Fine art digital printing is dominating our wide-format headlines this week, at two ends of the scale.
On one hand there is the news of the demise of The Art Group, a huge provider of fine art digital prints, with a list that reads like a who’s who of the high street and the art gallery.
It’s hard to imagine how what should be such a lucrative business has had such a torrid time. And while it’s doom and gloom at that commercial end of fine art, there are green shoots at the creative end with HP’s launch of a tool that enables fine art photographers and print makers to output contact negatives on its Designjet machines. I have to confess I have an interest, as in the past I have dabbled in the beautiful alternative print processes, and they were the topic of my final degree project.
Back then, 15 years ago, making contact-sized negatives was becoming difficult in the darkroom, largely as the continuous tone graphic arts films needed were on their last legs as scanning and desktop publishing did away with the complex colour separation processes of yore. At that time there were a few photographic printers playing with imagesetting film and the then novel FM screening to produce suitable negatives, but it was tricky to find a bureau or printer happy to tie up their imagesetter for a finicky photographer’s experiments.
Way back then I tried to use my desktop printer (an Epson Stylus Pro 500) to produce negatives with limited success. The high density needed was only possible with OHP films, and the coatings and inks back then limited you to a measly and gritty 360dpi. Not something compatible with the double cream tonality of a platinum print. In the end my experiments moved on and it was the combination of handmade watercolour paper that I’d come to love from printing gum bichromate, platinum and kallitype along with the humble inkjet’s colour capabilities that focused my efforts on a poor man’s giclee.
With HP’s new development I feel an urge to dust off the darkroom and go painting with light again now the latest digital technology has moved on enough to match the nuances of the nineteenth century’s finest photographic printing processes.
