Dark Prints and Viewing Light

JOHN GILLOOLY* wrote yesterday: "Mike, I think I posed a question to you years ago about Karsh after looking at a collection of his portraits of the Marshall Supreme Court that is housed at Boston University Law School. I found the prints to be very dark in the same way I think you are describing of Garo? Compared with the tones we see today, the images seem very dark overall, with even the highlights not coming anywhere near white. They are only highlights relative to the general darkness off the rest of the tones. I haven't seen any other prints of Karsh, so I wasn't sure if this is typical of all of his work? But I guess we can see where this came from.  —John, Boston."

I've never seen the prints in question, and I've never seen early Karsh prints, which might have something like John Garo's style of tonality. (Early work does tend to resemble peoples' models or the previous prevailing styles—Both Ansel Adams's and Edward Weston's very early work resembled pictorialism, for instance.) If not, though, then it's quite likely that it's a matter of viewing light.

Low light levels are common even in good museums today. This is a custom or fashion based on some mix of two things: conservation of the prints, and conservation of the institution's electric bills. (I have the latter on good authority, by the way—I'm not imputing base motives on the basis of supposition only.) In any event, it's apparent that inadequate lighting is a cross we have to bear these days. Another cudgel to the side of the head of the precious baby seal of the masterpieces of the past, forgive my hyperbole.

Outdated tech stuff
A bit of technical background: the light that strikes a print actually passes through the emulsion twice—once on the way in toward the paper base, and once after it reflects off the paper and comes back out.

There are a number of cool things that this implies. For one thing, it's critical for a darkroom printer to choose the right light level under which to evaluate prints during the printing process. I can sometimes see the printmaker's mistakes in choosing viewing-light levels when I look at prints on display. I could train anyone of visual sensitivity to do this with the right demonstration setup. One obvious example is when you go to an exhibit at a brightly-lit gallery and see B&W prints where the blacks are obviously just dark gray, not a full, rich black. Non-photographer critics can even bloviate about this like it's artistic choice, on which I call BS—it's just that the viewing light the photographer was using to make his choices in the darkroom was too dim. The dim light made the blacks seem black to him. Throw the finished product under stronger light, though, and oops! Suddenly the blacks don't look so black any more.

[Usage note: I'm in the habit of using the word "printer" in the old-fashioned way, to mean a person in a darkroom who is making a print. Now that printer more commonly means one of these**, I'm trying to use the word "printmaker" when referring to the person doing the work.

Unfortunately that's not entirely unambiguous either, as "printmaker" used to refer to a human doing "printmaking," which referred to old-fashioned fine-art methods of making prints, such as etching, woodcuts, stone lithography, silkscreening, etc. But a human in the darkroom has more in common with a human inking a copper plate than she does with a hulk of black plastic that says "Epson" on the front, so I'm doing the best I can on that front, I think. —Ed.]

Optical brighteners in printing paper also threw inexperienced printmakers off, especially if they evaluated their prints under fluorescent lights. The fluorescents could excite the brighteners and make the highlights look brighter than they would look under incandescent light, causing the printmaker to print the highlights too dark and dull. I've seen this flaw in exhibited work many times too.

When I was printing, my strategy was to look at the test strip and the guide print in various different kinds of light. (This caused me to wander around various buildings staring at the tray held in front of me like one of the Peripatetics of Aristotle, but then people in art schools and studio art cooperatives have to be tolerant of eccentricity.) I developed a sense of the right compromise. It's always a compromise, unless you know for sure in advance the light levels under which your prints will be displayed.

Light in darkness
There's another really cool effect of the light passing through the print emulsion twice. It's that when you take a negative with plentiful information in the shadows and print it dark, so that all the shadows look black from the front, you can shine a light through the print from behind the print—from the back—and suddenly see a whole lot more detail in the shadows. It's like brightening the shadows by 50%, because now the light is only passing through the emulsion once.

I once found a nice example. It was a heavy tangle of bramble in the woods which had an opening in it. The opening led to a covered interior space that was heavily shaded by the foliage above it. My print of that made the opening look a pure featureless black—but if I put a flashlight to the back of the print, suddenly it was as if you were shining a light into the inner space itself—you could see all kinds of detail in the interior.

