Editorial : The future of prints By Paul Whitham LPSNZ
AS I WRITE this on the last day of May, a sense of normality is slowly returning. My wife is currently attending church, for the first time since the end of March, in the building it is normally held at. For the last six weeks she has been attending church via a mixture of Zoom and YouTube Live. The increase in gathering size to a maximum of 100 people has opened the way for camera clubs to start meeting again, although initially they may be slightly less social than in the past. In fact, Whanganui Camera Club takes first place in getting together again, as they held a meeting on Friday 30 May. It will be interesting to see what the post-Covid world will look like. In all likelihood landscape and nature photographers are going to have to stick to New Zealand, and hopefully shortly Australia, as I can’t see widespread travel to the rest of world happening this year. While Covid has affected many facets of photography, I hope that it has not done permanent damage to the future of prints. I say this because, while the sharing of digital images took place over the last two months, the movement of prints stopped completely. We were unable to display the PSNZ Sony National Exhibition prints and the interclub prints. In addition, there will be no regional print competitions this year. The NZIPP also took the very drastic step to make the 2020 Iris Awards all digital. This is a huge departure from the past as these have been ‘print only’ events. Having attended their judging, and seen the differences between the digital and print versions of the same image, I hope that this is a one-time occurrence. Closer to home, the North Shore Salon opened by accepting digital images in both the print and digital categories. As I understand it, this decision meant that the salon could run fully while providing them the flexibility to still have the actual exhibition should events be allowed at the time. It also meant that they did not need to bring their selectors together in one place. In the event that the exhibition could occur then those photographers with accepted images in the print category would then submit their prints. It did raise a few comments in the Facebook group, especially as it essentially removed the element of printing (such as paper choice) which is part and parcel of print judging. It also meant that the photographers could not ensure that the selectors saw the images as they intended. This raised the question “ Why bother with a print in the first place?” It will be interesting to see if other salons do something similar in the future.
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