[pure-silver] Re: "Hand Printed"
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeffrey Thorns" <puresilver@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 1:05 PM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: "Hand Printed"
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.
FWIW, mass production of photographic prnts was quite common for promotion purposes at one time. For instance fan photos of movie stars were printed from 8x10 duplicate negatives with masking to provide whatever retouching was needed. There was probably variation across a run but not much from print to print. Also, photofinishers often used automatic printers. These usually provide some degree of enlargment (jumbo prints) but were usually run by an operator who had some control of exposure and contrast although I think there were eventually machines that controlled exposure by photo-electric means due to the variation in amateur negatives. The photographic process can be made as automatic as a Xerox machine or computer printer.
BTW, I keep reading this subject heading as "Hand painted" as in ties. 

--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
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