Guest Post: Traditional Reflection Prints Will Persist

The Samsung Frame TV Mike wrote about yesterday and the day before is a commercial iteration of a concept many of us have envisioned for quite some time. I believe the concept will prevail and flourish, but the end game will be when flat panel displays reach panel bezel width, thickness, and energy consumption, features that will allow them to be placed seamlessly by your local picture framer into almost any traditional frame and displayed anywhere in a home, not just on a wall with a dedicated electrical socket nearby. We aren’t quite there yet, but I have no doubt the technology will be achieved within my lifetime.

I welcome the new electronic image display options, and I don’t see them as a foreboding sign of extinction for traditional handcrafted prints. The photographic print is already a niche market in our modern age of smart phones and electronic social media (not a newsworthy statement to most TOP readers!). Hard copy printing is entirely optional. A relatively small percentage of consumers bother to routinely make them anymore, but that said, traditional reflection prints are still a viable market. They persist for good reasons and will continue to do so. Photographic prints have a universally perceived physical integrity that digital images simply don’t have. Signing a digital image in a way that has an intimate and tactile connection to the artist isn’t possible, so I’m not worried at all about digital image files entirely eliminating the need for a traditional handcrafted print.

Last year I made three full 1:1 life-size scale prints of a digital image taken by my daughter-in-law of my first grandchild. I scaled the image from known measurements in the original scene. My daughter-in-law’s photo shoot with her one-year-old daughter paid subtle homage to Irving Penn’s Corner Portraits, but the primary impact of this printed image to those who see it has mostly to do with its 1:1 scale. The finished work is pencil-signed by the artist, overmatted with 8-ply conservation rag board, and mounted in a traditional wood frame under acrylic glazing. Digital signatures and flat panel displays somehow aren’t quite the same, in my humble opinion, and I wouldn’t know how to ensure color, tone, and physical attributes of the image remain the same after today’s modern flat panel displays get discarded for the next generation of displays in just a few years.

I always print for longevity. I believe that photographs by their nature tend to hold out the promise of a persisting image, i.e., long life, whether that promise is realized or not. Thus, I choose materials and processes that have been vetted with this goal in mind. Barring fire or flood or some other unforeseen catastrophe, the three signed and framed copies should hold color and tone and physical attributes for a very long time...well beyond my lifetime, and well enough for my granddaughter's grandchildren to view the image colors and tones as I intended them to be seen. I have no idea how to achieve this provenance with a digital image hosted on a flat panel display or using digital files stored with no matter how many redundant copies in the electronic cloud.

Mark

Mark McCormick-Goodhart is the Director of Aardenburg Imaging and Archives.

©2017 by Mark McCormick-Goodhart, all rights reserved

TOP/Yale Spring Photo Book Offer
(Ends June 30th or when supplies run out)

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Brown: "Hear, hear!"

Comments

[Jim]

My unease with the digital sldeshow is the issue of contemplating an image. How do you choose the timing? If you see one image in passing and want to really look at it, you need a remote that can pause or reverse to allow lengthy viewing. But a paper print won't allow zooming in on details!
Two more recent events-
I was talking to a friend last week that we have gone on photo expeditions with who admitted he had not made a print in more than 5 years. I admitted that I had not either.
But as we are packing to move from the farm to the city, I found myself distracted by framed prints I have displayed for years, some over 40 years, that I like so much I will continue displaying forever.

[Kurt Friis Hansen]

Traditional pianos will persist
Traditional telephones will persist
Traditional typewriters will persist
...ehhh...
Does it matter?

[Brian Taylor]

Your grand-daughter seems happy enough with her portrait, but I'm reminded of an occasion some years ago when one of our neighbour's young daughters came into our house. Upon seeing a photograph of herself on the wall she became visibly perplexed, pointed to the photo, and said "there Fleur". After pausing for thought she then pointed to herself and said "here Fleur", and burst into tears!

Until that moment I'd been sceptical about Jaques Lacan's theory of a 'mirror stage', which suggests that there's something fundamental about how reflective images help us learn to think of our selves as objects. Perhaps your daughter-in-law had this in mind too?

[Allan Graham]

What an absolutely superb photograph. It's a very subtle and clever compositional design, but the contrast between the expressions on the child's face in the portrait and as photographed is priceless.

[Ken Tanaka]

Yes Mark, the print will remain an anchor of photography. Most of the best work will always be eventually printed in one form or another as it's shared and called-out. Family memento archives? Most will be lost and forgotten.

But your image of your granddaughter in front of her life-size portait is very charming. It looks great on my iPhone! 😉

[Daniel]

While many electronic screen images are beautiful in many ways we don't see surface texture from the paper as the artist intended. (at least some plan for this) Carbon with a three dimensional surface loses it when displayed on an electronic screen.
Both have their place in our world and I enjoy both but it is difficult for me to get subtle surface interpretation from a screen.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

If I'm displaying my own images on a digital panel, then you are seeing them "as the artist intended." Within the constraints of my chosen medium (but the same is true for papers, right? always has been for me anyway).

The issues get more complicated of course when we talk about buying rights to display images by other artists, which has come up both with Mike's distributed gallery idea and I believe others. In Mike's gallery case at least, he addressed this by using the same monitors throughout, profiled, so that the artist could be reasonably confident that what he previewed looked a lot like what the end viewer saw; that puts the artist in very nearly the same position I would be displaying my own images on my own TV.

[Exactly so, David, and it is an important part of the idea. --Mike]

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Traditional wood frames, eh? I've been framing by preference in metal-section since the 1970s. One reason for that is that wood isn't very good for paper products, generally.

[MHMG]

As long as one doesn't use wooden backer boards in direct contact with the artwork and/or conservation rag board, wood frames are fine for conservation purposes based on my experience although others would beg to differ. The inner frame edge can also be sealed. In my case, I isolate the artwork from the frame with a vapor barrier that in turn creates a more stable microclimate, so with proper attention to details, wood frames do not necessarily violate the rules of good conservation framing practice.

cheers,
Mark