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Outdated tech stuff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. :-)
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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."
