More of the Beguiling

Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon, 1888

Gauguin's painting has been in my thoughts these past few weeks.

When I bought my first camera more than 30 years ago, it was because of an intense desire to photograph the world around me. Ironically, the more involved I got in the art of photography, the less time I actually spent photographing and the more time I spent printing photographs in the darkroom. That was true printing black and whites and even more so now as a gummist. 

It just takes a fraction of a second to photograph an image that subsequently takes weeks or months to turn into a finished gum print. There’s a dynamic tension there that I’ve mostly learned to live with over the years. But the negative-making process that has me tied in knots these days is of a different order entirely. 

Less dynamic and more painstaking. Instead of deciding which pigment to brush onto the next layer of a print and then waiting for it to print out, I’m sitting at the computer adjusting printer scripts. The script sends directions from the computer to the printer and those directions subsequently effect every aspect of the inkjet negative that will then be used in the darkroom. 

Printers come with their own scripts that come with the printer driver that you download with the purchase of a new printer. You find them in the printer window under Printer Profile when you choose your printer and the medium you'll be printing on (glossy, matte, canvas etc). Needless to say, "gum negative" is not an option. And the Epson driver is not built to be tweeked; rather, to be accepted as is. QuadTone RIP, on the other hand, is an independent driver that allows the user to go into the script and rewrite gamma, boost, ink levels and more to match your particular needs.

But in order to find out if a given script is the grail I seek, I have to run it through the lengthy gum process. Which means, even if I stick with it, it might be a week or more after I print a negative before I find out if the new script change is what I'm looking for. It may be a fool’s errand. 

Unlike platinum printing, for example, which calls for a very specific and fairly narrow range of printing prescriptions, gum is all over the place. It’s so personalized and loosy-goosy in methodology that there may not be a prescription that will ever do the trick. I may be chasing a phantom. But I firmly believe that the road to 19th century hands-on photography now runs through the computer and making the best negative possible has always been the first goal of the photographer so I persist as I wrestle my demons and my angels.

See my website:  woodsedge.net