In 1827, Nicephore Niepce put a bitumen covered metal plate
into a camera and created the first photograph. By 1841, William
Henry Fox Talbot had introduced the calotype. In the 1850's,
albumen and collodion prints on a paper base were introduced. The
race for the ultimate printing material was on.
One writer opined: "Albuminized paper has been somewhat depreciated
of late. I think undeservedly so. It is said, that its brilliancy is
vulgar; it may certainly be carried to an obtrusive extent, but I cannot
think that a slight gloss, scarcely, or not at all exceeding that given
by hot-pressing plain paper, is objectionable, and there can be no
question that the minuter details are better copied, and the shadows
more transparent, than by any other method. . . . mere artistic effect
is often a very secondary consideration in a photograph. There is
another, and sometimes much more important requisite, namely, the
perfect clearness and legibility of every detail, whether in light or
shadow; and here the albuminized paper is without a rival. . . . in the
present state of our knowledge edge, the albuminized paper process is
that best suited for general use."
It's interesting to note the parallels to modern discourse on
photographic printing methods and materials - surface gloss, rendering
of fine detail, openness of highlights and shadows - all the issues are
mentioned. Reading the writer's argument, it's hard not to rush
into the darkroom to whack out a few albumen prints and behold the glory
of the ultimate photographic print.
But photographers apparently weren't satisfied. Along came
platinum prints, in 1873 or so. By 1880, pre-coated platinum papers
were available.
By 1920, the rising price of platinum (and the fact that enlarging is
easy on the faster gelatin silver paper, and not possible on platinum) had driven the platinum process
into retreat , and delivered up its successor - the gelatin silver
print.
From that point on, the gelatin silver print was king. Gelatin
silver printing has so dominated the monochrome photographic world that
the conventional term used for all other print processes (except digital
prints) is 'alternate process' - that is, an alternate to the de facto
standard of the silver print.
The Modern Silver Standard
Along came Ansel Adams, Ed Weston, Group f/64, and straight
photography. In a rush, the bulk of the art photography world was
swept into a conventional look - the air-dried, glossy, fiber based
gelatin silver print. Oh, there were variations - warm toned, cold
toned, a slew of surface textures like Kodak's G and N surface.
Chloride prints, POP, chlorobromide, and then VC papers. But the
bulk of the world remained true to the Silver Standard - air dried,
double weight, fiber base, glossy.
If it didn't look like an air dried, double weight, fiber base glossy
print, why, it just wasn't right.
And we still, by and large, subscribe to that standard. If you
went to any gallery, what you saw was the Silver
Standard. Toned in selenium, toned with thiourea, toned with gold
- but still the Silver Standard of air dried glossy, fiber base paper.
Even with the advent of resin coated papers, photography remained
true to the Silver Standard - the most popular RC papers have what's
called an "E" or "Luster" surface - an attempt to replicate the look of
the holy grail of photography, the Silver Standard.
Enter the Inkjet
And then, along came the inkjet. When I bought my inkjet
printer and tried digital printing of my photographs, it was only
natural that the prints I was aiming to replicate digitally were Silver
Standard - in fact, THE Silver Standard for much of the art world - air
dried fiber base Ilford Multigrade IV, toned in selenium.
So I tried what Epson called 'Semi matte' - but it was, well, a bit
too matte. It didn't look like an air dried, fiber base glossy
print, not even under glass. Premium Luster was closer - it
closely replicated the look of an RC gelatin silver print, which in turn
came close to the Silver Standard.
Until recently (until last week, in fact) I was content. My
digital prints looked like 'real' photographs, by which I mean that they
closely replicated the look of The Silver Standard.
About that Silver Standard
The Silver Standard has been around for so long, most of us don't
pause to consider WHY it's the standard. The unspoken existence of
the Silver Standard has influenced the properties of the materials we've
all used.
Sure, you can buy matte fiber based paper (or at least, until a few
years ago, you could). But everyone knows that if you want your
work to look like Serious Photography, you print on glossy paper.
