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After 40 years in the darkroom, I am still working this out what is a fine print to you?

Silverprint Italy

Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2014
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26
Location
Faenza - Italy
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A while ago I started a thread here asking about advanced darkroom courses. It got some kind responses, and then it stopped — and I have been thinking about why.

I suspect it was my fault. I am Italian, and I communicate in a direct way that feels natural to me but can land badly in English-speaking spaces. Re-reading what I wrote, I can see how some of it may have come across as dismissive — as if I was positioning myself above the conversation rather than inside it. I genuinely did not mean it that way, and I am sorry if it read like that.

So I would like to try again, more carefully this time.

I have been printing in the darkroom since I was a kid — since 1980 — and teaching since 1996. You would think that after all this time I would have a firm, clear definition of what a fine print is. Honestly, I am still working it out. The longer I spend in the darkroom, the less certain I am about rules, and the more I find myself coming back to one word: coherence.

Not a style. Not a technique. Just — does everything in this print serve the same intention? A soft, warm, quiet print and a harsh, cold, confrontational print can both be extraordinary. What seems to matter is whether every choice — tonal range, contrast, finish, even how it is framed and hung — points in the same direction.

But I hold this idea loosely. I am more curious what others think than I am attached to my own answer.

How do you think about print quality — especially at the level where technique is no longer the main question?
 

I think you are close. A fine print comes from the heart and soul. It is crafted to the highest standards and made from the finest available materials.
 
RalphLambrecht said:
I think you are close. A fine print comes from the heart and soul. It is crafted to the highest standards and made from the finest available materials.
Click to expand...

+1

To my mind, a fine print is in the eyes of the beholder. A careful, sensitive worker should be able to produce final prints that s/he can be proud of. Where that level winds up is a personal choice, IMO. For example, in my B&W prints I strive to make prints whereby light appears to emanate from the print. I rarely achieve that "look", but it's a target. Back when I was showing new work to my mentor on a fairly regular basis, I remember showing him an image of a brook and he said, "Go back into the darkroom and make that water look wet!" Huh? How does one convey "wetness" on a dry print. After playing with different developers, additives, and toning I finally made that water look wet. Honestly, though, with today's materials I'm not sure I can reproduce that look. And, my skills have dropped off over the years as I don't work in the darkroom nowadays nearly as much as I used to.

Anyway, I hope a threw a few tidbits into the mix to help in your thinking.
 
Thank you Ralph!

Coming from you, "close" means a lot.
I completely agree about heart and soul. In fact I would say that without it, technical perfection becomes just a display of skill — impressive perhaps, but cold, empty. The emotional commitment of the printer is somehow always visible in the final print.
I am curious though — how would you describe that in more concrete terms? When you look at a print and feel that heart and soul are present, what are you actually seeing or sensing?
I ask because I find it one of the hardest things to teach, precisely because it resists direct or clear description.
I feel that is really worth trying, though; collectively maybe we could get somewhere interesting and aslo useful.

On materials — I take your point, and the intention behind it is clear. Though I wonder if "finest available" is quite the right frame.
We have relatively few choices today, and honestly most of what remains is quite good. What seems to matter more to me is whether the material is *appropriate* — whether the weight, surface and tone of a particular paper serves the specific image and the artist's intention.
The finest paper in the world, in the wrong hands or on the wrong image, will not save the print.
 

That story about making the water look wet is wonderful — and it goes straight to the heart of what we are trying to describe. Your mentor was not asking for a technical adjustment. He was asking you to translate a sensation from one sense into another, through chemistry and light alone. That is exactly what the best darkroom work does, and it is almost impossible to teach directly.

It reminded me immediately of a moment in my own darkroom. I was struggling with a spring landscape — wheat fields, bright light — and after a long battle with the print I finally shouted in frustration: "the wheat is not green enough!" My assistant looked at me as if I had lost my mind. We were working in black and white, of course. But we both knew exactly what I meant.

I hope you find your way back to the darkroom more regularly. From what you describe, the sensitivity is still very much there — and today's materials, for all their limitations, have some unexpected qualities worth exploring. You might surprise yourself.
 
