Photography is not Printmaking.

by Maris Rusis

Dieses Dokument auf deutsch

(taken from a thread on apug.org about the value of photographs by permission of the author)

The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) identified a class of conceptual challenges that arise because of a misuse of language and I think the underlying assumption, that “photographs” are “prints”, is one of them. Photographs are so different from prints technically, historically, and aesthetically that to call photographs “prints” is now one of those unconscious deceits that become widely tolerated because they are so frequent and familiar.

The conflation of “photographs” with “prints” began, I believe, with a 19th century inferiority complex on the part of photography. Here was a new medium with no aesthetic credentials. Art critics and especially dealers burdened it with the values of the next best thing: etchings, engravings, aquatints; prints in general. A collector in search of a fine engraving might be persuaded to buy a photograph especially if it were passed off as just another kind of print and a cheaper one at that. I suggest it is time that photography cast off this aesthetic cringe to old print values.

Most photographers (camera clickers aside) know how photographs come into being but they do not know much about actual printmaking. Compressing the encyclopedia of printmaking into a couple of sentences is tricky but here’s an attempt. In printing the mark-making medium, ink, paint, whatever, is not formed directly in the substrate (as in photography) but is conducted from a reservoir by an organizing matrix such as an intaglio, relief, or planographic printing plate. Silkscreen and lithography are planographic, etching and engraving are intaglio, and letter-press and wood-cut are relief processes. The key thing is that the print medium does not have to be generated anew for each copy. To get another etching one does not have to etch again. One merely has to ink up and turn the press one more time.

Photography is a very different thing. To get one more photograph you must photograph again right from the start. The subject has to be re-addressed and light collected from it, a sensitive surface must be exposed to this light, then developed, fixed, washed – you know the drill. People forget (never think?) that the subject for many photographs is an all ready existing photograph, usually a negative. If I make a photograph of that negative on ordinary gelatin-silver emulsion I get a positive. That positive is surely a photograph whether the emulsion happens to be coated on clear base or paper. To call one version a photograph because it’s on film and the other a print because it’s on paper seems absurd. I will admit that the world is big enough that every absurdity will find someone (many?) to champion it but dead wrong can’t be turned into dead right whatever the vote.

Ansel Adams introduced an attractive and insightful analogy between photography and music and the analogy can be extended to include prints. Prints are like playing a record to get music. Photographs are like playing a musical instrument to get music. A record sounds the same every time it is played. A live performance is unique because even for an accomplished musician it is never exactly the same twice. Many music lovers know and prize the difference. That’s why they will pay more for admission to a concert that they hear only once over a record they can hear a thousand times. Some photographers have a parallel understanding about their own art and will always prize any photograph above any print.

Our familiar friend Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it another way: if you look at a photograph but say “print” then you are mentally imprisoned into thinking “print” which leads inevitably into seeing “print” where no print exists. Once the seeing is wrong strange things follow. For example, if photographs are prints then surely prints could be photographs. Impossible you say? No, it is already happening every time you are offered an ink-jet print that postures as a photograph.
Have you ever wondered why print-maker talk fits downright awkwardly with photographic production. Photographers really don’t do “numbered copy”, “limited edition”, “print”, “proof”, “artists proof”, BAT (bon a tirer = “good to pull”), “impression” and all the other print shop vocabulary. Every attempt to force photography into “print making” for commercial gain has a smell of artifice about it; a tacit swindle that can leave photographers, dealers, and collectors marked by a whiff of venal compromise.

And the only thing at stake is commerce not art. It is difficult to imagine a collector feeling truly fulfilled, getting more joy, in buying a “limited edition” photograph simply because they have been promised that there are a hundred more exactly like it out there somewhere. Photographs don’t derive worth from being “the same” from one example to another but prints do. That’s why extending print spiel to photographs does nothing except cheapen and commodify those photographs.