Digital BW, The Print

Not every photographer has mastered the art of printmaking. Not every photographer has the patience to begin understanding print in the way they dedicate themselves to their image-making. I believe that the struggle in the darkroom has become an even worse struggle in the digital age where it's difficult to gain mastery when a barrier of technology exists to frustrate at nearly every point along the way. Hats off to those who've gained these print skills or furthered their darkroom mastery into digital print mastery.

On the other hand, Gassan wrote (as the Gestalt psychologist rather than as the photo historian/teacher) that humans are not physiologically constructed to stare into transmissive light without it affecting our ability to truthfully "see".

I believe he would have thought that the display was a way to show what one's work 'subject matter' is about, an editor of sorts, but that the prints would be the only way to convey what one's work was truthfully about. He claimed it takes a human at least 3 minutes of looking at a single image to rid the mind of all the preconceived notions and thoughts and bits of interference before the viewer can actually begin to "see" the print. The memory of each successive image on a back-lit display would certainly cloud perception as well as impose its own memory in the form of a retained latent image on the brain. Perhaps we will lose the "art" of viewing as we move into the future. Contemplation versus convenience (and speed).

Who's not heard their grandmother say.. "So, they want to display their pictures on computers... who is anyone to say they can't?"   lol

Photography is morphing into something we can't quite understand yet culturally nor historically. The print most-likely represents the end of one medium. The new photography will merge with other interactive media and become displayed eventually in the same way as any other mass conveyed digital art is displayed. Still-images taken from video or constructed in software will be difficult to discern from those made thoughtfully by some photographer insisting they are not part of the new media. Some collectors will have expensive display systems while others may have cobbled systems.

I can only imagine this discussion ten years from now. How many photographers will be printing, and if printing will be printing in B&W, and how many will be printing B&W in color? How many B&W photographers will be displaying on color displays? Carbon inkjet I believe is going to become highly collectible in the future, as the ability to produce them becomes rarer and rarer. 


Jon Cone
InkjetMall.com


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "AlanScharf" <ascharf@...> wrote:
>
> I argue with my photographer friends that the PRINT is the photograph, not the image seen on a computer. For me the print size is a critical aesthetic consideration. The eye moves (slightly) around a little computer image in an entirely different way that it moves around a real print. 
> 
> Also, the junk surrounding the computer image, including the monitor itself, pulls the image up to the plane of the monitor screen, destroying the character of the photograph as a window to the beyond.
> 
> Do any of you have opinions about prints vs screen images?
> 
> -- Alan Scharf
> Saskatoon
>