There comes a time in when nearly every photographer decides some once-loved old work is crap. Edward Weston scraped the emulsion of some of his old glass negatives and turned them into window panes. He’d moved on, and considered the early work an embarrassment. I’m sure many pictorialists who saw the f/64 light felt the… [Read More]

The unpleasant aspects of the museum-going experience are pretty obvious: dealing with bad weather, traffic jams, parking, standing in line, trying to get an unobstructed view through crowds, having your feet stepped on, having the guards tell you not to get so close, backache from bending over to read descriptions three feet off the floor,… [Read More]

What has to happen before large numbers of people view mechanically reproduced images in preference to seeing the actual images on the walls of museums? In this post, I’ll talk about technology, and next time I’ll work on the social/business/legal issues. I expect the technical part to be easier. From a technical perspective, in order… [Read More]

In the November/December 2007 issue of Lenswork, Brooks Jensen wrote an essay on the implications of “the ongoing revolution in commercial printing technologies.” Jensen asserts, and justifies the position, that the best commercial printing processes can produce images equaling or exceeding the quality of photographic prints. He compares the rapid quality improvements in the commercial… [Read More]

In the last post, I considered the photographic process as linear, with a camera simply a tool that the photographer uses to make real a predefined vision. Most of the time it doesn’t actually work that way. Photographic visions don’t usually arrive fully formed and perfect, like the Kubla Khan did to Coleridge. We photographers… [Read More]