To Giclee or Not To Giclee

…How about not Giclee pronounced (zhee-clay) and instead archival pigment ink print or more simply pigment ink print. Sure they do not roll off the tongue in the same way as the French Giclee does, but it is an honest and transparent way of identifying the process. Any internet search for the word Giclee will tell you that Jack Duganne appropriated the term in 1991 to classify digital prints made on inkjet printers. At the time words like inkjet and digital prints had negative connotations and Mr. Duganne thought that a better word may elevate them to high art and appeal more to gallerists. So he adapted the french word “gicler” meaning “to squirt, spurt, or spray” or as a noun “giclee.” At the time it may have been a good move on Mr. Duganne’s part and I am not going to argue that he was right or wrong, but 21 years later I think it is time to reassess his neologism.

One major problem with his word choice is that “giclee” in french is also slang for male ejaculation, which is enough of a reason to completely remove the word from any kind of photographic printing process and save photographers all over the world from the potential embarrassment. Another reason to move on to using “pigment ink print” (or some variation there of) is that inkjet printing does not have the same negative connotations as it did in 1991. Pigment ink prints are now available with a color gamut and subtlety that surpasses either Iris prints or c-prints while also offering the best lightfastness and overall archival stability. Museums and fine art galleries do not label these prints as giclees but as inkjet prints or pigment ink prints because they accept the digital technology and are not ashamed to make it transparent. We no longer need an inappropriate neologism of a french word to elevate inkjet printing in the eyes for the art world; It can now stand on its own as a beautiful printing process deserving of a place in the history of photography.

By: Patrick Allen

A Camera as Big as a New York Apartment

Imagine looking at a 24-foot photograph of your face, created with such detail that if you got up on a ladder with a magnifying glass you could inspect the angles at which your eyebrow hairs were growing. This is what photographer Dennis Manarchy wants to create. Manarchy is bucking the trend towards tiny, discrete digital cameras and Photoshopped perfection by creating a camera the size of a New York apartment.

The camera extends 35 feet in length—big enough for the photographer and his assistant to throw a tea party inside it.

This massive dream camera has not yet been completed—Manarchy is still raising money on Kickstarter, but in the meantime he has been playing with this far less mobile prototype:

This camera requires 4.5 x 6 feet negatives, which are viewed using an actual window as a lightbox. Developing them requires taking a shower in chemicals. But now that Manarchy has finally found film large enough for his purposes, he’s enjoying himself. (As you can see in the gallery above; for a while, he had to piece sheets together).

“Last night, we were down in the dark room, processing these huge sheets,” Manarchy tells me on the phone. “I’m entirely covered in chemicals, but I’m thinking I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.”

His excitement is evident in his voice throughout our interview. This man who has been making portraits for decades sounds like he’s just discovered a new superpower. And in a way, he has: the power of going very, very big.

“What motivated me was Chuck Close, the painter, whose photo-realistic paintings I almost found more striking than the photos that he was painting, because of the viewing size,” he tells me.

If you blow up a tiny negative that big, the resulting image looks clear and faithful, he says. But then you compare the eyelash in the photograph to an eyelash made with single brush stroke. “It’s like the difference between a paper airplane and a rocket ship and it brings the whole thing to another level.”

Of course, we are accustomed to seeing people blown up big—on the sides of buildings and on billboards. But using film of this magnitude—offering 1,000 times greater detail than the average digital photograph—gives it a different, rather surreal quality, Manarchy says.

“Stanley” by Chuck Close at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. (Gabriel Bouys/Getty Images.)

There’s another side to working at this scale (and price), of course. There’s no room for error or for retakes. He makes each person’s portrait exactly once, which requires extreme selectiveness when it comes to choosing subjects.

Who deserves to be photographed in such a way? Manarchy believes members of “vanishing cultures” do. This is the name he has given to the project, and his work with early prototypes has focused on members of groups on the verge of extinction—Holocaust survivors, the Tuskeegee airmen, tiny Native American tribes, remote rural communties. That said, he’s a photographer fascinated by faces, so he’s not opposed to just throwing some “fabulous people of character” in there, essentially because they’re  cool.

Manarchy hopes to raise enough money through his Kickstarter project to get the dream camera-RV rig built and then take it on the road. Right now, his prototype is not particularly mobile; to take pictures of remote groups, he’s had to build cameras on location. In a swamp in Louisiana, he turned an old fish house into a camera, after spending several days fishing and hanging out with the Cajun community. Surprisingly, perhaps, his slow, on-site method did not prompt any particular skepticism, he says. What would have left them truly alarmed, he believes, is if another photographer had suddenly arrived, snapped 1,000 quick photos and then sped away.

Via: http://www.slate.com

South Street Seaport Museum

The South Street Seaport Museum successfully reopened on Jan. 25th 2012 under the direction of the Museum of the City of New York. Ken Allen Studios has a longstanding relationship with MCNY and Pure + Applied who beautifully designed the re-opening exhibitions. We reproduced the following 3 large historic prints and mounted them to Sintra for display in the new exhibition.

Judith Joy Ross

Judith Joy Ross taking a break from printing to photograph our resident fish Lola with her 8×10 camera.