[pure-silver] Re: "Hand Printed"

Today's ride started in fog at
7am but it cleared into a fine, brisk morning by 8am, temperature
in the high 40s, total of 58 miles including a loop through Napa
vineyards.

I'm in awe! That sounds very very cool.


Losses of manual control associated with "digital".  Digital
what?  Digital capture?  Digital manipulation?  Digital printing?
Especially digital printing. Pretend for a moment that you had the option to move the print-head of your ink-jet back and forth by hand, and how you did so (speed, pressure, etc.) contributed to the quality of the output, and told of your skill and experience as an artist. That would be hand-made. 


So, the notion of "Hand-printed on a Epson" really isn't worthy
of a snicker once you have anything beyond a superficial appreciation
of the craft.
Just to be clear, none of the editing, post-processing, test printing, color profiling, ink & paper selection, etc. is being addressed at all. I have more than a superficial appreciation for the craft, and a thorough understanding of art-making processes, methods and materials, and spend my working hours physically and intellectually joining digital to analogue, hand-made and machine- made. Only the notion that a machine-made print is hand-made is silly. It would be like saying "Walked to in a Ford". 


My take is that the artist uses the phrase "Hand-printed" to express
the attention given from capture to print, or, perhaps, it's yet another bit of artistic pretense in the name of marketing. But the same can be 
said of most "hand-made" silver gelatin prints, no?
I don't disagree that a darkroom print can only tentatively be called hand-made. I believe I said as much. The word "Manual" existed before it was a setting or an option, and I suppose it now has new meanings. I can accept that. But hand-made is too linguistically basic to have evolved into meaning "carefully considered choices, or personal attention given." Or has it? If hand- made is now in the realm of metaphor, what's left of the physical world, and our place in it as artists? I don't think of that so much as a snicker, but as a reasonable question. 

E.

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