No, not that Full Monty. This is the kind of Full Monty you get if you go all out and get the luxe version, the car that's optioned to the nines, the five star hotel penthouse suite.

This Full Monty is the printing and mounting process I recently saw in action at Blazing Editions in East Greenwich, RI. The company calls what it does "Sublimated Metal Printing" and I had an extremely informative morning with Merry Varr who is head of their marketing, among other things.

Check out their site at: Blazing Editions

The process yields (most commonly) a very glossy and slick bleed-edge image that is embedded onto an aluminum substrate. Colors are bright and punchy and the images have great impact.

As there is nothing between you and the actual image there is no conflict, no barrier to seeing it in all its glory (or not, if the image isn't good). Aaron Siskind, my teacher way back in grad school, would have loved this process as he never wanted anything in front of his pictures.

By the way the photographs you see here are  by Michael Tischler, as they are readying his work for a show. (Michael Tischler Photography)

Aluminum is a great surface to put a photograph on. It is inert, impervious to moisture, does not expand or contract, is stable, light in weight, won't bend or warp and is archival. 

The process is simple but needs some amazing gear and some high end tech. First, the file is printed, in reverse, on a paper-like material that serves as the transfer sheet. It looks like this when printed on:

which is faded out looking, almost desaturated as a print with no deep blacks. Here's what makes the print:

Regular large format printers, mostly Epson, that are loaded with dye sublimation inks.

The aluminum sheet is cut to size by this:

The 4 x 8 Patriot Router, the coolest thing I've ever seen, that can cut shapes as well as squares and rectangles out of sheet aluminum that's been specially treated for dye sublimation. 

Then the aluminum and the transfer sheet are put in this:

the sublimation press, which I called the "Sublimator" (of course) where it all cooks in there for a while at about 350 F and comes out, hot, looking like this.

Bright and vibrant with deep blacks.

I know this has been a long blog, but bear with me for a minute. I know what you're thinking. This is some sort of slick, commercial display-type of presentation made to  hang in some West Palm Beach Gallery or maybe in Aspen's gallery row, right? Slick, shiny, with impact and over saturated colors. Well, yes, it is appropriate in those uses but take a look at this:

This one is about 50 inches across, on a mat paper and looks simply gorgeous, with deep blacks and tremendous clarity, sharpness and fidelity. That's the one for me. Evidently for Jay Maisel, Joyce Tenneson and Bear Kirkpatrick too as they use Blazing Editions to make some of their prints. If you get a chance give Merry Varr (401-885-4329) a call and/or stop by to see what they do as it is most impressive. Pricing? Yeah, there is that. Compared to first rate mounting, over matting, framing with plexi or glass the prices are similar. Want to bring your work into contemporary practice? Don't like the face mounting system as it puts a " hazy screen" in front of your print? (face mounting can be viewed here: face mounting video). Try Sublimated Metal Printing.  It also is tough and may be polished, cleaned and so on. It won't take being keyed but it is strong as the image is in the aluminum not sitting as a print on top of it. And finally, Blazing Editions is a full "service bureau" in that  you send them your RTP file and they will make the mounted image. They also ship in custom made crates. As it turns out this kind of print ships easier due to its being thinner than frames and less bulky. Want to see samples? For $50 they will print your file on their 5 different surfaces in 8 x 10 inches.

Is this the future of still photography display? 

Maybe.

It has taken me a very long time. 

Perhaps it was the conversation and interview that Elin Spring and I had with Harold Feinstein (Harold Feinstein Photographer) and his wife Judith last week. Perhaps it was that I have a new summer assistant named Hannah who already has proven to be a huge help. And perhaps because it was time to face up to organizing, filing, correcting and re-boxing a career's worth of negatives made between 1968 to 2006. Yes, my friends, that is 38 years.

Harold Feinstein's negatives

I am known for many things, of course (stubborn, clueless, impatient,etc). But one of these characteristics is that I am very prolific. This has proven true as we work to consolidate, date, throw out and make findable all those negatives.  Man, I shot a lot! Thousands of 8 x 10 negatives. No idea how much 2 1/4 but certainly even more. For instance, many years Ilford was giving me 8 x 10 black and white film in a program to test new emulsions in the "field" to the tune of  1500 to 1700 sheets a year.  I would file a user's report at the end of each year, along with a request for the next year.  Somehow I managed to shoot all the film allocated. I remember one summer in Italy while teaching I shot 700 sheets. They were films like: Delta 400, XP1, XP2, HP5 and HP4.

Funny how we put things off. Some people are very good at "doing it now". Me, not so much. But as I will train Hannah to scan some of the negatives made over those 38 years, it becomes a little more important to be able to find them. Hence the great "refiling project" going on presently at my studio. We have a plan. Once the negatives are organized and work is findable, I will choose negatives for Hannah to scan on the Creo Scitex Eversmart Pro flatbed scanner in my studio. This is the same scanner, by the way, that I used to scan the negatives for my black and white book called "American Series". She will scan, mostly in the 8 x 10 format, and then "clean" the images created as large TIFF files. Why bother? Because if over 20 years worth of 8 x 10 negatives aren't scanned and cleaned and made RTP (Ready to Print) they will, for all intents and purposes, not exist. Same goes for over thirty years of 120mm, 35 mm and 4 x5 film. What does "cleaning" mean? Very simply, to remove dust and scratches that are either on the surface of the film or on one of the four sides of glass in the scanner. As much as these are maintained and cleaned, there is always dust. Of course, 8 x 10 is a perfect surface for dust as it is so very large. An 8 x 10 negative is capable of incredible levels of fidelity and phenomenal amounts of dust. The cleaning is done digitally in Photoshop with the rubber stamp tool, although it is necessary to keep those four glass surfaces physically clean as well. Scanning is deadly dull work but exacting too. I wish Hannah well with it. 

We are arranging the negatives in polypropylene boxes in years, from the bottom shelf being the earliest to the top shelf the most recent. I stopped shooting film sometime in 2006. Labels will be by date, place and project, Dymo taped on the outside of each box. Once we get that done we hope to create a database so that projects can be searchable.

Before, the way my negatives have been stored for years. Note predominance of yellow Kodak paper boxes. Paper and film are not archival.

All this is being done at the same time that we in the "Photographers Legacy Project" (PLP) are finding that very often negatives are thought of as not so important due to the sheer difficulty for archivests and museum curators to deal with them. The members of our volunteer PLP group are: Paula Tognarelli, Lou Jones, Elin Spring, Drew Epstein and myself. Current thinking is that for many, signed prints are the best vehicle to maintain a legacy of a photographic artist's work. Most prints are archival (a topic for another time: what is archival?), are easily aunthenticated due to being signed, easy to see and to store. 

New system using plastic boxes. Once we are done with the boxing, I will begin to go through each box and label its contents. Right now they are just labeled by year.

I have written this in other forms in this blog in past years but here it is again, reformatted. Aspire to be a "professional artist"? Want the fame and glory (hah!) along with all the income (double hah!)? Well, get professional. That means get organized. Do the work to be able to find your own work. No small task for many career artists. Once you've figured out where it all is and have sorted it, store it responsibly, make it searchable. It seems obvious to say this but believe me I know first hand what this is like: a prospective client, a gallery owner, a museum curator  comes to your studio or work room or home office to look at work. This is a time when you want to look like you know what you are doing, right? You show some work and the person asks what else you have from that time period or from that place, or that process, or that approach and then you begin the search for just where that one body of work is you know will slay them. Imagine having an "aha!" moment when you've found just what you were looking for only to find that the portfolio is incomplete, that the core pictures aren't in the box like they should be! OMG, this isn't good, is it? I have been there and it isn't pretty.

Old cardboard boxes used to store negatives in the dumpster.

To recapitulate. While doing it right now might not be possible doing it soon probably is. Put it on your list. Make it a priority. Oh, and one other thing, speaking from personal experience. Once you've got your negatives and prints, etc. organized, you'll want to keep them that way.

I don't know if you can relate but let's try it. There may be wisdom here but it may also be inconsequential or even foolhardy. We will see. At any rate, it will be good to run it down, to look at it a little as a phenomena.

I am starting here: senior and career artist photographer with some credentials (full professor at one highly ranked university and 13 years teaching at another, BFA and MFA degrees in photography at one of the top programs nationally, a long exhibition list over the whole career, grants and work in many museums and private permanent collections, currently represented by Boston-based 555 Gallery). In brief: a long established tenure of working in black and white analog series but also firmly established in the digital and color world of contemporary practice for the past 13 years.

Okay, so that's the framework. Let's just add that I taught photo history and contemporary directions in photography as lecture courses over the years. I know my discipline. But I am not solely a theoretician, I am a practitioner as well. Throughout my career I believed that part of my validation as a teacher was that I was out there making work. However, I live and breath in contemporary times and see photography changing so very drastically every day. Let me acquire some pictures to show you what I mean.

Photo Credit: Trey Ratcliff who describes himself on his site, "I'm a warm hearted old-school gentleman with really cool tools". His site is: here. I do not know Mr. Ratcliff but he describes his site as being one of the most frequented travel websites in the world. I suggest going to his site to get its full effect.

Whereas I come from a tradition of making pictures like these:

From the series Blackwater Dam made over a three year period in the early 90's. The full series is on the the site: here.

These fit into a firmly established tradition of landscape pictures made by a  practicing photographic artist: 8 x 10 view camera, 24 x 20 inch black and white prints made by me in the darkroom, a Zone System tonal scale, selenium toned prints, dry mounted and over matted 30 x 26 inches.

At issue is this: Mr Ratcliff's work has tremendous popularity. It also is, to my eye, overdone, too saturated and limited in its appeal (Mr Ratcliff is all about HDR photography). But is his work less credible or viable than mine based upon my credentials and his lack of same? I don't think so and there lies the sea change. 

We are going somewhere.

Stay tuned. 

Caught in a Dilemma? 2 coming up.

It seems the blog has taken a little bit of a vacation. This wasn't planned but I was away some and involved in a few different projects that kept me from writing. After this one that is an announcement I will be back with real content soon.

I have been asked by the New England School of Photography (NESOP) in Boston to be its keynote speaker at this year's graduation ceremonies in mid June. I am honored and humbled to be asked. Needless to say I have accepted the invitation.

Now comes the hard part. What do I tell a group of graduating students at the school? I've always listened to graduation speeches with a good deal of skepticism, for how could someone stand up there and be actually helpful to young people going off into the world to make their careers?

But before I delve into that I have to tell you what I love about doing this. I love that this is the same school I started out as a teacher in 1975, two years after getting out of graduate school. Of course, this was not only another century but the photography that we taught with 4 x 5 view cameras working in black and white in darkrooms bears little resemblance to the photography of today. Video wasn't even in the discipline's crosshairs then.  Now, for a pro, the two go hand in hand. NESOP was a place that launched not only its graduates' careers but young faculty too: Henry Horenstein, Jane Tuckerman, Joe DeMaio, Tom Petit, Jon Barkan, Jim Stone, and Barry Kipperman come to mind to name just a few.  

What will I say? I will reflect on my own career to analogize about the beginning of theirs. I will share my thoughts about failures that turned into wins, risks taken that succeeded, rejection and how to cope with the fact that all successful people receive far more "no's" than "yes's", that teaching within the discipline of photography that I loved with all my heart never truly felt like work, that being an invested and active photographic artist throughout my career informed my teaching and that my students helped me stay young, tolerant and invested in my art. Stuff like that.

Put yourself there. What would you say to a bunch of students about to graduate? It feels like a really good exercise to put yourself through, even if you aren't someplace's keynote speaker.

I am looking forward to it but I promise there will be sleepless nights thinking it through and deciding what to say.

I need to address the profession of teaching and, in my case, teaching photography in higher education.

First a little history 

By the post WW II era of the 50's and  60's in America photography was growing from a professional activity for magazines, portraiture and reportage to being slowly regarded as a viable art form in its own right. Pioneers such as Walker Evans, Bernice Abbot, Ansel Adams, Ed Weston and Harry Callahan among others were being recognized for the revolutionary artists they were. With the famous "Family of Man " exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid 50's came a whole new generation of people taking photography seriously. By the mid sixties actual photo programs and departments were being developed in universities. 

By the time I received my BFA degree in1971 and my MFA in 73 a photo major was the real deal and virtually all large universities and many smaller schools offered majors, minors, concentrations or at least courses as electives in photography.

In my own case and that of my classmates I was definitely in the right place at the right time. By 1975 I was teaching a couple of days a week and by 1978 four days a week in two places. By 1981 had landed a tenure track assistant professorship position in Boston.These were never easy to get and I started at a very low salary but several of my classmates, now colleagues, got them too. By 1988 I was tenured. Achieving tenure is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for many as it assures job security, senior status, and higher pay.

Was that the best? No. In the  beginning I was overworked, underpaid and under funded. I also was newly married, had a one year old baby, was renovating a house while living in it and was still teaching two days a week at Harvard. At Northeastern I'd been hired to teach in a facility that was hopeless. When it rained the roof would leak into the darkroom sink! I was scheduled to teach classes I had no curriculum for, no slides in which to teach a history class, no staff to man the lab for students to work outside of class time. But bit by bit, semester by semester things did improve. The school renovated the building, put us into new darkrooms I had designed, got us a color machine, new enlargers and most of what else we needed. I hired our first lab manager, hired other faculty, increased the program's budget, developed new courses and curricula, offered a concentration in photography and so on.  We were no longer aspiring towards being a vibrant and viable photo program; we were one.

While I was the primary force behind this, the popularity of photography and the medium's own pervasiveness as a significant field of study played a big part. It was a heady time as by the mid 90's Kodak was giving us materials by the palette, Ilford was as well, Polaroid was supporting the summer teaching I was doing in Italy with cases of film, Hasselblad had started a killer program with us that allowed our students and faculty to buy their wonderful cameras at phenomenal prices, Fuji was loaning us massive amounts of cameras and lenses to lure students to purchase their gear. Things were very very good. We had a state-of-the-art lab that was headed by a full time staff person of real ability. I stole him from another school by offering him a big raise. Photography was arguably the most vibrant and exciting program in our large Department. A few years later Photography was raised to another level of credibility, viability and support when it became a part of a new major in Multimedia Studies, a program I started with colleagues in our department.. This is how we garnered support for our digital offerings.

At the same time I tried to recognize my limitations as a teacher and worked to compensate for that by hiring other teachers with strengths in my deficiencies. I am proud of those hires and many of them are still there.

Things have changed

I retired from Northeastern in January 2012. Since then the Department has conducted one search for my replacement that failed due to incredible ineptitude by the University with commiserate deception and manipulation by the candidate. Not good. Currently they are searching for a more diverse person.

Here's the paragraph for qualifications for the Northeastern position, which is, by the way, "open rank" meaning they will hire the person they believe is best qualified in either tenure track (assistant professor), associate professor (tenured) or as a full professor:

Candidates must have an MFA, or equivalent terminal degree in media arts, visual arts, interactive media, digital photography, video art, digital art, installation, performance, or closely related contemporary art practices. They must demonstrate a high potential to advance their field through original work and creative production, experimentation, collaboration, exhibition, performance, activism, advocacy, presentation and publishing. Evidence of a high level of skill and accomplishment in making meaningful and provocative art with a sophisticated aesthetic, social acuity and cosmopolitan cultural sensibility are expected.

Notice how broad and open this is? The position is no longer a direct replacement for me but could be a performance artist, a book maker, whatever. That's because they want to choose from all kinds of people. Photography teaching and Photography programs at the college level are undergoing some serious changes. It is pretty difficult to justify single discipline programs in the visual arts currently, and specifically within photography. Photographers practicing the discipline are no longer just photographers. They need to know some graphic design, video, some animation perhaps, some web based applications, and on and on.

Photography teachers also need to show some flexibility and diversity in order to adapt to changing times. They need to increase their skills into other fields. Finally, the tenure system in higher education shows some signs of real stress. Fewer tenure track jobs are being posted and there are more and more adjuncts across all the disciplines. Adjuncts are pushing back, though, as many are seeking unionization to be able to effectively fight for better working conditions, including health coverage and job security. This dirty little secret of more adjuncts teaching more courses than full time faculty has been used by universities for a long time to great effect. Why? For more profit. I know, universities are not for profit places, right? Take a look at upper administration's salaries. Universities are businesses and you needn't look far to see what the real priority often is.While it was a long time ago, my dad's salary while president at a prominent art school in the 70's was well below $100k. It is not uncommon for current presidents of universities to make $1 million or more.  That's where a good deal of the higher tuition's dollars have gone, not so much into faculty compensation.

In conclusion, I was clearly in the right place at the right time. It shocks me now at my good luck. My belief is that photography itself is dissembling into a medium far more diverse that incorporates so much more than just a single picture at a time printed on a piece of paper. While this is the way I have worked throughout my career and will continue until I can't, younger photographers have both incredible opportunities ahead of them but large challenges as well. This is true of teachers too.

Please understand, this is one retired professor's point of view, not an accurate assessment of the field by survey or a consensus opinion. I hope you have found it informative. I would appreciate your views. You may reach me through my email address: here.

Thank you.