My idea was to put a person inside the space, retake the picture, and then hang the framed print with an integral lightbox behind it. The viewer would look at the plain print and see a black opening to the copse of bramble, seeing nothing there, then press a button, turning the light box on, at which point they'd see the interior space with the previously invisible person in it looking out.

Neat idea, but of course I never carried it out. Most of my ideas bloom in my head for a while but never get reified. I'm not good on follow-through. (But getting better, as I've been working on it.) The exhibit of all the cool artwork I never made would be a good show, I'll tell ya that. :-)

Another example: There is or was a landscape photographer whose name escapes me at the moment who made giant double-unsharp-masked prints from 8x10 negatives of remote wilderness areas. He is a virtuoso and his printmaking process is technically very involved. He came to my loft in Chicago one day for a private showing of his prints. Because of the limitations of transport he showed me only his "medium-sized" prints, which were up to six feet in the long dimension. Here's what he did: first, he showed a print on an easel under normal room light, in which it looked dark and flat. Then he took two very bright floodlamps with barndoors and positioned them quite close to print. Turning them on flooded the prints with blazing bright light, and bam—they were transformed! Suddenly all the tones looked "right" and extremely vivid, and the illusion of looking at snowy mountains on a brilliantly sunlit day was startlingly realistic.

He had printed the prints to display properly under unusually bright light.

Charles Phillips. Not to be confused with the Western photographer from Mariposa of the same name. The JPEGs at the link are nothing like the real things.

Anyway, long story short (unless it's too late for that), my suspicion is that the prints you saw were printed for bold, bright midcentury viewing lighting, and you were looking at them under tepid, fey, postmodern viewing lighting. This is only a guess, but I'd need to know more to be convinced I'm wrong.

Mike
(Thanks to John)

*I reproduce all commenters' names just as they wrote them, unless requested to do otherwise.

**I actually had a dream about making prints with a big Epson last night. I'm not kidding. And in my dream, I had figured out a way to make someone else pay for the ink.  :-)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Here’s the situation

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

John Camp (partial comment): "I went to a photo show of historic prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I could barely make out the images because of low lighting and protective glass. I wanted to pull out my iPhone and turn on the flashlight app to check out the pix, but I chickened out.

"There seems to be a basic contradiction here—they want to preserve rare prints, but for what? So they can sit in drawers, unseen, until they're dead? Or they're pulled out for some kind of ritual artifact display, in which you can't actually see the photos, but have to take it on faith that they're there?

"With delicate, sensitive photos, why doesn't the museum make precise copies, which I think really good digital printers could do, and display those, so we could see the images under brighter lights? You wouldn't get to see the actual artifact, but why is that different than seeing an actual artifact (say, 'Moonrise') that was 'printed later?' And often, much later? I've also noticed that with many really old, delicate photos, some of the details are hard to make out, even under crystal clear museum glass. I think it would be very interesting to make a precise copy of the photo, right down to the the precise colors or shades, and to the exact millimeter in correct size, as the main point of a display, but then surround it with blow-ups of details, and also tonal adjustments that the curators believe would accurately represent the original, un-aged print."

Mike replies: We should get Ken Tanaka to pass this idea along to the PTB at the AIC. (Powers-that-be at the Art Institute of Chicago.) Maybe it would make its way into the art world from there. Maybe the originals could hang under a thick weighted piece of black velvet that viewers could lift briefly under the watchful eye of a guard, like this precious artifact was when I saw it in D.C.

The best way to preserve prints would be to entomb them in archival enclosures and store them in a salt mine, and never let anybody look at them. That way when humanity goes extinct from climate change, they'll be there for aliens to discover. ...After the aliens get over their surprise about the dinosaurs being all gone. "Dude, wasn't this planet just full of giant lizards for, like, eons? What the hell happened here?"

I'm still waiting for the first museum exhibit of prints made by the curators from images that existed only in digitized form prior to the exhibit. That would take a curator (male or female!) with cojones.

