Re: When will we get simple, reliable BW
2003-02-11 by John/Julie Gittins
Following this thread, and the concerns voiced about the "unfinished" nature
of our current technical devices for producing digital B&W prints, prompted the
following reflection:
One's art-making is always tied to the means one uses. This condition is both
a curse and a blessing. A curse because one is necessarily limited by the
materials/instruments he or she uses (a photorealistic painting has a different
presence on the wall -- and also poses different visual and technical issues --
than does an abstract painting, or a B&W photograph, or a ....), and a blessing
because it is only through immersing oneself in one's materials/instruments
that a transcending vision can arise. In other words, the quality of one's printer
and one's software and one's ink and one's paper does indeed affect the look
of one's prints, but these means, by themselves, don't determine the "lasting"
type of quality of what's produced. It's how they're used, how deeply they're
assimilated into one's way of working that counts the most.
Last Wednesday, I saw two photo shows (both up thru this weekend) in NYC.
One, Bernd & Hilla Bechers' "Industrial Landscapes" at the Sonnabend Gallery
(in Chelsea), presented magnificent (silver) prints that, while they nowhere relied
on the strong B&W contrasts that AA introduced (and established as "the norm"),
had a breath-taking sense of tonal fullness . The second show, W.H. Fox-Talbot's
start-of-it-all pre-1850's photographs (both the initial photograms and the later
prints from paper negatives), had a half-dozen or so prints that are so resonant
that they don't have to rest on their historical-technical importance -- they'll always
be good, in any company. That their materials were crude by today's standards
is just irrelevant to their goodness as pictures. I'm convinced that what made the
quality of the work in both the Bechers' show and Fox-Talbot's show possible was
not their technical know-how per se, but rather their living enough in their materials
so that satisfying things could emerge from them.
When Picasso said, "When I run out of red I use green", he was, I suspect,
saying that he'd use whatever was at hand to make his work, that he'd get his
imagination into green paint (if that's all that he had left), rather than wait for more
(or better) red to arrive.
At the moment, I'm trying to get a handle on mid- to upper-value tones using K-only
ink. When I can't get this kind of image to work out with K-only, I go back to Jeff
Randall's quad workflow (which I like) to get some closure. But I think I'd do myself
a better turn if I pushed on further with just the K. It would put pressure on
to find some way that would work, and maybe stretch the idea of what a portrait
can look like.
FWIW,
John
(And also, for anyone in the area this week, provides a space to highly recommend two
photo shows currently up in NYC, and Wm. Henry Fox-Talbot's work at
the International Center of Photography).
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