The Meaning of It All: Reflections on Fine Art Images by Dead Guys (and Gals)
Herb Chong "Fine-art photographic prints are one of the last bastions of resistance. Black-and-whites by dead guys with darkrooms are indeed the ultimate limited edition. That they command the highest prices has more to do with scarcity than image quality." Galen Rowell - Outdoor Photographer, June, 1999. I was driving around after a photography trip to Bash Bish Falls in Massachusetts one weekend and I came across the Aperture Book Center in Millerton, New York. Aperture, as you may know, is one of, if not the most, prestigious fine art photography magazines in the US and maybe the world. Founded in 1952 by the likes of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Minor White. Its original mission, according to the Aperture literature, was to communicate to serious photographers and creative people everywhere. Today, it publishes its quarterly magazine, Aperture, and publishes books on photography, and sponsors fine-art photograph exhibitions worldwide. As it happens, starting that weekend was a show commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the magazine. To celebrate this event, Aperture was holding a series of gallery shows at over 50 different galleries in New York City. Although not a part of the main celebration, Aperture's Millerton Book Center was sponsoring a show at the Tremaine Gallery at The Hotchkiss School in nearby Lakeville, Connecticut with a display of Collector's Editions and Rare Prints from the Aperture archives. Those of you who have the privilege of studying or owning the Time-Life Library of Photography volume Great Themes know the type of photography being represented. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the prints being shown at the gallery can be found in the pages of that book. The photographs being shown were a selected collection of prints from photographers including the likes of William Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston, and many others. There were a total of about sixty prints shown on the walls of the gallery, about five or six that I recognized instantly. Some of the most famous ones were Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange, Nude Floating by Edward Weston, and Wall Street by Paul Strand. Prices were suitably high for prints from this set of distinguished photographers with the least expensive weighing in at a paltry $500 and the most expensive commanding a respectable sum of $25,000, all matted and framed with suitable archival materials, of course. It wasn't disclosed how many of these were original prints produced by or under the supervision of the photographer and how many were authorized reprints from the original negatives. One of the pieces of literature nearby did say that Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange was being re-released in a limited edition run of 750 more prints and some small number of artist's proofs. Despite the very high profile and well-known list of photographers and the list of photographs I recognized immediately on entering, I was distinctly unimpressed by what I saw. It wasn't the artistic quality either. Images like Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother and Edward Weston's Nude Floating are powerful emotional statements of mood and feeling. Paul Strand's Wall Street highlights the cold aloneness that one associates with the world of finance. No, to me, the missing ingredient was physical image quality of the prints. The tonality of many of the prints was far less than I had come to believe. These prints were not only from great photographers but master print makers. Indeed, the title of the show is Master Prints, An Exhibition Celebrating Aperture's 50th Anniversary. In many places where I expected shadow detail, I found paper texture and an even black. In other places where I expected highlight detail, there was none. For yet other prints, they were flat. The blacks were not a complete saturated black and the highlights were a light gray not even fading into white, even when there wasn't any detail to be had. I could not tell if what I saw was what the photographers had wanted or produced when they made their original images. A few images stood out as having the kind of range that used the full limits of the paper's dynamic range, but most didn't. Many images were on a cream colored paper. Perhaps they were simply old enough to have faded or aged to a lower dynamic range. The William Fox Talbot photos are old enough for that. It wasn't the venue either. The prints were being shown in a professional art gallery in the traditional manner with slightly off white walls and ceilings and lowered lighting except for small spots aiming down on each photo. The wood floor was light colored and there was nothing nearby to cast any color except what people who were in the gallery might be wearing. One got the very strong impression that all of these prints were either faded from their former glory, were printed deliberately flat, or just not that good prints. There were a few color images at the show. For the most part, they were muted pastel colors. A couple might have been faded a bit, but a couple of the newer prints were more brilliant and saturated. Color reproduction and tastes in color have changed over the years and we do expect more saturation nowadays from images to look right. Still, when compared to recently released book-published versions of images from the same era, the pastels could either have been a choice or from fading. The same day, I was at the Millerton Book Center and looked at a recently released book entitled Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness. It is published by Aperture and is a retrospective of the man and his photography. It can be said with a great deal of truth that Porter was a major factor in making color a legitimate photographic medium for outdoor photography. I have also seen a long out-of-print first edition of Porter's book on the Adirondack Mountains of New York. His style is deliberately muted and pastel-like, and I often wonder each time I see his work whether the choice to photograph that way was because he knew he could get the scene to reproduce most pleasingly given the color films of the day or because he liked it that way and would have shot photographs with the same muted pastels using an appropriate choice from a film of today. Held up next to a modern-day book on a similar subject matter, one can view the newer photographs as hopelessly garish and over saturated or the older ones as drab and unexciting. A black and white photographer using the Zone system works very hard to maximize the latitude of the original negative and the resulting print to show the full tonal structure of the original scene. Many of the photos I saw at the Tremaine Gallery looked to me to be flat and uninspired prints, yet here they are attached to a list of names that I, as a modern day photographer, would surely be proud to say I shook their hand. Is the cachet value of a $25,000 original print by Paul Strand worth it knowing that a recent reprint from the same negative is a much finer technically and aesthetically pleasing print? It really makes me think, just like Galen Rowell, that "black-and-whites by dead guys with darkrooms are indeed the ultimate limited edition. That they command the highest prices has more to do with scarcity than image quality".
