Well, maybe it’s me who feels the need, but I do feel the need to make prints. Maybe I have some old-fashioned values, but for me, the goal of my photography is to make a print. Ideally, it will be a large, matted and framed print that can be viewed and enjoyed for years. But none the less, I need to make a print.
The ability to make a print is one of the things that makes photography unique. Particularly with modern digital cameras, many still photographers are migrating to video, but I’ve just never felt an attraction to video. To me, a video is like a box of slides, or a collection or music CDs – it’s not really a thing you can enjoy all by itself. A printed photograph is an actual thing that you can pick up, set down, display, and even dust occasionally. A video needs all sort of supporting technology to be viewed, and the technology needs some sort of power supply. And, you need to worry about the quality of the display device, the size of the screen, the viewing conditions in the room – all sorts of variables that the artist can’t control.
When I make a photographic print, it is what it is. It’s the culmination of my technical capabilities and artistic vision. You may like it, or you may hate it, but I don’t have to worry about whether you saw or heard it presented correctly. And if you like it, you can buy it and take it home with you. It (hopefully) becomes a valued object that you’ll treat with some amount of care since it will be hard to replace.
Last week, I took “a few” pictures of our newest grandson. I posed one photo on my blog, and also set up a web gallery of photos for friends and family to view. Lot’s of folks looked at the pictures on line, but everyone really wanted a printed wallet-size photo. Those little prints get stuck to the refrigerators, saved in wallets and propped up on kitchen tables and window sills. They are viewed and enjoyed repeatedly during the day. They’re something you can carry around and show to others without needing to plug in, log on or boot up.
The ability to make prints is one of the things that makes photography unique. You can’t sing a song and then give it to me as an object. You could paint a picture, but you’d only have one. Of course, you could use photographic processes to duplicate it, and then you could have many. I suppose book printing and binding is similar in that you can capture ideas and words and put them into a beautifully bound object that will endure. Modern manufacturing processes also allow a design for a part (or even a statue) to be created by expensive CNC machining centers, so it’s somewhat similar.
