Printers are seldom celebrated and it was good to read a two part piece, Voja Mitrovic, Printer to the Greats by photographer Peter Turnley, himself once a printer. Mitrovic, born in 1937, has printed the work of many great photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka . He arrived in Paris from Yugoslavia in 1964, and worked from 1966 until his retirement at the start of 1997 at the world-renowned Paris photographic laboratory Picto created by Pierre Gassmann in 1950.
Turnley worked closely with Mitrovic, both as a printer (and he reveals it was only with his help that Turnley got a job as a printer at Picto) and when Mitrovic printed his photography, and his closeness to the printer makes this a compelling article.
As he points out, although we may not know Mitrovic’s name, we have all seen many of his prints, both in many exhibitions but for so many books. In the feature there is an incredible list of the photographers he has printed for.
Many photographers prefer to print their own work, and I’ll write about this more in another post. But for many others the collaboration with a skilled printer has been a vital if seldom acknowledged part of the success.