My new picture "One Gull" highlights the problems of controlling viewing environment for pictures. It is, first of all, exaggerated modestly in order to preserve the feeling of what it was like to stand there and experience the sight; that is, the primary goal was something other than a judiciously objective recording of the relative luminances of the scene.
Small problem: looking at my computer screen in ambient daylight, it looks too dark.
I work on the front porch of my small home. I have a family room that could be converted to an office nicely, but it's a former one-car garage and the WiFi stubbornly refuses to reach it, regardless of various repeaters and extenders placed in various spots—and anyway, it, too, has too much daylight, with windows on all four walls. The ambient light on the porch (which has wondows all along three walls) is bright, and varies throughout the day as the sun passes through its arc and filters through the trees. This is what led me to abandon my 27" 2011 iMac four or five years ago and invest in a NEC MultiSync PA272W monitor*: the Mac's screen was reflective, and looking at it all day was frustrating. The NEC has a hood and a non-glare surface, and works much better. New Mac displays (their word for monitor), especially the nano-texture glass models, have much better glare control, I'm told.
Typically, I work on pictures on the computer in subdued lighting in the evening, after sunset. I have a color-corrected light placed in back of my monitor, and overhead light in the living room comes through the windows between the living room and porch illuminate the keyboard adequately. In this environment I can see tones much better, and I typically correct for the way pictures look in this environment. However, with "One Gull," the values of the sky on top and the water of the lake are delicate; a little change too much either way either closes the picture down or opens it up too much. With many pictures I compromise, seeking an average, because, of course, I can't know how you're viewing the picture, or how anyone else is—you probably have a color-calibrated monitor, but a lot of people don't. Either way, I don't know if your workspace is brightly lit (in which case this picture will look too dark) or has subdued lighting.
In the dark
This was always an issue with darkroom printing as well. When galleries and museums used strong viewing lighting, it was usual to try to reproduce that light level, minus a little bit as a fudge factor, for controlled viewing lighting in the darkroom, where the prints were made. But now, museums, at least, have adopted dim, murky lighting as a cost-saving measure [UPDATE: this is wrong, it isn't done for cost saving] (which is truly cutting off the nose to spite the face, but I've already ranted about that several times elsewhere), so pictures printed for bright viewing light look terrible. The worst, most catastrophic exhibition lighting I ever saw was a Paul Strand show in Chicago; Paul printed strong, bold darks, with a tonal palette tilted toward the lower end, and under murky Sav-a-Buc lighting the shadow contrast vanished and the highlights** just looked depressed and gloomy. Put a bright light on the same print and it comes alive. (But you should not let a museum guard catch you using a flashlight to inspect a print, and please don't ask me how I know that.)
When viewing exhibitions of B&W prints from film in museums and galleries, I could often tell you what the printmaker's darkroom inspection lighting was like. If the print tones looked tepid and the darks were too elevated, pale and weak, it meant they were judging their prints under lighting that was too dim. If the prints were too dark and the shadow contrast clotted up, I knew that their darkroom printing light was overly strong. Personally, I usually tried for just the right intermediate balance; at one school darkroom, where I couldn't control the viewing lighting, I would wander around looking at the wet test print in a tray under different light levels: over by the window, in a shaded corner, under incandescent lights, under fluorescent light. Of course, after a while I had a firm grasp of what I wanted and I didn't have to do that.
Anyway, if you would like to see "One Gull" (here's the link again) as it probably should look, try turning the lights down or off in the room in which you have your computer, and see how that looks.
Prints and sales
The only way to really make sure the tones are right is for the artist, who gets to say, to lock them down in an immutable medium: the fine print. As you know if you've been following along, we're going to have a print sale of some of these monochrome prints soon; I've been through the JPEG review with the master printer who will be making the prints, and the set of guide prints will be shipped to me for review this week. This sale will follow the time-honored strategy I developed years ago, which has served us very well (and has been copied or adapted here and there around the Internet): we take pre-orders for a short period of time, close the order window, and only then make all the prints in one batch. This makes it efficient to produce the prints while also keeping the price-per-print quite low.
But the scale has changed over the years. TOP's audience has consolidated to a smaller group of more committed readers, and traditional photography in general is getting less popular and less "status-y" in the general culture, in this age of Instagram and Facebook, of color as the default, of phones as the most ubiquitous cameras, and of printmaking going the way of the dodo (how terrible to be the go-to metaphor for the utter annihilation of extinction! Poor dodo). We're never going to reach the heights of the go-go years of the 2010s again: we had one sale in which we sold well over 700 prints, and another that grossed over $130,000 (most of which went to the photographer). The conditions for that level of success have vanished.
So I'm thinking of a new method, one much more similar to the gallery model: making a very small, limited run of prints of my best B&W pictures from the Sigma fp(m), and offering only a handful for sale—but offering them more regularly and more often. Let's say we do it every Friday. On one Friday I might offer a custom 17x22" print of "One Gull" at $495, but limited to say, seven prints; and then the next Friday there would be another image offered. Miss one you like? No matter; keep an eye peeled for the next. Finally find one that really speaks to you? Jump on it. I could tailor the number of prints based on what I imagine the popularity of the image might be: for "Corn at the Harvest," which everybody seemed to like, I could have, say, 13 prints made, a large run; for "Little Girl with Alpaca," which is not the sort of picture most people would display on their walls, maybe only two. For images that don't sell out right away, they would simply remain available until they do.
I have no idea if that would appeal; the proof of the pudding is to eat it, and the only way to test this idea would be to try it. We'll see.
At least it's not an impulsive idea: I've been considering it for years.
