Vintage, Shmintage

Noted Hemphill: "If painting was the voice of God, the voice of man was the camera."

To be sure, there are exceptions to today's high-tech visual overload. There are fine art photographers who are gravitating back to such classic techniques as platinum/palladium printing, pinhole photography and other alternative processes. They are enjoying their share of success, especially as the digital revolution makes nearly all wet darkroom processes seem increasingly arcane and rare. Here, in fact, I am reminded of what photo curator Tom Beck once told me: as fewer and fewer people actually get their hands wet to create individual photographic images, these images inevitably will be viewed as the result of rare "antique" processes -- and their market value will reflect that scarcity accordingly.

But, for this discussion anyway, Hemphill -- and I -- are talking about general trends and changes.

Today one can see a move away from the traditional gold standard--vintage archival black and white prints -- in favor of edgier, and much larger, work by contemporary artists. And much of this work is in color.

"By the 1990s photography achieved economic parity...with large scale prints," Hemphill said, noting that such color photographers as Joel Sternfeld have enjoyed a healthy resurgence in popularity and sales by having their work reprinted in mural size editions. Today this Brobdingnagian growth in image size is made even easier by the increasing popularity of Iris printers, that can achieve success in tone, scale and detail with scanned negatives, slides and silver prints that would have been impossible to duplicate with traditional projection enlargement. Add to this the fact that the ink sets available to Iris printers (and to some of their Epson brethren) are archival and you have conditions that appeal to many of today's sophisticated photography collectors.

In fact this is precisely what my wife Judy and I have done with much of our work from our just-completed project depicting Venice in Winter. Using 11x14 silver prints that I have personally made in our darkroom, we have had many of our more atmospheric bxw views of the city scanned and made into huge limited edition Iris prints that are larger (3'x4' in some cases) than anything I ever could hope to make in a conventional darkroom. And they have been selling very well.

[One note of caution, however. Computer-generated Iris and Epson prints, even in signed limited editions such as we produce, may always be viewed in the higher echelons of the fine art photography market as just that: computer-generated, as opposed to hand-made. I remember, for example, respected New York photography dealer John Stevenson conceding to me that, while beautifully done black and white Iris prints of our Venice work surely can approach -- or even rival at times -- one-of-a-kind platinum/palladium prints, "my clients won't touch them." Why? Largely because Iris prints are produced with the push of a button, and not by a master printer working alone in the dark.]

In the old analog days, a photographer took a photograph on film, then either printed the negative or transparency by him or herself, or had someone else do it. Either way, the final exhibition prints most often were made one at a time and by hand using technology that was -- and is -- reassuringly low-tech, if also smelly, tedious and occasionally harmful to the printmaker's health.

This secondary procedure -- the individual printing of the image in the darkroom -- added to the final product's appeal in the marketplace as an individually made, virtually one-of-a-kind, example of genuine craftsmanship, if not a whole separate art form in an of itself.

With digital, this concept -- this quaint artistic conceit of uniqueness and artisanal craftsmanship -- barely exists. What this amounts to is the blurring of the line between original photographic prints and posters. In fact digital has created a wide -- and oftentimes gorgeous -- middle ground: the computer-generated facsimile of an original photograph, whether film or digital, that can be produced en masse after the initial prep and set-up, no matter who is pushing the button.

Or, in other words, vintage shmintage.

It's worth noting that such prints often are printed on fine art paper in signed and numbered limited editions to lend them cachet in the marketplace and to correctly set apart these beautifully printed (albeit mechanical) reproductions from a run of posters or similar reproductions that are made on comparatively much cheaper stock and offered to the general public in huge numbers.