Introduction(s)

These introductions explore the visual concepts and ideas that inform ways of making a photographic fine print.  A fine print is more than a physical representation of a photographic image, a fine print is an expression of all the things the artist ‘saw’, ‘felt’ and ‘responded to’ in making the image.  To nuance a photographic fine print, to make something that is extraordinary to look at, requires a set of problem solving concepts that can be technically executed using image editing applications and the correct choice of paper.

Photography is inherently an analytical discipline.  Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene – simplifies the jumble by giving it structure.  He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.
(Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs, pp. 37)

A photographic print is, in most instances, a base of paper, plastic or metal that has been coated with an emulsion of light sensitive metallic salts or metallic dyes.  In some prints, the base is coated directly with or imprinted with dyes, pigments, or carbon.  A photograph is flat, it has no edges, and it is static; it doesn’t move.  While it is flat, it is not a true picture plane.  The print has a physical dimension.
(Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs, pp. 15)