What makes a fine painting, a fine musical composition, a fine poem, a fine novel? Questions often asked and never answered as there is no absolute answer. In my way of thinking all art is about communication, conveying a message, a fine print conveys a message, as humans all it often comes to an emotional message.
 

you are, of course, entirely correct by saying that heart and soul is hard to explain and teach. the point is that a fine print must 'grab' the observer and'speak' to him or her. That connection is obvious when you see it but hard to convey in words. There is one common thread, however. A fine-art photographer is more likely to put their heart and soul into their work if they have a strong emotional connection to the subject. Photograph what you love and love what you photograph.
 

You raise something genuinely important, and I agree that there is no single absolute answer — though I think that is precisely why a collective effort to explore the question becomes so interesting. If there were one clear answer, the conversation would be over before it began.

On art as communication — I find myself only half convinced. If a fine print is primarily about conveying a message, then a well-written caption would do the job more efficiently, and with far less effort. What strikes me about the best prints — and the best art in any medium — is that they do something language cannot do at all. They produce an experience that resists translation into words. The moment you can fully explain what a print communicates, something essential has already been lost.

Perhaps a more useful model is art as a trigger rather than a message — something that activates thoughts, emotions and memories already latent in the viewer, in ways that no direct communication ever could. Two people stand in front of the same print and are moved in entirely different directions. That is not communication. That is something stranger and more powerful.

Which brings us back, I think, to the question of how a print achieves that. And that seems very much worth trying to define, even if the answer is never final.
 
And it takes hours, days sometimes to come up with the right equation. Even then it nay be a failure. A fine print should be made in multiple copies so you can possibly dry mount the print, have it matted, put into a frame to display. Keeping in mind that the final "customer" may not want it mounted and want to choose how to display.

If I feel like I have something good I will try different subtle toners. etc....

It's grueling work for me, but I love the result
 

This may be silly in this thread, but this pointed reply of Paul's reminds me of a M*A*S*H episode I saw long, long ago; and it goes like this: A soldier, who was a pianist before induction, lost his right hand in a battle incident. He was very despondent in thinking that he'd never be able to play, again. Winchester sat him at a piano and laid out music that was written for the left hand, only. The soldier was reluctant to even try, but Winchester said, "I can sit there and play the notes, but I can't make the music." That line has stuck with me for a long time!

Sorry for veering off-topic slightly.
 

"Photograph what you love and love what you photograph" — that is a beautiful line, and I think it describes something real about where the energy behind great work often comes from.

And yet I find myself wondering about the edges of that idea. Some of the most powerful images I know were made by photographers who were not in love with their subject — who were perhaps disturbed by it, indifferent to it, or simply deeply professional about it. And some of the most technically accomplished darkroom printers I have encountered were printing other people's negatives, with no personal connection to the subject at all — and yet the prints were extraordinary.

It makes me think that emotional connection to the subject might be one path to a fine print — perhaps the most natural and intuitive path — but not the only one. What seems to matter in the end is whether something is transmitted to the viewer, regardless of what the maker felt in the process.

I am curious whether you have ever made a print that moved you — or moved others — from a subject you felt little personal connection to? I would love to hear your experience.
 
A fine print is one you are happy with.
 
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Hello @Silverprint Italy I have seen some of your youtube videos and I enjoyed them, they were clear and helpful, keep them coming!
 
To me, "fine print" implies that one has taken that particular negative to its best possible interpretation and done the requisite finishing, archival washing, toning, spotting, etc. It is complete and you are happy with it.
A "fine print" is simply not a test, work print, or artist's proof (well, maybe an artist's proof would qualify depending upon the printer)

Any discussion about art is so subjective though, and language is tricky. Adding the modifier "fine" denotes a higher level of quality than if we remove "fine." Fine furniture, fine clothing, fine wine, a fine finish (woodworking), etc.

To my odd sensibility, calling a novel "fine" indicates a lesser viewpoint; "Did you like that book?"
"It was fine." That is not a glowing review.
 

Thank you — and yes, the linguistics of "fine" are genuinely amusing, and you are not wrong. It is an imperfect word for what we are trying to describe, and I am not sure a better one exists in English — or in any language, for that matter. And yet here we are, a group of experienced printers, all instinctively understanding what quality we are referring to. That shared recognition, even without a precise word for it, seems to me the most interesting thing this thread has revealed so far. It suggests the concept is real, even if language struggles to contain it.

