It knew it was heresy. So I kept it to myself. Drank the white wine and kept quiet.
I was there in the temple of silver, the Print Room of London’s Photographers’ Gallery, in the rather subdued if not hushed darkness of the opening of ‘Eternal London‘, worshipping with others both Giacomo Brunelli‘s undoubted talent (as I said in my initial post –Giacomo’s London – this is a show to see and, perhaps more importantly, a book to buy.) And I found myself thinking the unthinkable.
There is a particular mystique about Giacomo’s work, which goes with it’s mysterious quality. He uses the old Miranda SLR and lens given him by his father for all his pictures. It has a removable pentaprism, enabling you to hold the camera close to the ground and see them image on a ground glass screen on the top of the camera body. I thought to myself, just like you can with the tilt-able screens on many digital cameras, or even with a little less elegance using Live View on the back of digital cameras without this feature.
The wall text also had a reference to the printing, comparing it to the wet plate images of the Victorian era in its qualities. I found myself thinking of those fine large, highly detailed prints by Samuel Bourne and others from what is arguably the greatest era of photographic printmaking and finding no similarities. Perhaps there were a few empty skies that were reminiscent of images made when photographic materials were only sensitive to blue light and the ultraviolet, but the wet plate process enabled incredibly detailed images, limited only by the lens as the light-sensitive material was not an emulsion.
Looking at the images on display, I think what they resemble more are prints made from paper negatives, such as those produced in the even earlier calotype process – and also those that I used years ago to make prints by alternative processes, enlarging my images onto resin-coated photographic paper and then contact printing onto another sheet of the same material to give a negative – which was then again contact printed, in my case onto hand coated and sensitised ‘salted paper’ or albumen. Exposures through the paper were much longer than when using sheet film – I put the printing frame in the garden when I went to work and take it in when I came home – and the prints had something of a similar quality to those made by Brunelli in a more conventional manner, though it was more the highlights than the shadows that seemed to diffuse.
And I thought again about what had caused me to lose much of my interest in those alternative processes. In a word, Piezography. Jon Cone‘s four shade black inks and software that I bought into when it first came out, enabling me to make prints on matt papers that had a richness that I’d never managed in the silver darkroom (though it was to be another ten years or so before this became possible on glossy surfaces.) Now, things are even better with seven shades of grey, though I now make do with Epson’s rather inferior ABW offering (3 greys and the odd spot of colour) as I no longer print enough black and white to keep a dedicated printer running. But even with the Epson inks I can produce prints that are in almost all respects a match for silver.
Soon after I started using the Cone inks (BJP published a review, which half paid for my first set), I had someone visit me who wanted some enlarged negatives using these inks. He’d photographed on 4×5 and printed from this as a platinum print, but wanted to make a larger print – and so needed a larger negative. I scanned his 4×5″ negative, and printed it out as an 8×10″ negative, and before he left I printed out the scanned file as a positive print on a Hahnemühle paper. He looked carefully at it and went rather quiet. It was clearly (at least to me) a rather better print than the platinum, but I made no comment.
Brunelli gets a particular look about his prints that comes from his exposure and work in the darkroom, but it is one that could also be readily applied to a digital file, either by some clever footwork in Photoshop or perhaps even by applying a suitable filter in that or some other software.
Of course it doesn’t really matter whether we work on film or digital or print using silver or carbon pigment inks. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to think about it or to write about it if there didn’t appear, at least from the gallery, some odd kind of mystification over the process. What matters is the end product, the pictures.
And of course these have been printed digitally, and very well indeed, not for the show, but for the book, ‘Eternal London‘ printed by Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei (EBS) in Verona.
