PIXEL PROPHET
PIXEL PROPHET
PRINT IS THE PERFORMANCE
Martin Christie has always felt that, as a profession, printers get pretty poor coverage in popular media. After all, when television channels anxious to fill available viewing hours with content have made personalities of sewer workers and ticket collectors, and a blocked drain can be a major drama, it seems any daily event can be raised to be the subject of compulsive viewing.
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ccupations that involve real drama involving life and death, like doctors, police and even vets, are understandable as high profile. Still, when baking cakes and sewing become headline features, you have to wonder where the list will end. I suppose food is an obvious candidate because we all consume it. However, there is a certain irony in the fascination of its preparation when so many people seemed to be obsessed with the delivery of fast, precooked cuisine, to the extent that thousands could probably survive without a kitchen at all. Of course, we all need print at some time or other in our lives, whether it’s the basics of birth, marriage and death. Despite the rise of digital technology, paper still plays a significant part in transmitting facts and figures. It will continue to do so as it is the only medium with proven longevity over centuries, apart from things literally carved in stone. The printed word has played a more decisive part in history than most battles, which is why those in power have often tried so hard to suppress it, but while books and pamphlets can burn, it’s a lot harder to track them all down than today — flick a switch to close down the internet. When photographs could be printed in more recent times, they have equally had an impact and a lifespan which flicking through transient images on a small screen can never challenge. For over a century now, those images have not only captured history but often changed it for good or ill. Surprising then it has taken so long for photography to join the list of TV challenges, as the BBC has recruited celebrity photographer Rankin (he does have a first name; it’s John) to host a series with a number of keen amateurhope-to be-professionals. I usually cringe at the portrayal of photographers on the screen, generally playing the expected cliches, clicking away randomly and full of crass remarks. So I was reluctant to rush to watch the series initially, but now, in the interest of balance, I’m catching up one by one online and so far favourably inclined. Through digital technology, photography has become something everybody does, and almost on a daily basis. Previously the camera would only be dragged out for the special occasion, 14
Christmas or a holiday, and the day-to-day snapping would be left to the professional and the enthusiast. Instead, they learned to do it properly through trial and error. If you only held a camera a couple of times a year, it was tough to learn because the device didn’t give you much help. You only got to see results when the prints came out, and even then, it would be hard to work out what you’d done wrong unless you’d obviously chopped someone’s head off! Now you can see what you are doing; it’s a lot easier to get it, if not exactly right, merely acceptable. But actually, because of that, it is much more likely to result in a whole series of very average images, none of which are perfect but are never given a really critical review, so they will do. And that is the theme of Rankin’s series so far as I have seen, taking photographers who are mostly self-taught and reasonably competent at some level and making them more critical of what they are doing in terms of subject and composition, as well as eventually more professional and commercial. Hopefully, a lot of the new generation of photographers, empowered by digital cameras and phones, will take note. It’s a lot easier to taste a poor dish than judge a bad photograph. I have often said that modern cameras are so good that it is very easy for anyone to take
a great photo — once. The difference is that a professional has to do it every time, in any circumstances, or go hungry; at least, that’s the general theory. I don’t know if Rankin will go on to feature printing in future episodes, but it is very much a part of the judgement of a truly great photograph. There’s no hiding imperfections in hard print. They may not show on the small screen, but when those pixels hit the paper, the truth is revealed for all to see. In browsing other photographers for research for this column, I came across an interesting quote from American landscape expert Ansel Adams which, to be honest, I had never heard before. “The negative is the score, and the print is the performance.” I had to do a double-take to get the sense, but he uses the word score in its musical sense rather than a football analogy. The notes on paper are simply symbols until the orchestra brings them to life. It struck me as particularly apt in present digital terms as despite what many people seem to believe, the displayed images are not strictly real but projections of mathematical numbers. You have to grasp that to understand why so many things can go wrong in the complicated digital daisy chain to make them real and why some things, particularly colours, are not always what they seem. It is the daily challenge at the counter with print on demand, explaining why some things JULY-AUGUST 2021• QUICK PRINT PRO