Which brings me back to "best possible interpretation" — we all agree on that as a goal. The question I keep returning to is: what would help us actually recognise it, or distinguish it from a lesser one? That, I think, is where the interesting conversation lives.
 
Silverprint Italy said:
Which brings us back, I think, to the question of how a print achieves that. And that seems very much worth trying to define, even if the answer is never final.
Click to expand...

Your right, but, defining fine prints, how do you judge Eugene Smith's Tomako in Bath to Ansel Adams Moon Rise over Hernandez New Mexico? Very different artists, very different approach, one taken as a commercial work, the other as "fine art" both stand alone in terms of conveying the message the photographer intended.
 
Alan9940 said:
Winchester sat him at a piano and laid out music that was written for the left hand, only
Click to expand...

Opening bars of Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. I love that episode.

(End of digression)
 

Those are really "fine" examples — and I think they actually illustrate what I have been trying to describe, perhaps better than I have managed so far.

Those two prints could hardly be more different in style, technique, subject or emotional temperature. And yet both are undeniably extraordinary. The question is, why? What do they share, if not style or technique or even a similar approach to the subject?

I would suggest the answer is coherence. In Tomoko in the Bath, every tonal choice, every shadow, every area of the print serves the same intention, the weight of that moment, the tenderness, the devastation. Nothing is there by accident, nothing distracts. Moonrise over Hernandez works in an entirely different register, but with the same internal consistency, every element pointing in the same direction.

Neither print would survive an element out of place. That, I think, is what they share and what we might call a fine print. Not a style, not a technique, not even an emotion.
A coherence between intention and outcome that we may struggle to define precisely, but can learn to recognise
 
Great answers, but I disagree with the idea that a fine print is the print of an image that should stand on its own. You can have a fine print of an image that is a (seemingly) ordinary image on its own but is meant to be in a series, to take its part in a narrative.

A fine print is in the craft.

There are many photobooks constructed as narratives in which not every photograph is a great photograph (or not as great as the greatest) but of which every print is a fine print.
 

I am not sure you were referring to my answer or someone else's — either way, I think we agree more than you might expect. The idea of a print within a series is actually a wonderful extension of what I mean by coherence — a print that works perfectly in its narrative context, serving the intention of the whole sequence, may be held to an even higher standard than one that stands alone. The coherence is simply operating at a larger scale.

Which makes the craft demands greater, not lesser. So perhaps we are saying the same thing from different directions.
 
This talk of series and narrative reminds me of something from my own practice that might be worth sharing.

When I print a portfolio or a series — whether for a client or for myself — I keep all the prints at hand throughout the process. I will not consider the work finished until they function together as a whole. Not similar — some technical choices inevitably create visual continuity — but something beyond that. Each print should strengthen the others, create a context for them, perhaps even change how you read them.

It is one of the most demanding aspects of darkroom work, and one of the least talked about. A print that works beautifully in isolation can quietly undermine a sequence. And sometimes a print that seems modest on its own becomes essential the moment it finds its place among the others.
 
 
My personal take is that the word fine in this case has nothing to do with ranking image quality or quality of material or workmanship. One fine print is not finer or not as fine as another fine print.

For me it is a descriptive word of the intention of the photographer making the print…to create. A fine print can fail, and it happens often. I have many technically fine prints made from the finest materials that are not worth sharing…but were good learning opportunities.

We tend to share the successful fine prints.
 
At the risk of paraphrasing Ansel Adams, a fine print is a performance.
So as is the case with many other performance arts, it is very possible to end up with many different, extremely valid fine prints from the same negative.
I've done a reasonable amount of work printing for others. One of the more enjoyable results of doing that is sometimes photographers are surprised at what I've been able to do for them - when they imagined the results obtainable it didn't include some of the results I've achieved. Of course that is a double-edged sword - sometimes a failure to understand needs and expectations can result in the printer disappointing the photographer.
Of course we all have encountered the opposite. Sometimes the print you envisaged as the photographer turns out to not be supported by the negative you created.
If you haven't already done so, I recommend looking through all the fun and different and very fine results shared in @Don_ih 's excellent "All print one Negative" project thread, found here: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/lets-all-print-or-maybe-scan-one-negative-2025.215648/
 
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