonderful organization that now enjoys an international membership, started as the Austin Photographic Cooperative; formed by seven photographers who had to pool their money to order Agfa printing paper by the case because our local camera stores couldn't/wouldn't keep quality papers on the shelf. By comparison, the materials we have available now--film and digital, wet darkroom and digital darkroom--is almost an embarrassment of riches (not that I don't want manufacturers to continue improving their wares).
  
 As a university and workshop teacher, I look for ways to emulate wet darkroom practice in our digital printing labs. And, while some portion of the vocabulary changes, the way we talk about prints, and do critiques, is the same regardless of the method used to make the print. 
 
  Bill Kennedy K2 Press Austin, Texas
        
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