Woodstock, NY

Danielle

This is Danielle in the barn at Peters Valley. We only had a few minutes to work with each model, and this was her first experience, but the result is not nearly as 'stiff' as it might have been.

In his discussion at the workshop, Herb spoke at great length about 'quality'. I've been thinking about that subject, and spent some time reading Herb's essay on the topic. While I don't disagree with what he said, I think I put is in slightly different terms.

All photographs start with an image. For the photographs to be good, there are certain things that must be true about the image. It must be strong. It must be composed in a way that makes it very clear what the photograph is about and that causes the eye to remain within the photograph. It must be properly exposed. A picture that starts as a technically-flawed image will rarely achieve greatness (although there are serendipitous mistakes). It must have a cohesive narrative - it should tell a story. And the image ideally should be something that triggers an emotional reaction in the viewer - which usually means that the subject triggered an emotional reaction in the photographer.

Good images are good images - and bad images are bad images. It doesn't matter what the purpose of the image may be - sensitive portraiture or commercial advertising, nature or sports, still life or photojournalism - the image must meet minimum criteria on these dimensions to achieve any degree of quality.

In his essay, Herb concentrates at length on what he calls "hand made photographs' - his term for platinum/palladium prints. This is the point where I suspect that we may part company a bit. Herb's thesis is that the 'hand-made' dimension of Pt/Pd prints puts them in a special category. My view is that the special category exists at the point where the print takes on an intrinsic value that is over and above the inherent value of the underlying image.

Good images can appear in books and magazines or on web sites. They can even be printed with 150-line screens on cheap newsprint paper (witness the daily newspaper). They retain whatever quality that the basic image may have in whatever medium they appear.

The element of craft is a factor in the incremental quality of a fine print. There is an obvious difference when the maker takes care to produce the finest possible print, be it silver gelatin, Pt/Pd, cyanotype, ambrotype or any other process. A knock-off workprint on RC paper can be used to successfully translate the image into a book, magazine or newspaper, but it takes craftsmanship to produce a print that will stand on its own when framed in a matt. That craftsmanship is an emotional investment by the maker.

Today, Linda and I drove down to Woodstock, NY. That's an interesting little town - lots of neat shops and galleries, with a distinctive counter-culture atmosphere. During our visit, I walked into two galleries that were showing fine photography. GallerieBMG was showing a group of Pt/Pd prints of botanical subjects by Yumiko Izo that were drop-dead gorgeous! Photosensualis was showing silver figure studies that were also very nice. In both cases, the prints on display were far more than mere images because the makers took care to make an emotional investment in their preparation.

One interesting observation - we found that the lights were off at Photosensualis. Now that's understandable - it makes sense to keep lights off to conserve energy when no one is there to view the prints. But it would be such a simple matter to have a motion detector to automatically turn on the lights when potential customers walk into the gallery. There was a person in the gallery, but she was more interested in working on her laptop that trying to help us look at the art. Sad.