That's a $79 printer for you
Welcome to the 90th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal. I'll use the funds to pay for the fee the service provider of this Mailing List charges me every month. If there's money left, I'll invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
For a long time, I thought that Daidō Moriyama was a pretty boring photographer who keeps churning out the same material over and over again in his signature high-contrast black and white. And he does. But there is another Daidō Moriyama, the one who in the mid to late 1960s and very early 1970s produced some cutting-edge work.
Ignoring some of the details here (there's going to be a review of a recent catalogue on CPhMag.com on Monday), while looking into this older work, apart from the photography there was something else that resonated with me. In a 2007 interview, he talked about how at that time he didn't think that silver-gelatin prints were his thing. Instead, he said, he was interested in seeing his photographs in printed materials. And for those printed materials he accepted all kinds of versions. A book might be printed with the finest gravure, but another would be printed with a single plate.
One of the reasons why this resonated so much with me is because for a long time, I have been very weary of photoland's obsession with "fine prints". When I was teaching at the MFA program that shall not be named I remember how in every crit, people would obsess over whether a photograph had in fact been printed on the right paper. People would stand very close to the pictures, trying to see whether all the detail was there. It was infinitely tedious to observe this over and over and over again.
To begin with, no normal person looks at details in a print that way. Furthermore, there was a larger underlying problem at hand: apparently, everybody had internalized the idea that for a photograph to be art it had to look like art. And looking like art meant expensive materials and the finest papers so that the rich people who buy prints would be happy.
Obviously, that's a very limited understanding of what art actually means. But photoland has internalized it to a huge extent, possibly because of some lingering worries that photography still has to prove that it can be art. In all fairness, it's not just photographic prints, you can find the same thing in the world of the photobook.
There are alternatives, but I don't think they are taken seriously. Take the zine. Out of sheer snobbery, most photolandians won't accept zines as "real" photobooks. To make matters worse, the zine scene appears to also have embraced their status as outsiders, usually keeping themselves apart from the world of the photobook.
I don't own an expensive inkjet printer for a number of reasons. First, I have cats, but I don't have a studio space I can make inaccessible to them. Second, it's too expensive. I don't have the money to shell out hundreds of dollars for sets of completely overpriced inks. Third, I'm temperamentally unsuited to operate an expensive inkjet printer. I've been working with computers since the 1980s (when I got my first computer as a teenager). After all these years, I simply do not have the patience any longer to spend endless hours trying to fix a computer problem, whether it's software or hardware. And from what I observed in various places, you have a lot of such problems when working with fancy inkjet printers. No, thank you.
I own an inkjet printer, though, that I bought at the local Walmart. I thought I bought it for $79, but the internet tells me it now costs $125 or something like that. I'm pretty sure that I didn't spend that much money for it. Regardless, no sane photographer would print their pictures on that thing.
Obviously, I'm not a sane photographer.
It was writing about Moriyama that had me thinking about making prints with that cheap printer, using the office paper that I also bought at Walmart. What can go wrong? Specifically, I was after seeing all the imperfections that such a cheap printer might produce. I have used the printer for a while now, and it routinely messes things up.
Don't get me wrong, though, I did not want to make prints on the cheap printer for the sake of it. Instead, I was wondering whether I would able to make an object -- a print -- that had character, something that through its form -- the way it looks and feels -- expresses something I respond to. I decided that I would use the spray varnish that I had bought and not used years ago for something completely different. From that earlier project I already knew that varnishing a print would help bring out the picture more (the shadows get a little darker etc.). I was thinking that this would also bring out the imperfections more.
So I started playing with it, picking a picture I had taken in May in Budapest. The first attempt didn't quite deliver what I had hoped for. Somehow, I had hoped that the quality of the printer's imperfections would be something like an equivalent of what you see when you look at a Risograph print. As it turned out, though, when the printer decides not to fuck things up, the prints actually don't look that bad. That was disappointing. I didn't get what I was looking for.
I've been in the game long enough to know that if you give up when your first attempts aren't working, then you're unlikely to achieve anything. I tried a number of variants.
But I also looked at my first attempt again. Instead of comparing it what I imagined it might be (that's always an iffy approach, but as people we can't help ourselves), I looked at what it really is. The varnishing had been done a bit shoddily, so I reprinted the image (using the original setting) and varnished it last night.
Here, it gets a little bit tricky because a digital photograph on a screen does not give you the experience you have when looking at the print. You want to keep this in mind. This is a photograph of the print that I took with my D800. For this email I wanted to have the option to zoom in (the picture I took with my iPhone didn't deliver that part).
The colours aren't accurate, BUT we're looking at a print made with a $79 printer which might or might not be properly black and white. Ignore the colours.
You can see how the edges have curled a bit. You can also see the painter's tape that I used to stick it to the wall (the red stuff in the top corners). What you maybe can see -- or maybe it doesn't show -- is that this print is quite nice. It has a strange sense of character. I don't know how to describe it. It feels rough and it certainly doesn't look precious. At the same time, it's not a shitty print.
I like this print a lot.
When you get close to it (remember, normal people don't look at pictures this way), you can see the slight imperfections created by the printer. You can see these faint lines going horizontally. Unfortunately, some of the other small-scale imperfections don't quite show up in the picture.
In the past, I had my pictures printed as digital silver gelatin prints (which I like), as inkjets (which I don't like), and as Risograph prints (which I love).
I could now imagine printing them with this cheap printer, with an added spray varnish afterwards. In fact, I could imagine an exhibition space where I'd set up the printer and then produce the whole exhibition right there. Possibly, every day there would be something different on the walls. You'd walk in and see me produce the show. OK, the spray varnishing would need a properly ventilated area, so I'd probably do that outside.
These kinds of ideas aren't new. In fact, Daidō Moriyama was part of the CAMP collective in the late 1970s, and they engaged in such experiments.
Obviously, none of that is every going to happen for me for all the reasons that I don't necessarily want to repeat.
And I didn't even write this email to talk about my own work (even though I just did). My main point here is that in photoland, we'd be well advised to not only stick with a very limited idea of what a print in an exhibition might look like. There are other options, options that actually would re-inject quite a bit of creativity back into a field that has become too focused on satisfying rich collectors and museums.
So if you feel the same way, just give it a shot! Experiment! Have some fun and make something fun, something that has real character! You're not obliged to follow all the dinosaurs who will faint when they see a print that doesn't conform to their very narrow ideas of what a print should look like.
And that's it from me. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg