Richard Klein wrote:
>
> I doubt that Ansel Adams had a digital camera, so he probably had some
> photo-sensitive (phototropic?) material in his camera and was thus taking
> photographs. If they have since digitized his photographs and are printing
> them on Iris inkjet printers then they are no doubt gorgeous reproductions
> of his photographs. If you want to say that because the image was captured
> with photo-sensitive materials even the reproductions would be photographs,
> well... I'll go along with that if I'm in a good mood. But the Iris prints
> wouldn't be photographs just because they look as good as a photograph.
The thing is that these Iris prints are marketed and sold as
print-prints, y'know, not lithographs or reproductions, but 'originals',
just like the prints from negs. And I think that this is valid: I don't
see how printing from the negative by shining light through it onto
sensitized paper differs from printing the negative by shining light
through it, recording the light as data and then laying down the data
with inks on coated paper. Both are reproductions of the negative in
positive form with some interpretation (exposure time, contrast, burning
and dodging).
I haven't seen these prints side by side, but I have read that they are
very hard to distinguish from each other.
I am personally much happier with my large format inkjet work than I
ever was with my colour darkroom work: I have a wider range of colour
available, I have easier contrast and colour correction tools , and I
can print one print today and one print six months from now absolutely
identically without any additional testing (though this is because our
chemical colour darkroom was very low volume). Plus, if I want or need
to make 200 8x10s of something, there's no shift in colour when the neg
gets warm, no shift in focus when the neg pops in the carrier from
heating up (or no newton rings from the glass carrier)...anyhow, as a
result I shoot more colour, and enjoy it more. I find the notion that
what I am doing is not photography as silly and almost offensive.
On a side note, if 'photography' is to be limited to chemical processes,
is it limited only to specific chemical processes? Or is anything that
is chemically light-sensitive a photographic medium?
-Aaron
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