Firenze, Ponte Vecchio
August 2012
Silver gelatin print
It took a while to print. I studied the crop for a long time, Also, the sky was completely white in the first print I did, so I burned it in in subsequent prints to give it some texture.
Then I wanted to test some old Kodak paper I got at a rummage sale. It is very cute; it is pre-printed on the back side so it can be mailed as a postcard :
But chances were the paper would not be usable, so I just inserted the old paper in the easel without moving the enlarger head. Since this sheet of paper was smaller than the first one, I ended up with a different crop (notice how it is all off center!):
This accidental crop turned out so much better than the one I had worked on for an hour! This print tells a completely different story than the first one. I had gone to some trouble to crop out the tiny rowboat in the foreground, which turned out to be a great focal point, much better than the lamp-post in the other version!
In fact, it is hard to believe this print is pulled from the exact same negative. There is something magical about editing and the way in which it turns one scene into another, and sometimes drivel into gold.
(There is a line in Caruso, a song that Lucio Dalla wrote: "Potenza della lirica, .... che un po' di trucco e con la mimica puoi diventare un'altro"/ "Opera is a mighty thing, .. with a bit of makeup and miming you can turn into someone else". Dalla was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1943, and passed away earlier this year, 2012).
Last night I brought the pictures over to my friend's Jim house. The first print, I was going to give to his wife, who likes Italy; and the other print I wanted to discuss with him.
Jim had a lot of plausible explanations of why the second print is better, but the problem, as with much talk about composition, is that they are after the fact explanations: you can explain why a successful picture works, but you cannot prescribe a recipe to create a good picture.
While we were talking about it, I was reminded of a story I heard about Titian. I found the exact quotation this morning (but I remembered it accurately enough last night too): "he used to turn his pictures to the wall and leave them there without looking at them, sometimes for several months. When he wanted to apply his brush again he would exam ine them with the utmost rigor, as if they were his mortal enemies, to see if he could find any faults; and if he discovered anything that did not fully conform to his intentions, he would treat his picture like a good surgeon would his patient."
The story was written down by a Marco Boschini, who heard from Palma il Giovane, who had been an apprentice in Titian's studio. Palma was a good painter in his own right, and it is reasonable to believe he had understood the importance of what Titian was doing. My interpretation is that he had developed a technique to deal with composition: waiting for months to be able to see the picture with fresh eyes, then making an effort to be critical of it, rather than hoping for his work to still look good.
Two thoughts: even to an extraordinary painter like Titian, composition was something that required a work; he knew he could not get it right the first time, every time.
And: time. You have to let months pass. Not an easy thing to accept in our age: ars longa, vita brevis.
Oh, and: ars really meant "craft" in latin, not art. The craft takes time.
Coming tomorrow: Jim had an idea, and he gave me a gift.
P.S: I found a datasheet for my old paper. It is dated 1999, so maybe the paper is less ancient than it feels: http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/support/techPubs/g8/g8.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment