First: anyone who wants to see our prints can contact me and Paula and can visit us here at our home/studio. For those near Chicago, as one fellow is: We will soon be photographing in Chicago for a month. Get in touch with us and you can come into the city to look at prints. We will have over 300 of our prints with us. A rainy day, or a very gray day would be best, as those days we will not be working.
Now to try to answer Ray Rogers:
He wrote: "It would seem that a difference that can only be seen in direct comparison, side by side, is a rather small one, and not one that would make you want to write a letter home to mother about.
I am not trying to say you are wrong, just that I and perhaps others cannot (yet?) see what you are looking at!
Glow?
Sounds like love to me!"
Alfred Stieglitz once said:
"If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it." from Introduction to an American Seer by Dorothy Norman. (This is not the big Dorothy Norman book, but a smaller book published in 1960.)
If you were not a musician, or not even very musical, and weeks apart, you heard for the first time, music by, say, Telemann and Vivaldi, you might think it was pretty much the same music. But if you heard them one after the other, hopefully you would immediately know that the works were written by different composers.
The difference between a print on silver chloride paper and a print from the same negative on enlarging paper is a huge one. (Sometimes it can be a small difference, but usually there is a very great difference.) I was a good printer before I used Azo, but one year I reprinted all of my pre-Azo negatives onto Azo paper. The difference, for most of them. was astounding. In a few cases, one would have thought that different negatives were used. If long scale prints and endless glowing mid-tones are what someone is after, and if they have the opportunity to make contact prints, in my mind they have to be very uncaring not to make their prints on silver chloride paper.
I'll make this offer to Ray Rogers and to all of the other skeptics: Send me a negative to print on silver chloride paper along with the best print you could make of it on enlarging paper, and I will make a print on silver chloride paper and send it back to you. In our Vision and Technique workshops Paula and I ask people to bring their most difficult negatives and I print them. That is to demonstrate an approach to printing. This is something different. Send a negative that you could get a good print from fairly easily. I may not do all the dodging and burning you would do (but then again, depending on the print, I may). I will be printing it to show you the tonal quality of silver chloride paper. I will not archivally process the print, nor will I tone it unless for some reason the color seems "off" (which is highly unlikely). Include return postage. Hold off doing this until we have the new Lodima paper. Send a negative that prints on grade 2, as that is the only paper I will have for a while. if you send a negative with the wrong tonal scale I will not try to print it, as a grade 2 paper will not properly print a negative that needs either grade 1 or grade 3 or 4. Now, there is a little leeway on this, so your print does not have to be dead on, but I hope you understand what I mean here.
I am not a "technical" person, have never owned a densitometer, etc.. I go by what I see. I don't like anything technical about photography. Silver chloride paper not only has the best tones of any paper, but it is the easiest paper to print on--the least technical.
Just yesterday, a photographer whose work we have published in one of our Lodima Press Portfolio Books came here so I could print one of his negatives. He had never used a silver chloride paper. He was blown away by how easy everything was. He used to spend two or three days making a few prints from one negatives. I had it nailed in far less than an hour. Partly my skill, but mostly it is the paper and the Amidol.
So yes, the magic is in silver chloride paper. if it were not, Paula and I certainly would not have gone to all the trouble we have gone to, and would not have spent part of a couple years of our lives trying to get the new paper made.
Frederick Evans gave up photography when commercially made platinum paper was discontinued. I might give it up if there were no more silver chloride paper.
Michael A. Smith
