Would making only one print increase value of photography?

[Maris]

What really would boost the value of photographs would be to stop calling them prints.

Photographs are not prints.
Photography is not printmaking.

The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) identified a class of conceptual challenges that arise because of a misuse of language and I think the underlying assumption, that "photographs" are "prints", is one of them. Photographs are so different from prints technically, historically, and aesthetically that to call photographs "prints" is now one of those unconscious deceits that become widely tolerated because they are so frequent and familiar.

The conflation of "photographs" with "prints" began, I believe, with a 19th century inferiority complex on the part of photography. Here was a new medium with no aesthetic credentials. Art critics and especially dealers burdened it with the values of the next best thing: etchings, engravings, aquatints; prints in general. A collector in search of a fine engraving might be persuaded to buy a photograph especially if it were passed off as just another kind of print and a cheaper one at that. I suggest it is time that photography cast off this aesthetic cringe to old print values.

Most photographers (camera clickers aside) know how photographs come into being but they do not know much about actual printmaking. Compressing the encyclopedia of printmaking into a couple of sentences is tricky but here's an attempt. In printing the mark-making medium, ink, paint, whatever, is not formed directly in the substrate (as in photography) but is conducted from a reservoir by an organizing matrix such as an intaglio, relief, or planographic printing plate. Silkscreen and lithography are planographic, etching and engraving are intaglio, and letter-press and wood-cut are relief processes. The key thing is that the print medium does not have to be generated anew for each copy. To get another etching one does not have to etch again. One merely has to ink up and turn the press one more time.

Photography is a very different thing. To get one more photograph you must photograph again right from the start. The subject has to be re-addressed and light collected from it, a sensitive surface must be exposed to this light, then developed, fixed, washed - you know the drill. People forget (never think?) that the subject for many photographs is an all ready existing photograph, usually a negative. If I make a photograph of that negative on ordinary gelatin-silver emulsion I get a positive. That positive is surely a photograph whether the emulsion happens to be coated on clear base or paper. To call one version a photograph because it's on film and the other a print because it's on paper seems absurd. I will admit that the world is big enough that every absurdity will find someone (many?) to champion it but dead wrong can't be turned into dead right whatever the vote.

Ansel Adams introduced an attractive and insightful analogy between photography and music and the analogy can be extended to include prints. Prints are like playing a record to get music. Photographs are like playing a musical instrument to get music. A record sounds the same every time it is played. A live performance is unique because even for an accomplished musician it is never exactly the same twice. Many music lovers know and prize the difference. That’s why they will pay more for admission to a concert that they hear only once over a record they can hear a thousand times. Some photographers have a parallel understanding about their own art and will always prize any photograph above any print.

Our familiar friend Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it another way: if you look at a photograph but say "print" then you are mentally imprisoned into thinking "print" which leads inevitably into seeing "print" where no print exists. Once the seeing is wrong strange things follow. For example, if photographs are prints then surely prints could be photographs. Impossible you say? No, it is already happening every time you are offered an ink-jet print that postures as a photograph.

Have you ever wondered why print-maker talk fits downright awkwardly with photographic production. Photographers really don't do "numbered copy", "limited edition", "print", "proof", "artists proof", BAT (bon a tirer = "good to pull"), "impression" and all the other print shop vocabulary. Every attempt to force photography into “print making” for commercial gain has a smell of artifice about it; a tacit swindle that can leave photographers, dealers, and collectors marked by a whiff of venal compromise.

And the only thing at stake is commerce not art. It is difficult to imagine a collector feeling truly fulfilled, getting more joy, in buying a “limited edition” photograph simply because they have been promised that there are a hundred more exactly like it out there somewhere. Photographs don’t derive worth from being “the same” from one example to another but prints do. That’s why extending print spiel to photographs does nothing except cheapen and commodify those photographs.

[Q.G.]

Your friend Wittgenstein would have had no problem with the notion that we make words mean what we want.
As long as we understand what is meant when we call a "print" a "photograph", or vice versa, it'll be just fine with him too.
And lo and behold, we do!

[Jedidiah Smith]

Hi Maris, just checking back on my old thread. Wow, your post is something!
That's a neat way to look at photography, and I will keep it in mind.

Jed

[markbarendt]

I do like your thoughts here Maris.

[steve]

You might want to actually know what you talking about before you make statements that show you truly don't understand printing processes.

The key thing is that the print medium does not have to be generated anew for each copy. To get another etching one does not have to etch again. One merely has to ink up and turn the press one more time.

Not any different than making additional photographic prints from a negative or transparency - once you have the film processed you can make a nearly unlimited amount of prints. For each photographic print you make an exposure onto the paper and run it through the chemical processing. This can be hand processed, drum processed, or roller transport processed.

For a hand-printed fine art lithograph (as an example) after all of the processing required to make a stable printing source which will be either a stone or plate the process for both is the same, although different chemicals are used (etching, cleaning the stone, asphaltum application, rollup in black ink, further processing) After resting the printing source to allow it to stabilize and ensure a good bonding between the gum (arabic or cellulose) and source - you start the printing process.

You clean the black ink out of the stone, reapply ashpaltum, clean the hardended gum off of the source, wet the printing source (stone or plate), and ink the source which can include a single roller or mutiple rollers inking different colors on different areas. The amount of ink applied to each area depends upon how much ink the printer has put onto the roller (controlled by how many passes are made on the inking platen by the printer) and then how much ink is put onto the printing source (controlled by the amount of ink on the roller and how many passes are made on the area to be inked). The entire process is very tactile and requires the printer to be in an intimate relationship with the image and process.

Not unlike dodging and burning areas in making a photographic print.

To continue, you wet the printing source again, dry it slightly with another sponge, dry it a bit further with a fan, register the printing paper to the printing source, put a blanket over the paper, put the tympan on top, close the press pressure bar onto the tympan, apply grease to the tympan, and run the print through the press. For every print you repeat the process - not quite "turn the press on."

Each time you run a plate or stone through the press, the printing source degrades very slightly from the printing pressure and friction from the physical printing process, until after a number of prints, the printing source is no longer usable. This is why early prints in a lithographic or etching run are usually more desirable than those towards the end of the run, and why prints are carefully numbered in a print run.

Unlike fine art press printing, the source (photographic negatives - especially B&W) do not degrade from being printed. Even a color negative hardly degrades, and in tracking the number of prints made from a single color negative - it takes about 10,000 exposures through a negative before it has to be replaced because the dyes have faded. This is from a friend who sold over 40,000 prints of a single transparency image and had the prints made from internegatives - every 10K prints, he had another interneg made.

Photography is a very different thing. To get one more photograph you must photograph again right from the start.

You're conflating creating the image with making another print from the master source. If you want to make a NEW photograph (new source) you have to go out and take it - no different than if you want a new lithograph or etching - you have to create a new printing source meaning you have to draw it onto the stone or plate.

Photography IS a print making medium if what you desire is a photographic print, and it may involve the printing process itself to create the final finished image such as images made by Uelsmann, Witkin, Robinson, etc. etc.

I thoroughly dislike your simplistic, definition of one exposure = one photographic print. That goes against the entire history of the medium.

[nolanr66]

I cannot even remember the last time I saw a photograph for sale. Sometimes I go to San Francisco and view B/W stuff at the DeYoung or MOMA. Of course those collections are not for sale. Other then that I cannot recall seeing a photograph anywhere for quite some time. However I would imagine the value of a photograph is mostly dependent on the name of the photographer.

[Maris]

You might want to actually know what you talking about before you make statements that show you truly don't understand printing processes.

True! I don't have deep knowledge of all printmaking. I merely dabbled in lithography, too demanding, and did some engraving but my passions were hard ground, soft ground, dry point, and aquatint etching techniques. But photography eventually took over and I will never go back to printmaking.

Not any different than making additional photographic prints from a negative or transparency - once you have the film processed you can make a nearly unlimited amount of prints.

To get past the negative and achieve a positive image one must photograph that negative. The negative becomes, in an absolutely literal sense, the subject matter for what happens next. With regular photographic emulsion the result of photographing a negative is a positive.

For each photographic print you make an exposure onto the paper and run it through the chemical processing. This can be hand processed, drum processed, or roller transport processed.

Yes indeed but with the proviso that exposing a sensitive surface and then conducting it through the develop and fix process is the very essence of photography and the result is indubitably a photograph.

For a hand-printed fine art lithograph (as an example) after all of the processing required to make a stable printing source which will be either a stone or plate the process for both is the same, although different chemicals are used (etching, cleaning the stone, asphaltum application, rollup in black ink, further processing) After resting the printing source to allow it to stabilize and ensure a good bonding between the gum (arabic or cellulose) and source - you start the printing process.

You clean the black ink out of the stone, reapply ashpaltum, clean the hardended gum off of the source, wet the printing source (stone or plate), and ink the source which can include a single roller or mutiple rollers inking different colors on different areas. The amount of ink applied to each area depends upon how much ink the printer has put onto the roller (controlled by how many passes are made on the inking platen by the printer) and then how much ink is put onto the printing source (controlled by the amount of ink on the roller and how many passes are made on the area to be inked). The entire process is very tactile and requires the printer to be in an intimate relationship with the image and process.

