Then and Now - I Do Print

I Do Print

I took up photography seriously again in 2008. In the intervening sixteen years aspects of the way I photograph, some of my thinking about photography and some of my expectations around photography have changed. In this - irregular - series I identify the what and the why of those changes. In this third post I explain why I now routinely print my pictures. Each post is accompanied by a random photograph or three from those sixteen years.

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For most of my life a photograph was a print. Yes, there were negatives, but we didn’t pull those out to look at or pass around. Occasionally there was reversal film - slides - but they needed a projector and a screen (or a light-coloured wall.) Most of the time, we took our exposed film to the nearest Boots (UK readers will understand) and picked up our wallet of prints a few days later. Sometimes they stayed in the wallets which then stacked up in a shoebox. Sometimes they were arranged in albums to be placed on a bookshelf and shown to friends and relatives when they came round. In a world of digital photography, it’s easy to forget just how radically our way of handling and viewing images has changed in a relatively short space of time.

Clearly, people are still printing. The number of online photo printing sites demonstrates there is still significant, and possibly increasing, demand. But equally clearly, we are more selective in what we print. In someways this is a benefit of digital photography. Instead of printing an entire spool of thirty-six negatives, including all the poor ones we wouldn’t want anyone to see, we can now choose only to print the best of our work. And what we don’t print is still viewable on digital devices rather than gathering dust in the negative sleeve. But I still wonder how many of us print regularly. How many of us view a print as an integral part of the photographic process, rather than an optional extra.

Tbilisi - January 2012

I know that, for me, it’s only in the last five or six years that I’ve started to print regularly rather than occasionally. And throughout that period the amount I print has increased significantly. There are many reasons why, but the main reason is that no digital display can match the tactile pleasure of a print - or a photobook - in your hand. I don’t know why, but the lack of materiality of an image viewed on a screen seems to distance or diminish the image compared to holding a material print in my hand or even viewing a print on a wall. The screen seems to create a distance between me and the image - even if it’s one of my own images.

Perhaps people who did not grow up with this sense of the photograph as a material object do not feel this way and are perfectly satisfied with the digital image. But I also suspect there are people who might like to print more but are put off by the apparent complexity of the process. In the era of film most of us dropped our roll off at the nearest film development service, picked up our prints a little later, and gave absolutely no thought to how the magic happened. Now, even a brief internet search for advice on printing is likely to pull up all manner of choices, complications and warnings:

• profiles and calibration

• gamma and gamut

• sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB

• RGB (additive) and CMYK (subtractive)

• ICC colour profiles and LUTs

• glossy, baryta, cotton rag

• dye-based, pigment-based, chromogenic

It’s little wonder that, confronted with all this, some of us might conclude our chances of ending up with a decent print are slim. My advice is largely to ignore all of this. If you are printing an image that’s going to hang in a gallery these are all important issues. (Though if your print is heading for a gallery wall there will be a professional printer taking care of all of this for you.) For most of us, most of the time, we are printing for our own pleasure or to hang on our walls at home and this level of technical knowledge is not necessary. Yes, it is useful - and sometimes interesting - to know the technicalities, but you can pick up as much as you consider useful as you go, refining your print preparation and reprinting your images.

Tbilisi - April 2012

Prints don’t have to be perfect, so there’s no reason to agonise over how a print will turn out. Prints are reproducible and disposable. If you don’t like how a particular print turns out, tweak as necessary and reprint. If you do like how it turns out, print a dozen, give a few to your friends, pin one on a noticeboard, leave some on a park bench. Print a black and white version. Make a calendar from your prints and send it to your family and friends. Print on a mug, a dishtowel, an apron, a cushion, a jigsaw puzzle. Don’t be all ‘artsy’ believing your pictures are too important, too meaningful, for anything other than a framed print on the wall.

Prints, particularly the standard 6x4 prints are cheap. In some cases they’re free. Are they gallery quality? No. But so what? They’re not going in a gallery. Will they last fifty years? No. But if they fade too soon, print some more. Even in a gallery, a specific print is not that significant in itself. If someone slashes a Van Gogh painting, that’s a tragedy. If someone slashes a Henri Cartier-Bresson print, that’s unfortunate but (assuming the negative still exists) a new print can be made.

Tbilisi - April 2012

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One of the best ways to get your work into print is to make photobooks or magazines. In the pages of a photobook, you can print multiple sizes and formats, use both sides of the page to print on, and gather a collection of prints in a bound volume that can sit on your bookshelves or coffee table.

For the last couple of years I’ve used Blurb magazines for most of my printing. Each month I select around thirty pictures and create a thirty-page photo magazine in Blurb’s BookWright programme. For around USD15, I get the printed magazine and a digital PDF version. From time to time, I put together additional magazines on a specific theme or location, such as my recent sixty-page magazine of black and white images of Shanghai.

There are plenty of other photobook printing services available at every kind of price and quality. Many of them regularly have discounts and special offers available. Try one. If you don’t like the results, try another one. The key thing is to make a start. Once you see your work in print, you will almost certainly decide to print more.

Unfortunately, some within the online photography community make photobook printing unnecessarily complicated by fixating on design and sequencing. My advice, as with printing in general, is not to worry about any of this and learn about it through practice - that is, through actually printing your pictures. For photobook design, keep things simple. You don’t need elaborate fonts, complex layouts, sophisticated text. The photograph, the image should be front and centre. Start with a blank page. Place your image. Now ask yourself if anything you add to that page will enhance your image or take away from it. Almost certainly anything you add will be a distraction.

Sequencing is one of those things that some photographers or photography educators get very worked up about. But fixating on sequencing will lead to paralysis. Here’s the key point: there’s no such thing as the ‘correct’ sequence. For Mark Power sequencing his images is important. He takes a lot of time shaping the images in his books into a sequence that satisfies him. But, as Power says, ‘The important thing to remember is that there isn’t just one correct way of sequencing pictures. There are many, and it’s very subjective.’

If a sequence works for you, it’s a good sequence. Another day you may re-sequence the same set of images differently. That’s also a good sequence. You might sequence by chronology, by subject matter, by colour, by contrast, by viewpoint. You might sequence thirty pictures, or five sets of six pictures. So, if you sequence your pictures in a way that works for you, don’t second guess yourself by wondering if it is the ‘correct’ sequence.

Go ahead and print your photobook. Print some extra copies for friends and family. And if, a year from now, you see a different sequence or think a different treatment of certain images might work better, make the changes and print a new edition. Remember, prints are reproducible and disposable. There is no authentic or canonical version of your photobook, just endless possibilities.

Print. Print. Print.