Warning: grumpy
post follows.
Brooks Jensen is
publisher, editor, designer, and probably janitor of the magagine “Lenswork.” There is a lot to admire about him. He and his wife thought up the idea of
Lenswork and made it happen – and keep making it happen – with a barrage of
marketing ideas, some luck, and a whole lot of hard work. They moved Lenswork from a home-printed rag
one step above a memeographed newsletter to a very high quality, tri-tone
printed monthly with state-of-the-art reproductions of photographs and a
high-quality digital edition that even publishes color. He does workshops on project development, has
a podcast and even gets some of his own photography done.
He writes a column
for Lenswork and his latest project is a “usually daily” short video – a minute
or less – called “Here’s a Thought” –
available free to Lenswork subscribers.
All that said –
his field of view on photography is very narrow and he is very prone to
grabbing an idea and pushing it to what I consider an outlandish extreme. Which statement brings me to the grumpy part.
I watched a sample
edition of “Here’s a Thought” in
which he was discussing how big a print can be made from a given sized negative
(and, by extension, a given sized digital file.) His going in position is that a well-exposed
and carefully developed negative can make a 3x print. That is, a 2 ¼ square negative could be
enlarged to 6 ¾ x 6 ¾, a 35mm negative to about 3 x 4 ½ inches. A fine negative can go up to 4x and an
exceptional negative to 5x. Beyond that
the smooth mid-tones begin to break up, the grain begins to show, the print
isn’t critically sharp.
Hello?
He has just dismissed nearly every photograph
not made from a 4x5 or larger negative.
Cartier-Bresson, Kertesz, Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt, Eisenstadt,
Boubat, Doisneau, Ronis, Mary Randlett –
you folks all missed the boat. I’m sorry
(no I’m really not) to say that I have seen spectacular prints – not only
content but print quality – made by each of these folks and many others in sizes way more than 5x. Even
some of mine look pretty good.
The problem here
tracks back to an observation made by Ted Orland in the book “Art and Fear”. Orland was Ansel Adams' printer for several
years and his own photographs were, by his own statement, baseline west coast,
tack-sharp, 10-zones, fine-grain prints with lens-cap-to-horizon depth of field.
But then, in a blinding lightning bolt of insight, he realized that he
doesn’t lead a tack-sharp, 10-zone, fine-grain life so that kind of print does
not express what he wants from his photography.
All Jensen had to
do was to add “To make the kind of prints
I want to make …” to the beginning of his pontifical statement to make it an
expression of his taste rather than a sweeping generalization.
I am often annoyed
by his apparently narrow view of photography but this one really got me.
