I think the implication of "hand-made" or "hand-printed" vs "machine-made" has less to do with the machine and more to do with "mass production".
Regardless of the product, if the process involves 'intimate human intervention', without which the product would not be the same, then you have mass production. And I think the distinction that most people make when they say hand-made is that is was not mass produced - it wasn't exactly like 5000 other samples of the same item.
In the case of photographic prints, you can mass produce a silver-gelatin print (has anyone here ever used an auto-printer?) or an inkjet print. The difference is in the individual samples. If you print by hand in the darkroom, then every print is likely to be subtley (or grossly) different from the last. (this assumes you are not using a machine printer) If you work on a digital image, then press the button for 5000 prints, then those prints were not hand-made. The 'image' may have been hand-made, but not the prints. They were mass produced.
In the case of traditional darkroom print-making, the 'image' (in the final product sense) and the 'print' are the same thing. In digital printing they are not.
On Nov 30, 2008, at 9:33 AM, Dana H. Myers wrote:A good inkjet print requires preparation of the image for printing before you start printing it, and it's possible that print itself is trimmed afterwards. Entering the options to start the print-out is perhaps analogous to pushing the button on the enlarger timer. Most importantly, the process is hand-guided; rather than queuing up a bunch of images and running a script to print them out automatically.And the same argument applies to making the color separations and plates, loading the plates, paper, and ink into a 4, 6, or 8 color Heidelberg press, registering the plates, and running-off a couple thousand copies. The printer does it by "hand" but then the press takes over.
============================================================================================================= To unsubscribe from this list, go to www.freelists.org and logon to your account (the same e-mail address and password you set-up when you subscribed,) and unsubscribe from there.
