dispatches

The Silver Conference

While Robin is at her UCLA Attachment Conference, I’ve been attending the "We’re Not Dead Yet" conference on silver photography, sponsored by Ilford and Calumet. The heavyweights of the field—John Sexton, Steve Simmons, Keith Carter, Michael Smith and Paula Chamlee, and the executives of Ilford—were in attendence. The audience was gray-haired. If there was anyone under 40 in the room, I didn’t see them. Midway through the first day it was suggested that the term "dinosaur" be forbidden for the rest of the conference. It didn’t stick.

That said, Ilford’s photographic paper sales are up 45% over last year, while inkjet paper sales are levelling off. There is hint and rumor of a resurgence. The main photography schools, Art Center and RIT, have reaffirmed their commitment to teaching traditional black and white. We are exhorted to be silver gelatin print evangalists. Hopeful as this sounds, it has the whiff of whistling past the graveyard.

I missed the important part of this conference, which was the hobnobbing and print sharing back at the hotel (the presentations were at the Art Center College of Design). But I did see some great lectures. Mona Kuhn showed her lush, lovely portraits from her holiday home in the south of France, where apparently no one bothers to put on clothes. Marissa Roth showed her Women and War series. Keith Carter spun well-rehearsed homilies and showed his inimicable work. Panels met and reaffirmed for the choir the superiority of traditional processes, while bemoaning the shrinking availability of materials.

Personally, I think traditional photography will be possible for the rest of my lifetime. Diminished perhaps, augmented by digital technologies (Ilford is about to release a fiber based paper for use in digital printing equipment), but available. Ilford is proclaiming themselves to be committed to the market. It remains to be seen if there will be a market to sustain them.

Silver photography is vulnerable in a way that other photographic processes are not. You can’t coat your own silver gelatin paper the way you can a platinum or palladium or gum bichromate paper. Photographic emulsion paper is an industrial product, and if there ceases to be an industry, silver photography will end.

But the negatives and prints will live on, which is a lot more than can be said for a digital file.

LA Dispatch

Our elevator has a button marked "Earthquake." Does it start one or stop one?

The weather report casually includes, "There’s a flash flood warning for the Burbank burn area. That means you’re having a flood. You other burn areas just have a flash flood watch. High today 62, showers ending tonight. Back to you Pam."

Mayhem and disaster are unremarkable in this city. So is excessive grooming. This is a place where serious income is devoted to hair care.

I saw the Robert Adams show today at the Getty. My photographer-friend Claudia said, "You like his work? It’s really boring. And the printing isn’t very good." Claudia is not a landscape photographer. I would tag her "Romantic-Conceptual," and she is getting a bit of a name for herself lately. She is the antipode to Robert Adams and his cool, formal, dense landscape work of altered, and often decimated environments of the Colorado Front Range. I adore it. I thought the curation was a bit odd, with bits and pieces of bodies of work over 25 years, not particularly well synthesized, and scattered in non-contiguous galleries. The print quality is fine. There’s tons of shadow detail if you look deep, but the lighting in the galleries is too dim to really see this work. I think his prints reflect a sympathy for the harsh, overwhelming light of his environment, and an homage to 19th century landscape tradition, particularly the spare landscapes of Timothy O’Sullivan.

The other show on at the Getty was of the French landscape painter Courbet. The critics all think of him as a harbinger of modernism, his abstractions of rock forms and compression of landscape elements paving the way for Cezanne and his like. I looked at his paintings and thought, this is naturalistic and keenly observed. When you look hard at a landscape it really does look all abstract and broken up. That would be the hallmark of modernism -- the full and hearty embrace of the world as it is perceived.

Another RAW Format Workflow

I got this link from Rawformat. Here is a very good description of a workflow for processing RAW images in Adobe Raw Convertor. It largely matches my own processing. New to me was his final step to tweak the curve under the Curve Tab. I disagree with the advice on color space however, as you always have to consider the final use. If my client has a color managed workflow, I save in Adobe RGB. If they don’t, I use sRGB. Web use is always saved in sRGB. ProPhoto may have the widest color space available, but that only counts if your printer has the ability to reproduce that gamut, or your client has some reason to need it.

Honda Civic Ad

This is what they want me to do. Be a viral marketing agent. I don’t care. I keep watching this commercial again and again, deconstructing it, parsing the technique, yet each time I am more deeply filled with marvel and wonder, and, yes, joy. I know, at a commercial. The imagery is Early Photonica, and the sound, well, the sound is the point. My favorite part is the raindrops. Turn your volume way up.

http://www.honda.co.uk/civic/

(Directions through this site—let the Flash intro do its thing, then click on the "Watch Civic" on the upper left. The movie will start on its own.)