Yes, your dissertation is a superb evocation of the expressive possibilities of lithography; and its technical challenges. It was too hard for me. Etching comes a lot easier at least at the base level.

Not unlike dodging and burning areas in making a photographic print.

Both lithography and etching offer ways of manually making ink go places beyond where the stone or the plate would naturally confine it. But burning and dodging are deeply different. The dodging wand and the burning card accompany the film negative as the things being photographed in the darkroom on paper backed photographic emulsion.

To continue, you wet the printing source again, dry it slightly with another sponge, dry it a bit further with a fan, register the printing paper to the printing source, put a blanket over the paper, put the tympan on top, close the press pressure bar onto the tympan, apply grease to the tympan, and run the print through the press. For every print you repeat the process - not quite "turn the press on."

Yes, that is how it works but I did use the phrase "turn the press one more time.." which is how an etching press goes.

Each time you run a plate or stone through the press, the printing source degrades very slightly from the printing pressure and friction from the physical printing process, until after a number of prints, the printing source is no longer usable. This is why early prints in a lithographic or etching run are usually more desirable than those towards the end of the run, and why prints are carefully numbered in a print run.

Photography is very different to this. The negative is the subject being photographed in the darkroom and in theory photographic subjects never wear out no matter how many times they are photographed.

Unlike fine art press printing, the source (photographic negatives - especially B&W) do not degrade from being printed. Even a color negative hardly degrades, and in tracking the number of prints made from a single color negative - it takes about 10,000 exposures through a negative before it has to be replaced because the dyes have faded. This is from a friend who sold over 40,000 prints of a single transparency image and had the prints made from internegatives - every 10K prints, he had another interneg made.

While some photographs are fugitive to light and become altered by continued exposure the usual limits to extended re-photographing of existing photographs (typically negatives) are handling damage, contamination particularly in contact exposure processes, and operator boredom.

You're conflating creating the image with making another print from the master source. If you want to make a NEW photograph (new source) you have to go out and take it - no different than if you want a new lithograph or etching - you have to create a new printing source meaning you have to draw it onto the stone or plate.

Photography IS a print making medium if what you desire is a photographic print, and it may involve the printing process itself to create the final finished image such as images made by Uelsmann, Witkin, Robinson, etc. etc.

What Uelsmann, Witkin, Robinson, etc ended up with were photographs. Their subject matter was an assortment of photographic negatives. Those negatives too had their own prior existing subject matter, trees, bodies, faces, etc. Uelsmann, Witkin, and Robinson were in the darkroom making photographs of photographs not photographs of trees, bodies, and faces. Uelsmann, Witkin, and Robinson never exhibited camera-original photographs.

I thoroughly dislike your simplistic, definition of one exposure = one photographic print. That goes against the entire history of the medium.

It goes with the identity of the photographic medium that every photograph must start with an exposure. To get another photograph it is necessary to expose again each and every time. It is a powerful corollary of this necessity that any surface that generates picture forming marks as a consequence of being penetrated by light is a photograph.

Since this post is getting unreadably long it might as well get longer.

A curious incident in Point Light Gallery (an exclusively photographic gallery in Sydney, Australia) led me to a personal epiphany about prints and photographs.

I arrived at the gallery too early to meet the director Gordon Undy (Australian master of the Platinotype) and while I was waiting I noticed a black and white print on a work bench. It featured an American lighthouse towering over a rocky coastline. This print was very sharp with a glorious run of tones but just plain too dark overall. I picked up the print to take it up to the gallery's big bright windows when the image fell off the paper! Yes, it fell off and slid onto the work bench; not the floor, thank goodness.

That thing was a 8x10 positive on film. It had been made as an intermediate step in the preparation of an enlarged negative for the platinotype process.

While that positive lay on the paper background I called it a print. When it slid off the paper it was obviously a photograph. When I put it back on the paper to hide my blunder did it become a print again? Not only did an image fall off paper that day but the scales fell from my eyes.

The image was always a photograph! It doesn't matter whether there is film or paper behind the photographic emulsion. It doesn't matter if the exposure is in a camera (on film or paper) or under an enlarger (on film or paper). A photograph is a photograph is a photograph. We should say "photograph" and say it with pride.

And another curious insight emerged; a photograph of a photograph is still a photograph. So many people forget, or never think, that the photograph on the gallery wall is a photograph of what was in the camera not what was in front of the camera.