Housatonic, MassachusettsIt's never seemed important to me to find one single, definitive view of a subject. Sometimes I return to the same subjects again and again to find new interpretations. It's OK to see more than one interesting view of a subject and I don't think it's essential to decide which view is best. For that matter, I feel the same way about prints. If I return to a picture I've printed years before, I don't make any effort to print it exactly the same way as before. I look for the best interpretation I can make now, and don't care if it's different. After all, maybe I know a little more about pictures, and printing them, than I did ten or forty years ago.
Housatonic, Massachusetts
4 comments:
Not only have our abilities and attitudes and vision changed when we come back to an image, the available technology may have changed meanwhile - new materials and methods, perhaps adding to, or perhaps superseding the availability of previous materials and methods.
In the digital realm this happens over a much shorter timescale. I am already seeing a difference in camera Raw images from 3 years ago, after progressive improvements in the software I use merely to view, let alone convert, them. My computer monitor is now a moderately accurate one, which [blush] apparently wasn't a concern, way back then in the mid 'oughts...
Richard, technology sometimes takes away treasured tools, and sometimes it gives us new opportunities for interpretation. I've made many pictures with a 7x17 inch camera intended solely for contact printing in Pt/Pd. Years later, I began to scan some of them to make 40-inch wide digital prints, a whole new way of looking at the pictures. In some cases I "found" details in the pictures that I had been very aware of while shooting but had more or less forgotten because they hardly showed in the contact size prints.
I made some similar explorations after flatbed-scanning some family tintype portraits dating from late 1800s Scotland. Roughly cropped metal sheets, with chemical streaks, bubbles and fingermarks at the edges and on the back, they are more object than image; more a craft than a technology.
Even printed at the same scale with a matt inkjet process, they take on a very different meaning. One feels like a survival from the past, the other feels like a representation of the past.
I agree entirely with your thoughts on points of view and printing. What I find interesting about these photographs is that they are from a different perspective and have a totally different feel, yet, the major elements are the same: the tower is in the same place, there is a large 'object' running from the right, pavement in front. A different point of view with the 'same' (?) elements
Post a Comment