Not on that nasty, high gloss resin coated glossy paper, which looked
like ferrotyped glossy fiber base prints, and thus are bright and
vulgar. No, you want air dried glossy, because it (the
conventional wisdom claims) best captures fine detail. I'm not
saying that air dried glossy is a bad standard. In fact, I think
it looks pretty damn good. But the real reason we use air dried
glossy is not that the gloss looks good, it's that air dried glossy
gives us the best Dmax we can get without resorting to that tacky,
plasticky looking super glossy stuff. We don't actually like the
gloss, which makes it hard to view the print. What we like is the
good solid Dmax - 2.0 or better.
Why the quest for better Dmax? Partly it's just that, of two
prints which are otherwise equal, the print with the higher Dmax and the
tones distributed evenly tends to look better. That's a generalization,
but on the whole, it's true.
But the real, honest reason is this: the crippling property of
gelatin silver paper, which no one will mention, is that it has a
pronounced toe and shoulder. That is, the contrast in the shadows
(especially right down near the Dmax) and up in the highlights
(especially right up near the paper base) is low. Very low.
As silver printers, we compensated. We printed the dark regions
of our prints lighter, up where they had better contrast - in effect, we
were throwing away part of the tonal range of the paper because it had
unusably low contrast. Up in the highlights, we could print things
down, and then bleach them back, and get better highlight contrast that
way. It was a hassle, but it was possible.
So that's why we care so intensely about the Dmax of silver paper -
it's because we were routinely throwing away some of that range and
using only the higher contrast region. That paper with the
breathtaking Dmax of 2.0 - it turns out we need 2.0 mostly because it
leaves us with a USABLE dmax of 1.7 or so.
Somehow, though, that became the be all and end all of gelatin silver
printing. Advertisers claimed the higher silver content of their
papers gave them 'solid' blacks. Articles in the photo magazines
that compared papers routinely had tables listing the Dmax of the
papers. Strangely enough, no one discussed shadow contrast, or
usable Dmax. It's as if it was some dirty secret, not discussed in
polite company.
Those Inkjet Prints
I started digital printing on my Epson inkjet printer about a year
ago. The amount of ink and paper I've consumed over the past year
as I learned to print anew would stun a stoat. That's the price of
learning. And boy, I learned a lot about printing on Epson Premium
Luster paper - and about why it's time to rethink The Silver Standard.
Digital printing offers unprecedented control. It's an
expressive step forward, just as VC paper was from graded paper.
The biggest change, in my opinion, is that you can control the contrast
in the highlights and shadows, independently. If you want snappy
highlights - just tweak the curve in Photoshop. Likewise if you'd
like to compress those highlights. Decisions that in the past
needed to be made at exposure and development time can now be made (or
revisited) at printing time.
The net result of this control of the contrast in the shadows is
this: now you can still get tonal separation right down to the maximum
black. Unlike The Silver Standard, the measured Dmax and the
usable Dmax are essentially the same.
In this way, digital printing is more akin to platinum/palladium
prints than to silver - the Dmax is not as dark as with silver, but the
usable dmax rivals that of silver.
A few weeks ago, I was at a friend's house, and I admired the
platinum prints he had hanging in his dining room. They're
beautiful - a warm, chocolate brown, with beautiful, open tonal
separation right down deep into the shadows. They're on some
watercolor paper, of course - it looks like Arches Hot Press to me.
No gloss at all, and to be frank, the Dmax is not only not impressive,
it's surprisingly low. And yet... And yet... those prints, hanging
there, reminded me that that there is more to photography, and printing,
than The Silver Standard. They're lovely, in a way entirely unlike
a silver print.
Now, imitating The Silver Standard in an inkjet print has
disadvantages:
inkjet prints on glossy/semigloss media suffer from what's
called 'bronzing' or 'differential gloss', because the part of the
print where the ink is has a different gloss from the part where no
ink is. It's most pronounced from an acute viewing angle, but
it's always present to some degree. You can solve this with
spray overcoats, but the longevity of this solution is questionable.
