I proudly subscribe to LensWork, the only photography magazine focused entirely on photographs (as opposed to cameras). The editor, Brooks Jensen, has a keen eye, tremendous experience, and never takes sides on pointless issues. For the longest time, the magazine was adamant that their special edition reprints were real photographic prints, not lithographs, and certainly not inkjet prints.
So it is troubling to this young luddite, so fond of making his own B&W prints in the darkroom, to read the results of Mr. Jensen’s tests with the latest crop of fancy inkjet printers and coated inkjet photo paper: “They are every bit as good as the gelatin silver paper I printed on for years. In fact, the Dmax black densities are even greater than I was able to reproduce in the darkroom with selenium-toned prints! The surface textures are lovely… The ‘feel’ of them is just wonderful.”
There you have it. In the short time since I took up photography, I have watched digital technologies equal or surpass silver at a number of metrics. First in resolution. Then at noise. Then dynamic range. And now falls the print. The significance is less about analog vs. digital than about what makes a “fine art” print so desirable. A gelatin silver print hanging in an art museum was almost certainly exposed from an original, one-of-a-kind negative in the artist’s darkroom, burned and dodged with light shaped by the artist’s own hands. Now black-and-white photography enters an era in which machine reproductions are equal to or better than what we currently call the “real thing.”
How will we value art when time-consuming and expensive originals become indistinguishable from copies? Will we need dealers? Will we need museums? The music industry is already asking similar questions, but at least they will always have the live performance.
I was going to write a lot more. This will be a question of value for future art-lovers to make. This is a phenomological issue as I see it. Will we need dealers? Will we need museums? YES, now more than ever, if we are to value the artistic process, then dealers and museums will be more important than ever. Even if indistinguisable from the prints made from the original negative, I would much rather see the first print the artist made from a beatiful negative than see an identical, perhaps more “beatiful” copy.
It is not simply about image, it is about process foremost, about history, and about being “close” to the artist. And only by being within a few inches to the original can we capture the full body of experience that interaction with “art” is all about.
The museum and the dealer will be even more important in ensuring, to people like me who value the originals, that we are looking at the authentic article.
Otherwise we’ll have nothing but a society of mindless art “lovers” with identical, indistinguishable copies of actual art hanging up on every 12 year girls bedroom wall.