An acquired taste?
I’ve gone through ups and downs while evaluating this new inkset. At firt I thought it was really cool, then I realized it was just coincidental color still in my system. Then I thought it wasn’t all too different from the images that I can make with the ABW mode on my 3800. Next I was feeling really unsure about the look of the darker tones in the piezography images (the reddish warmth was quite different than what I was used to and struck me as rather odd). But now for the past couple of days it has started to grow on me once again, kinda like an acquired taste. Over the past few days I’ve been combing through some of my favorite b/w images and printing them with the new inks. I’ve already had to refill one of the cartridges and I’ve only been using the system for one week now. Tonight I came across this image that I took at the Guggenheim Museum back in 2005.
I really enjoyed the time I had at the Guggenheim that day, they just happened to have an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s on display when I was there. I knew that Mapplethorpe had caused quite some controversy while he was alive, but didn’t really know too much about it. Well I can certainly see why a bunch of stuffy old conservatives would get all bent out of shape by some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. While I was able to get by some of the more difficult to appreciate homoerotic images, I was at the same time blown away by the beauty in so many of those prints. It didn’t really matter if they were of flowers, a statue or a person there was just so much artistic verisimilitude in his work that I found inspiring. I recall seeing for the first time a modern highly techincal large format platinum print. Having become used to the near perfection of Ansel Adams style of printing with deep blacks (think later versions of Hernandez) and rather strong contrasts, it was rather astonishing to see soft warm radiance in those Mapplethorpe prints. At the time it also reinforced in my mind that not all photographic worth should be tied up in trying to approximate the air dried fiber based glossy look. Producing an image with our modern inkjets with the reduced dmax and acuity of the best fine art matte papers produces a result than can at times be not unlike what I saw that day at the Guggenheim.
The new inks that I’ve been working with have a distinct look, they ought to provide me with the chance to produce some of my own soft, warm, radiant prints.
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