Digital BW, The Print

The negative being the score and the print the performance, Ansel  was definitely open to new performances of his score. However, it is obvious that this is not the way to do it. He told us students back in the late 70s that he really wanted his film to be scanned  and  "reinterpreted" and printed digitally when the technology developed beyond where it was then. He said that over and over over a period of years. The technology was no where at that time of course. This is probably the excuse they have for doing this. Using his own words.

A couple of years ago the Center in Tucson had a really great exhibition all about how various photographers, Sommer, Adams, Smith, Winnogrand, Avedon,  personalized the bw process in their own unique ways to suit their own vision. There were 4 versions of Moonrise shown that Ansel had personally made over a 40 or so year period of time. They were all different, but all excellent. They just had different qualities with new papers available later, etc. However, my favorite was the first. Other people felt the last one was the best. There was no correct interpretation.

One thing for sure, I couldn't duplicate any of them on my Z3100, even if I wanted to, unless I had a couple of more grays to work with.

By the way this whole "scan the print" to make collector prints thing was done about 7 years ago by Wynn Bullocks estate. You can expect to see a lot of it in the future. 

I think the guys at Bauhaus did an excellent job reinterpreting the qualities of the Herman Leondard jazz archive after the originals were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. They were sensitively done 30x40s, with a specially designed hextone inkset on Silver Rag that did justice to the originals, possibly even improving them in some cases. The artist was still alive to supervise and the 4x5 negs were drum scanned .


john 





--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Tom Baker <tbaker1328@...> wrote:
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> David -
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> Given first rate negative scans I believe there are several on this list that could pretty well duplicate any given print of Ansels if they had it in front of them.  However, it would obviously not be possible to create something new and say that's how Ansel would see it now.
> Â 
> Tom Baker
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> --- On Mon, 4/27/09, Emerick, David N <dnemerick@...> wrote:
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> From: Emerick, David N <dnemerick@...>
> Subject: RE: [Digital BW] Ansel Adams Archival Replicas
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Monday, April 27, 2009, 7:29 AM
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> Ansel spent a lot of time in the darkroom manipulating his prints and it would require a really good eye to achieve the same image from a scan of the negative, albeit in theory, a much better approach. 
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> david
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> Ernst Dinkla wrote:
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> It would have been much more interesting to see what was possible with
> new negative scans, the best digital B&W printing possible and an eye
> for what the original prints meant to express.
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