James Bullard: "There is one other factor that applies in printing and that is drydown. Ansel used to dry his tests in his microwave oven to be sure of the final tones. I find that drydown is even a factor in digital printing, at least with the mat surfaced paper I mostly use. Wet inks, even slightly wet inks, reflect more light."

Mike replies: Some silver gelatin papers suffered from quite a lot of drydown and some very little. For me it was just a matter of really getting to know the paper. I know I tried the microwave thing once. Decided it was a tad iffy from a food safety standpoint, since of course I didn't have access to a microwave dedicated exclusively to drying prints.

Tony McLean responds to James and Mike: "I used to avoid drydown with my silver gelatin prints by using a technique borrowed from the water colourists—I taped the washed print to a piece of 1/4 inch glass and let it dry overnight. The print was drum tight in the morning and no shrinkage equals no density increase."

Geoff Wittig: "Digital inkjet printing is very much prone to errors in value control, and prints notoriously tend to come off the printer looking way too dark. Low ambient light in viewing conditions is part of the problem, so I finally got a decently bright daylight balanced viewing light to check my prints to make sure the shadow details I intended are actually there in the print.

"A much bigger problem is the innate difference between transmitted light on the computer monitor and reflected light in the print. It's very easy to see endless shadow detail on a bright computer monitor that disappears in the print.

"The solution has two parts: the first is to turn down the monitor brightness (some authorities state 90 cd/m^2 [candela per square meter], but 'less bright' is a good first approximation). The second comes from Charlie Cramer's fabulous printing course, and is an invaluable technique. You set your Photoshop 'infopallete' so one of the readouts is in L a b colorspace. Then place your cursor over a shadow area where you want some detail to show, and check the values. The 'L' in L a b is luminosity, and gives a simple numeric value. Anything less than about 6 will print as dead black (depending on your printer), no matter how much detail you can see on that monitor. Somewhere between 8 and 12 you'll see subtle shadow detail. From 15 or so higher you'll see lots of detail. Simply using this tool saves you lots of wasted paper for prints that lost their shadow separation."

Michael Perini: "Re light traveling through the emulsion twice, When my second daughter was preparing her thesis show at University of Pennsylvania, she had an idea to accentuate the effect. She had shot portraits of women's shoes. Her idea was to print them on glass and then frame them three inches in front of a mirror. Ten by ten sheets of glass, 10x10 mirrors, and we made 3 1/2" deep shadow-box frames to hold the sandwich. We had to polyurethane the glass, paint on the 'Liquid Light' emulsion in a bottle, then process. The effect was stunning.

"She got the thesis prize that year. A nice memory. I pulled them out a few years ago, and they had faded quite a bit. I must have gotten the fixing or washing wrong. It was the only time I ever worked with liquid emulsion."

hugh crawford: "When I was in college I made the mistake of judging my exposure in the darkroom by looking at my prints standing next to a window with a sopping wet print in the tray. Between the print drying down about a stop and the bright viewing light they were pretty much viewable only in direct sunlight, or about 500 watts of Lowell Totalight (RIP Russ Lowell by the way). They were on the 'old' Portriga and it turns out that overexposed prints scan really well so it's good that I saved them. Still at the time I had a portfolio that was optimized for viewing either outdoors ('funny running into you here in the parking lot, want to see some prints?') or under really bright light. Fun fact; stores and galleries like to turn the lights up really bright because it makes people want to buy things, and painters tend to have studios that are lit to daylight levels."

Kenneth Tanaka: "We have over 200 prints by Karsh in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, gathered from the 1950s to 2014 (I think). I can't claim to have seen them all (probably most) but I can say that there is (understandable) variation in papers and general print warmth. I do not know what you would consider 'dark' but I can say that Karsh did keep the highlights of his prints below (paper) white. However, the overall impression of 'brightness' is largely conveyed via the contrast of the image. The 1946 portrait of Henry Ford II, for example, presents a brighter impression than, say, the duller 1971 portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor even though it's certainly 'darker.' But your (visual) mileage may vary.

