Printing Photographs

My Brownie Bullet

I printed with my own hands (or more likely assisted in printing) my first black and white photograph when I was maybe 10 years old, circa 1963. A young boy with a Kodak Brownie Bullet camera and a Dad who was, for a time, a serious enough amateur photographer that he had a 3 foot by 6 foot, homemade, portable darkroom for printing black and white photographs.

Even before I printed those first photographs, that darkroom had been a place of quiet retreat. A place where fantasy happens. A spaceship with colored lights and motors. To be able to print a picture in it that I'd made with my own camera was icing on the cake! I wish I had a picture of it. It was a very cool space. Magical really. 

Dad was always interested in photography but he only processed and printed his work for a couple of years after that. By the time I was 12, the darkroom was abandoned. Sometime later it was sold off.

But the memory of the magic never left me. Nor has the fundamental principle embedded in that magic -- that a photograph is a hand-made object.

William Henry Fox Talbot

Maybe that’s the reason inkjet photographs rarely move me. Absent the human hand, I don’t see the magic in them. I can appreciate the image itself of course, but I can do that looking at a book or on a website. In the end, the physical inkjet print doesn't hold me in person like a gum print does. Or a cyanotype print. Or a platinum print, or any photograph printed by hand. 

Making photographs

It has been a while! 

In the 6 months since I last posted, I’ve made a lot of photographs. By “making photographs” I mean to distinguish the photographic image as captured in the camera, (on film or card) from the photographic print that’s made in a darkroom or with an inkjet printer.

Wading and watching as Hurricane Arthur approaches.

But really what I’m trying to do is get away from the language of “shooting” and “going on a shoot” and so on. I’ve never liked it for its coarseness but used it for its convenience if for no other reason than because everyone else says it. I could have said, “I’ve been doing a lot of shooting recently” and that would have been enough. And you would have been spared those last few sentences. 

It’s true that making photographs can take on the nature of a shoot. I’ve been on plenty of them, especially in my earlier days working as a photojournalist. Photography as hunting prey, be it person, place, or thing. Some photographers go so far with the metaphor as to talk about “bagging one” after a successful shoot.

I don’t own a gun, I’m not a fan of the NRA, and I'm tired of hearing about my so-called Second Amendment right to own a private arsenal. But that’s not what this is about. The language of the shoot is coarse, for sure, but more critically, “shooting photographs,” sounds too mechanistic to me. Essentially, it leaves all but the photographer's trigger finger out of the image making process. 

That famous quote about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers comes to mind. The one about how Ginger had to do all the steps that Fred did except backwards and in heels. Photographers have to make the same kinds of preliminary decisions that a painter makes regarding light and other atmospheric decisions, about composition (without the ability to move the parts around within the frame like painters can). And we do it all in a fraction of a second! The ultimate Impressionists!

And that’s what I mean by “making photographs.”