Printing is on my Mind
There are so many more opportunities to see so much more photography today, given the astonishing number new electronic ways to share photographs and to find the photographs of others. Through blogs, Flickr, the many photo web sites and discussion forums, photographer’s web sites, email, you name it, we all experience a flood of visual media. While not all of it is great stuff, quite a lot of it is interesting and the sheer variety is astonishing. I don’t know how much time you spend intentionally looking at photographs, but I suspect that I may look at over 100 per day. (I’m not counting the images that we are exposed to by don’t actually give attention to – add those to the mix and the total would be much, much higher.)
But one thing has perhaps been lost in all of this, and that is the appreciation for the printed photograph. The majority of today’s photographs never make it off the screen, and I know of quite a few photographers who virtually never make a print or even send their photographs out to have someone else make a print for them – their entire experience is with the on screen versions. I think this is unfortunate. There are many things about viewing a print that are special and that are not generally experienced by viewing a photograph on the screen.
For one thing, there is something about viewing images on the screen that encourages us to look quickly and then move on. (This effect is not limited to photographs; it happens with print media, where most readers won’t stick with anything longer than a few pages on the screen.) But often a photograph does not reveal itself fully to a cursory view. Good photographs are like great pieces of music: while they often do have an initial impact, the best photographs allow the viewer to discover more and more about the image with longer consideration and repeated viewings. It may come as a surprise to some, but I don’t always fully understand my own photographs until I print them and look at them over and over.* If you want to give yourself the opportunity to grow into understanding a photograph, I’m convinced that you’ll have much better luck with a print than with an ephemeral image on the computer screen.
There is also something compelling about the physicality of the print. It has depth and texture; the surface reflects differently depending on how you look at it; its dual nature as image and as mere pigment on paper becomes even more mysterious.
I have been printing a lot recently, primarily for myself – I made perhaps 50 prints during late December and early January.
Speaking of prints…
My friend Jim M. Goldstein is giving away some tickets to the upcoming Epson Print Academy events. (1/31/09 in Seattle, 2/7/09 in San Francisco, and 2/21/09 in Los Angeles). I’ve heard a lot of great things about this program, so wander on over to Jim’s blog and take a look at his post on this topic to find out more. And even if you don’t end up with one of the free tickets, Jim’s post has some information about good discount pricing on tickets to the event.
* One reason I’m thinking about this has to do with a photograph of mine that was used on the cover of Wallace Stegner’s West, recently published as part of the California Legacy Series by Heyday Books and Santa Clara University. (I’m especially proud of this usage, since I was already a big fan of both the “west” and of Wallace Stegner’s writing.) The photograph is of a place I visit very frequently, and while I like the photograph it hadn’t spoken to me beyond being a beautiful image of a place I know well. Something happened as I was reading the book; I looked at the photograph on the book cover one evening and realized that it is very suggestive of a thematic idea that, to me at least, seems associated with something that I take away from Stegner’s writing. I won’t go into the details here, but the point is that I didn’t understand this about my own photograph right away.
G Dan Mitchell :: Jan.08.2009
Commentary, Ideas
2 Comments - click to comment
I was actually thinking about this too today at a bookstore. I was looking at a book by Galen Rowell, and I was amazed at how much different it is to see photos on print versus seeing them on flickr. I am torn on printing my own photos though. I am still building my own camera set up, so would rather save money to buy new lenses or a better tripod over printing photos.
But maybe I’m looking at it wrong, and I should enjoy the good photos that I have now. Do you have a method of displaying the prints you make, or do they go into storage somewhere?
Thanks for posting. Glad you enjoyed the Rowell photos. I guess I should have included the “photo book” in my little write-up, too. The experience of viewing the book is different from viewing online images and from viewing single photographic prints I think, but I’m all for viewing well done book prints. (If you ever have the opportunity to visit the eastern Sierra Nevada, stop in at the “Mountain Light Gallery” in Bishop, where many of Rowells photographs are hung as prints. I think you will really enjoy that if you are becoming a Rowell fan.)
I think that if you end up feeling that “the print is the thing” that you’ll eventually want to try doing your own printing. I think this is the only way that you can follow your vision for your photographs all the way through. But I also understand the dilemma of figuring out what to do next when you are still building your system, especially if getting a printer now means that you cannot make certain shots due to equipment limitations. Life is full of choices… and so is photography! :-)
As to what I do with my prints, there is not a single answer – it depends on the photograph and on where I am with that particular photo. I print some photographs at the request of a client who wants to purchase one, of course. At the other extreme, I make small prints of many new photographs so that I can hold them in my hand, see what they’ll actually look like as prints, and consider them over time. At the moment I have a stack of more than 50 such small prints sitting on my desk. I print some for display in my home. I’m working on assembling at least three portfolios right now, so I’ve printed many photographs for that purpose.