"Regarding museum light levels, I've been on a bit of a personal campaign to visit as many of the major museums, at least in America, as possible for the past several years. (My aching feet!) I have no doubt that museums do attempt to reduce their electric bills. But I can say that any lowered lighting levels in shows at larger museums are primarily due to conservation considerations, not 'fashion' or electric costs. (Museums have become sensitive to the gripe about gloomy galleries.) Advancements in research of the effects of various lighting on print integrity have made exhibition standards for chemical prints more conservative during recent years. It has become common for loan agreements, for example, to mandate maximum footcandle-hour exposures for high-value prints loaned for shows. Advancements in LED lighting, light filtration, and glazing are gradually helping to mitigate this, but these newer technologies for world-class museums are very expensive. So it will take a while.

"(By the way, If you're interested in print conservation and you're visiting the AIC by April 28 be sure to visit Sylvie Pénichon's outstanding exhibition on Conserving Photographs now on view in Gallery 10!)

"Anyone can make an appointment to view prints in the AIC collection for just the price of general admission during the museum's normal weekday hours. Just call the museum and ask to talk with the Department of Photography's collection manager.

"Closer to John Gillooly's location, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has over 900 Karsh prints in their collection. Why not make an appointment to visit some of them this spring?"

Bruce Alan Greene: "A while back I went to see the Huntington Library's collection of original Weston prints. I guess to preserve these old prints, they display them only on occasion and...in dim light. And they looked so dull displayed this way that one was left wondering why anyone thought they were such good photographs. Even the bookshop at the museum was a better viewing experience. Sad."

Mike replies: Sometimes I think books really do give a better representation of prints than the real thing. Another example is one of my all-time favorite books, Roy De Carava: A Retrospective. The reproductions are faithful in feel, but just slightly better balanced than the real prints. They look better, read better, and seem more beautiful to me, compared to some originals I was able to compare to the reproductions in the book.

Glenn Brown: "I was once sent to Ottawa by my boss to pick up copies of his then-new book Karsh Canadians as corporate giveaways. He was very charming and appreciative of the book purchase and I had the opportunity to talk about his prints. His technique was that you had to be able to 'read through' the negative and print accordingly. They were what I would call 'thin.' After that I did print darker than before."

Sal Santamaura (partial comment): " I've gotten to the point where it's not worthwhile traveling any distance to view exhibits. They're almost always so dark one cannot see the prints anyway."

Tom R. Halfhill: "Printing dark was apparently an intentional style early in the 20th century, or so says a museum curator. While viewing a photo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art several years ago, I saw several dark prints by famous photographers. I was wondering if they had faded when I noticed a museum placard next to these prints. It said they weren't faded and were well-preserved original prints from that time."

Comments

[John Camp]

"I actually had a dream about making prints with a big Epson last night—and in my dream, I had figured out a way to make someone else pay for the ink. I'm not kidding."

Hmm. Perhaps time to get a testosterone-level test...

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. I went to a photo show of historic prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I could barely make out the images because of low lighting and protective glass. I wanted to pull out my iPhone and turn on the flashlight app to check out the pix, but I chickened out. There seems to be a basic contradiction here -- they want to preserve rare prints, but for what? So they can sit in drawers, unseen, until they're dead? Or they're pulled out for some kind of ritual artifact display, in which you can't actually see the photos, but have to take it on faith that they're there? With delicate, sensitive photos, why doesn't the museum make precise copies, which I think really good digital printers could do, and display those, so we could see the images under brighter lights? You wouldn't get to see the actual artifact, but why is that different than seeing an actual artifact (say, Moonrise) that was "printed later?" And often, much later? I've also noticed that with many really old, delicate photos, some of the details are hard to make out, even under crystal clear museum glass. I think it would be very interesting to make a precise copy of the photo, right down to the the precise colors or shades, and to the exact millimeter in correct size, as the main point of a display, but then surround it with blow-ups of details, and also tonal adjustments that the curators believe would accurately represent the original, un-aged print.

[Stan B.]