And the spray smells bad - really bad.
inkjet prints on barrier media (like the RC paper that's used
for glossy/semigloss prints) suffer from outgassing, where the
liquid carrier from the ink continues to evaporate from the print
even after the print appears dry, and the gas will 'fog' the inside
surface of the glazing when the print is framed.
Metamerism - inkjet prints, especially those on the glossy/semigloss
media, will appear to shift in color as the lighting source changes
(e.g. from tungsten to halogen to daylight). Even silver
prints do this to some degree, but with inkjet prints it can be more
pronounced.
That surface gloss is annoying, and makes it hard to view the
print.
Viewing those platinum prints, with their low Dmax and matte surface,
and some hard thinking about the problems with inkjet prints on RC media
made me ask "These inkjet prints are suffering from real problems, all
in an attempt to duplicate The Silver Standard. Why not simply
walk away from it? Why not pursue inkjet printing on its own
merits, pushing it into new areas that The Silver Standard doesn't (and
can't) address?"
So, just last week, I switched my printer from Photo Black ink
(designed for printing on glossy and semi-gloss papers like Premium
Luster) to Matte Black ink (designed for printing on non-glossy papers).
When I did it I was pretty anxious. How would I feel about prints
which didn't look like silver? What would inkjet prints on matte
surface paper look like?
And the answer is - they're breathtaking. They don't compete
with glossy prints on Dmax, but the Matte Black ink on matte paper comes
surprisingly close. Unlike matte gelatin silver prints, which I've
always thought looked peculiarly lifeless even when framed, the matte
inkjet prints are vibrant. They're better than the prints on
Luster paper, not just because they don't have that annoying glare, but
because they seem to have better tonal separation. The tones look
smoother, more creamy. They don't suffer from the unnaturally
bright, cold white base of the RC paper.
And at least one of the matte papers I'm now using is about half the
cost of the Premium Luster paper I was using before.
The Smithsonian Moment
The end of easy availability of precoated platinum papers in the
1920's produced a sort of
Bretton
Woods Agreement of the photographic world. Photography was
about gelatin silver prints, and the generally accepted aesthetic
rapidly swung toward the strengths (and away from the weaknesses) of the
gelatin silver print, and landed us with what I call The Silver Standard
- glossy, air dried, fiber base gelatin silver prints. Color
photography went off on it's own, with c-prints, Cibachrome, and
r-prints, but black and white remained the domain of the gelatin silver
print, with all of its problems and limitations.
Inkjet printing lets us throw off the shackles of the Silver
Standard. Just as the Smithsonian Agreement was a last ditch
effort to prop up the failing Bretton Woods standard, inkjet printing
gives us ways (via RC, glossy papers) to try to duplicate The Silver
Standard, complete with it's flaws and problems. We can, by using
those media, struggle on with something like the Silver Standard.
It's not quite the same, but if we tip our head to the side, and squint
a bit, we can pretend it's the same.
But we don't have to. Inkjet printing lets us make prints that
look like platinum prints, or cyanotypes, or Van Dyke prints - and do it
easily. We're free to explore new surface textures, including the
lovely smooth finish of hot press watercolor paper. We're free to
choose papers without optical brighteners, papers which are acid free,
papers that feel differently in your hand and have different looks.
Sure, those things were possible with silver printing, but when we
smeared gelatin silver emulsion on canvas, or watercolor paper, we lost
the strengths of silver printing, and kept the weaknesses. That's
not the case with inkjet printing.
What does the future hold? The explosion of possibilities means
that we're going to see photographers explore a lot of new possibilities
(and some old ones, like the look of platinum prints). Some of
them will probably be mistakes. We'll have chaos and confusion,
just as when laser printers made desktop publishing possible, and people
sudden started using 47 different fonts in their documents 'just because
they could'. That might seem frightening; the Silver Standard is
an old friend, and it's hard to let go.
In the end, probably, there will be a new standard (or, maybe, many
standards). I don't
know what it's going to be. But I think that it's pretty unlikely
to look like the Silver Standard.
But I'm confident it's going to be OK. No, not just OK.
It's going to be better then the Silver Standard.
