gum printers: what's your favorite black pigment?

[Katharine Thayer]

Date correction re Demachy

But as far as the progression of his work over time, the curator's note Lukas mentioned on the back of the print makes no sense to me in the context of the reproductions I've seen. That print in red, showing the woman to have a full head of hair and giving a very nice gradation in the filmy cloud of gauze around her shoulders, is given a date of 1898 in Camera Notes; another print of apparently the same subject with the same hairdo but a different pose, that has the highlights so blown out that it looks like she has a big bald patch on the side of her head, is given the date of 1900. (And it looks that way in a variety of different reproductions, so it's not just one particular reproduction that didn't reflect the print accurately). So I'm not sure that his work could be seen as a progression in the direction of printing a full photographic tonal scale.

I've become aware that the dates on prints in the books that reproduce images from Camera Notes and Camera Works reflect the date the print was published, not the date that the print was made. The print in red of the back of the woman's head, published in 1898 in Camera Notes as "Study in Red," was apparently printed in 1895; the other print I mentioned earlier being probably the same model but a different pose, also printed in red, with the highlights blown out, I believe is correctly dated at 1900. But I came across a reproduction of a different print of that same image, printed in black and dated 1896, that is a much better print, at least insofar as one can judge from comparing the reproductions, and insofar as we take the definition of being a good print as "somewhat resembling a continuous tone photograph." The impression I took from my reading, as I suggested earlier, is that Demachy wasn't terribly concerned with making prints that looked like photographs; he was more interested in making prints that looked like paintings.