I remember when I first encountered an inexplicably darkened photo exhibit at a museum, annoying as hell, and just chalked it up to some temporary technical problem. But then it kept reoccurring... Meanwhile, paintings, sculpture, etc never lack for light. Do they save on light at photo exhibits (only) because they think the public buys that it's to "protect" the photographs?

[Michael Perini]

About 35 years ago (I believe it was IBM, could have been AT&T) had a showing of Karsh prints in the lobby of their 5th Avenue headquarters.
The prints were large--on the order of 4x5 feet they were spot lit , and got considerable base illumination. They were wonderful, and the highlights positively glowed. They were epic pictures of epic people, I loved it.
I was in MoMA last year and the photographs were actually hard to see.

I have always used a standardized print viewing light. In the darkroom, I just copied what David Vestal did, A 16x20" plexiglass squeegee-ing board, leaning back 5-10 degrees from vertical and a 100 watt or so R-40 flood about 5-6 feet away for even illumination.
For digital, instead of a print viewing booth, I illuminated a 4'x5' section of a wall (painted Munsell gray #8 with 4 Solux 5000k filtered Halogens in a track light system where the lamps were angled for even coverage and the fixture was moved back & forth until I got a meter reading specified as a Standard illumination level.
I do that with the regular lights off. With regular lights on is my second test.
The Solux set is surprisingly cheap, maybe $100-150 for a 4 head track fixture
This atlas gives me consistency.
My Image print RIP profiles are all available for Daylight (or D50 illuminant) or 3200k.
When people buy prints, I show them the difference, and give them a link to Tailored Lighting.

[DB]

>> conservation of the institution's electric bills

Is this still true with LEDs now?

[Eolake]

“Optical brighteners in printing paper also threw inexperienced printmakers off, especially if they evaluated their prints under fluorescent lights.”

Or perhaps they were just not very good printmakers? (It does not seem to me to be a lot worse than not looking at your prints in proper light.)

[hugh crawford]

One more thing. When printing for reproduction, the platemaking guys really liked dark prints, so if the prints were "liberated" from some magazine's filing cabinet, they are going to be dark.

[Chris Kern]

I make a fair number of prints, mostly because I enjoy the process (my production far exceeds the capacity of my wall space), but what I really want is an electronic ‟frame” with the color characteristics and high dynamic range to show digital photographs to their best advantage regardless of the ambient light.

The functional spec I have in mind includes:

(1) wide gamut (~Adobe RGB);
(2) high dynamic range (>= 1000:1);
(3) high resolution (>= 200 px/inch);
(4) thin (<= 2.5 inch);
(5) square, to handle both landscape and portrait orientations;
(6) battery-powered (i.e., no cords).

As far as I can determine, only the battery-powered requirement might be a stretch for current technology—although I’m not aware of any manufacturer that is currently offering square panels. I've seen one product that I might be willing to live with, despite it being corded and rectangular (it can be used in either orientation), except for the fact that it only displays images in fixed aspect ratios.

A good print, well-illuminated, can be quite striking, but a good digital image has subtleties in both the highlights and especially the shadows that can only be optimally displayed by a transmissive medium.

[Daniel]

How one prints is at times driven by the display conditions. Under good quartz/halogen lighting a print that otherwise looks dark will sing - and look great. A low light level color image of last rays of sun on a bristlecone snag looks flat - until you see it in late evening light - then is is amazing.
Knowing the display lighting helps when printing. Putting information with the print about what one believes will look best can help when one is deciding how to show the image.

[Tom Frost]

I recall one of the Ansel Adams programs in which he took a fresh, wet print and put it in the microwave to see what it would look like when it "dried down," as he described it. The video just kept going as the microwave cooked, and Adams said with a wry smile, "You have to wait!"

[Nick Van Zanten]

"A bit of technical background: the light that strikes a print actually passes through the emulsion twice—once on the way in toward the paper base, and once after it reflects off the paper and comes back out."

Is this only true of a silver print or does it also apply to an inkjet print? Probably obvious to all, but the term emulsion took me back to a very specific place, far, far from my monitor and Epson.