Mike
*I looked for a current model, but it appears NEC doesn't really make one. They appear to have scaled back on color-correct monitors for photography; their representative suggested the NEC EA271U as being an appropriate replacement, but, although it has higher resolution, it has less color gamut. Specifically: the EA271U covers 73.6% of the Adobe RGB color space, 69.5% of NTSC, and 95.1% of sRGB, whereas my monitor, which "feature[d] enhanced color accuracy," covered 99.3% of Adobe RGB, 94.8% of NTSC, and 146.4% of the sRGB color space. So it's not really a replacement, which is why I'm not linking to it. The EA272F-BK-SV 27" comes with built-in Spectra-View calibration like mine did, but has a color gamut similar to the business model. I can't find an NEC monitor with the color accuracy of mine, although I—and the rep I talked to on the phone—might be just missing it.
Probably grist for a future post: current recommendable monitors for photographic work.
**"Shadows" is the term of art for the dark areas of B&W photographs and "highlights" is word for the light areas.
Jim Meeks: "I've worked in museums for 36 years now...it's not a cost cutting measure to exhibit works on paper in dim light! It is a means in which to preserve works for future generations. Works on paper (photos, prints, drawings, etc.) are sensitive to light and deteriorate when exposed to UV, bright light and even infrared. I've seen many, many examples where something has been on display for a long time and the paper turns brown, colors fade, etc. You might not like the light levels, but please stop saying museums are trying to save a buck on our light bills."
Mike replies: Nothing personal Jim, but why bother preserving works for future generations when nobody between then and now will be able to see them properly anyway? The reductio ad absurdam of this principle is to store everything locked away in darkness all the time. What good would that do? I'm a photographer. I was a printmaker. I want people to look at my work and to be able to see it the way it was intended to be seen.
Even the Niépce Heliograph is "Currently on View" at the Harry Ransom Center.
Sal Santamaura: "It's doubtful museums made that change to save on electric utility and lamping costs. LEDs rendered any potential savings minuscule. Rather, conservators' influence transcending that of curators is the likely culprit. As a result, institutions will prolong the life expectancy of prints that no one will be able to see as intended. Thereby ensuring fewer and fewer visitors will return, thus endangering museums' survival and putting the prints at greater risk than they would be from a few more lumens."
Keith B.: "NEC has given up on providing wide-gamut monitors after their merger with Sharp Corp. The current equivalent (through specs comparison) of your [now] old NEC PA272W is the EIZO ColorEdge CS2731. It is sold with calibration puck for about $1,350. If/when my NEC PA271 needs replacing, this is what I'll get."
Bear.: "I have the luck of doing two exhibitions in a row in the same gallery space—the second was significantly better than the first because I figured out that I should work backwards from the lighting to the prints. I'm planning a third for later 2023—which I have yet to shoot—so I will start my consideration of the process in camera. Ahh luxury...."
Jeff: "One of my favorite exhibits, at MOMA, in New York, in 1996, featured Roy DeCarava prints. Thank heaven that the curators ensured appropriately adequate lighting; otherwise I would have not been able to see the gloriously dark and rich tones. I’ve collected vintage silver/platinum prints, and printed my own work, since the '70s, and display lighting has always been a priority. Viewers often under-appreciate, or are completely unaware of, the importance of this issue. It can make the difference between what seems a mediocre picture/print, and one that 'sings.'"
Greg Boiarsky: "If museums are reducing lighting to preserve prints, they're doing both the prints and patrons a disservice. First, as you've noted in a response above, is the problem of preserving the art but not allowing the patrons to enjoy it. Second, the primary causes of print degradation are UV light and free-radical airborne chemicals. UV light can be controlled with filters or by using low-UV lighting sources. The free radicals can be controlled with air filters and other airborne pollution controls. Second is the fact that almost all modern photographic prints are created using pigments rather than dyes. Pigments are inherently more stable than dyes and require much less babying. Also, modern photos are usually printed on low-acid or acid-free papers.
Steve Rosenblum: "The incredibly dim lighting at museum photography exhibitions also drives me crazy. I so look forward to seeing actual prints instead of reproductions in books, and then I get there and it feels like I'm viewing the prints with my sunglasses on."
David: "At the co-op darkroom I used to belong to, there was a viewing board just outside the darkroom entrance. It was lit by an overhead spotlight which simulated gallery lighting. You placed the wet print, or test strips, on the white board to view the print or compare the tests. I am not sure how accurate the light source was in comparison to gallery lighting. But at least it was a consistent, even lighting. I do miss printing at that darkroom. The sink was large enough that you were sometimes processing with three other people, and there were often really good conversations (photo-based or otherwise)."
Joseph L. Kashi: "About the most egregious example of misguided lighting that I've seen occurred in a university gallery where the museum-grade medium intensity halogen lights had been replaced by a motley mixture of compact florescent bulbs and other mismatched lighting. It was explained to me that the faculty 'wanted to save the planet.' We did find some of the units 'liberated' by faculty but the gallery lighting was significantly degraded."
Kye Wood: "Prints in very limited numbers? No. Great prints beautifully printed in very limited numbers? Most definitely, yes. You'll have to lean on publishing positive feedback from your buyers, to help push prospective purchasers to commit. If running a software company taught me one thing above all else, it's the importance of perceived value. Your best most discerning customers are your priority. You share their aesthetic and speak their language."
Luke: "Re poorly lit visual displays: It's like a zoo with 'natural habitats' for the animals to hide in, so the paying public can't see them."
Adam R: "Dim lighting is the car bra of the museum world: By trying to preserve something so it looks good at some indeterminate point in the future, you succeed in making it look awful all the rest of the time."