[Sal Santamaura]

...Low light levels are common even in good museums today. This is a custom or fashion based on some mix of two things: conservation of the prints, and conservation of the institution's electric bills...

Today there's no excuse for the second thing. High-CRI LEDs in a choice of color temperatures now enable any institution to light prints as brightly as desired with very low kWh consumption.

That conservation thing is another matter. I've gotten to the point where it's not worthwhile traveling any distance to view exhibits. They're almost always so dark one cannot see the prints anyway.

[John McMillin]

In my my good old darkroom days, I viewed my prints by a light bulb hung over the fixer tray. (Didn't we all?) It was at least a 60-watter, but it could even have been 100. Under that bright bulb, with my eyes still adapted to the dark, those prints looked wonderful, from the inky blacks to the dazzling highlights. But now when I dig them out of storage, they look dark and grim. Like wearing dark sunglasses in the late afternoon. Granted, that was my style then, but those prints will never look their best unless I spotlight them like the day they were made.

[JohnW]

I ran into the same problem a couple years ago at a Harry Callahan exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Had a terrible time viewing the prints under the weak flat lighting from a 10' ceiling. It finally dawned on me that the lighting was geared towards preserving the silver based prints. Don't think electricity is as much a problem for them as it would be for a US gallery of similar size. Our rates are a fraction of what you pay in the US; my 900sqft apartment cost just under $75 for December and January combined, two of our coldest months. Commercial and institutional rates are higher but still much lower than comparable rates in the US.

[Luke]

Re: optical brighteners and fluorescent lights:
What about modern LED bulbs? I know some LED flashlights produce lots of UV.

[I have no experience with that. I don't even know which papers have brighteners any more, either, although it's pretty easy to tell--just look at them under a black light! --Mike]

[Earl Dunbar]

From my recollection, it’s the viewing light. Karsh appeared to expose, process and print so that the low values had a great deal of separation and the high values were not overly dominant and didn’t distract. I think as far as the technical was concerned, he was after that kind of richness.

[wts]

I saw the comprehensive Adams exhibit at Boston's MFA yesterday. As expected, prints exhibited full dynamic range black to white, but in my subjective opinion seemed to be biased more to black than when I saw some of them exhibited there several years ago (2013?). Don't know why. Lighting was more than adequate. However, protective glass was very reflective.

I have yet to see a reproduction in a book or poster or on my monitor that didn't pale beside the real thing. It's like the difference between playing in an orchestra compared to the best audio reproduction.

[Greg Heins]

I can tell you that we have for several years been in the era of museums receiving digital files from photographers and having prints (generally large ones) made to the photographers' specifications for exhibition purposes, after which those prints are destroyed.

[Peter Wright]

A few years back I visited the valley of the kings in Egypt. Going down the passages to the tombs, and then in the tombs themselves, the most amazing art is on display; painted directly onto the walls about 33 centuries ago, and since kept in perfect "archival' conditions (very low humidity, and total darkness) for all those centuries until the last one. The Egyptologist with us explained that the art is now visibly deteriorating due to the humidity of visitors breath, lighting systems, and even occasional illicit touching. But the country badly needs the tourist money, so rather than conserve the tombs properly (such as building a replica site for example), they just close certain tombs for a period and open up others in their place. They also now prohibit the use of flash and use perspex screens to prevent physical damage. But all they have really done is to somewhat slow down the deterioration.

I sometimes reflect on those incredibly talented artists who painstakingly created work that was never intended to be displayed – except perhaps to their gods. I am glad I got to see it however, because in centuries to come it seems unlikely that anyone else will.

[Robert Roaldi]

Have there been scientific studies of which frequencies of light actually cause damage to displayed works of art? Are photographs affected by different frequencies than paintings?
All this is to say that I hope there is some basis for the practice and it's not just habit.

[KeithB]

Why not do what the do with the freezers in the frozen food section of the super market? (I was going to say "frozen food freezer")

Have the lights turn brighter when someone is close. If the gallery is too small for that, have a button that will increase the lighting for a short time.