I spent 40 hours on a mezzotint. Two people asked for the price.

I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with half the printmakers I know.

Last month I finished a mezzotint. Rocked the whole plate by hand, which honestly took longer than I want to admit, probably 40 hours across three weeks. Edition of 25. It is the best thing I have made in two years and I would defend that claim in front of anyone.

I posted it once. And then I posted a photo of the copper plate itself, still inked, sitting on the scuffed bit of the worktable with my thumbprint in the margin. No caption, no price, nothing.

The plate photo got about six times the reach. Someone messaged asking if the plate was for sale. Nobody asked about the print.

I've been sitting with this for a week and I don't have a clean point about it. My instinct is to say the algorithm rewards process over product, we all know this, be more human, show the mess. Fine. But I think that's too easy. What that photo showed was the object after labour, the residue, the evidence. What the mezzotint showed was a finished thing that looks like it came from nowhere. And people cannot desire what has no visible cost. That's not an algorithm problem, that is just how wanting works. Maybe I should have been showing the cost all along and I was too proud about the mystique.

The uncomfortable part: the prints are not selling. Three gone, and one was to my mother.

So now I have 22 of them in a drawer and a decision about whether I keep making plates that take 40 hours, or whether the thing I actually like doing is the part nobody wants to buy. I don't think I'm going to stop. But I'd like to hear from anyone who found a way to make the slow version legible without turning it into content.

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Mateo Serrano·3w

forty hours of rocking a plate by hand and the photo of the inked copper wins? that tracks and it hurts a bit. i glaze and fire, and the thing people respond to is always the greenware, the bone dry piece with my fingerprints still in it and the seams showing. the finished thing looks like a product. the in-progress thing looks like something happened.

i don't think it's that people don't trust finished work exactly. i think the plate photo tells them a story they can enter. the print is the conclusion, and you can't stand inside a conclusion.

that said, six times the reach on the plate and two price asks on the print is still two more than most people get. what did you end up doing, posting the process stuff on purpose after that?

Margaret Hsu·3w

I half agree with you, and I'd push back on one word. "A product" isn't what the finished thing is. It's what a photograph of the finished thing is. A mezzotint under glass in flat light photographs like a grey rectangle, and a bisque pot photographs like a catalogue entry, because both were made to be seen in a room by a person standing in front of them. The plate and the greenware photograph well by accident, and we've built our whole visual culture around that accident.

Which is why I've stopped letting the camera decide. The one time I photographed a finished plate properly, raking light, close enough to read the burr, it did as well as anything I've ever posted. It just took an hour I didn't want to spend, and that is the part nobody tells you.

Giulia BrunoOP·3w

"We've built our whole visual culture around that accident" is exactly the part I keep coming back to, and I think it is less of an accident than it looks. The camera was invented by people who wanted to fix the visible world, and it turned out the visible world it fixes best is the one that is unfinished, wet, mid-process. The plate is not more honest. It is just more photogenic. Honesty is our word for it, but the mechanism is optical.

Which is why "stopped letting the camera decide" is easier to say than to do. I've been trying it with raking light across the burr, angled so the black actually reads as velvet instead of a grey rectangle, and it works maybe one shot in thirty. So now I'm spending the time I used to spend on the plate on lighting a finished object, which is its own kind of absurdity.

What did you land on in the end? Did the raking light give you the velvet, or did you give up and photograph the plate too?

Giulia BrunoOP·3w

The greenware comparison is a good one and I keep turning it over. Bone dry, seams showing, fingerprints still in it. Yes. That is exactly the plate photo.

But I want to push on the story part. Everyone says the plate photo "tells a story," and I'm not sure it does. A story you can stand inside, fine, but what story? There's no narrative in a rocker and a scuffed table. What there is, I think, is evidence of duration. You can see that time went into it. The print hides the time. A print is a surface that has forgotten every hour that made it. That's the whole point of the medium and also its cruelty.

Which is why your greenware beats your glaze: glaze is a surface that has forgotten the hours. You can't photograph labour, you can only photograph its residue.

So the six times reach. I don't think it's reach for the work. It's reach for the proof. And I'm not sure proof is the same thing as attention, which is a distinction I'm going to be annoying about for a while.

Tomáš Havel·4w

The plate photo is the honest object. It still has the marks of being made on it, the thumbprint, the ink, the scuffed table. The print is the finished argument, and people don't trust finished arguments, they trust evidence.

I do installations, which is a slower and lonelier way of learning the same lesson. Photograph the finished room, polite interest. Photograph the pile of salvage in the yard before I built it, six times the response. Forty hours of rocking a plate is real and I'm not going to tell you it isn't worth money. But the reach isn't a verdict on the work. It's people leaning in toward the making, which is the part they can still imagine doing themselves.

Giulia BrunoOP·3w

"The print is the finished argument, and people don't trust finished arguments." I've been chewing on that since I read it. I think you're right, and it annoys me a little, because the argument is the whole point of the work. But you're right.

What I keep circling back to: the plate is the only object in the whole process that isn't a copy. Everything after it is a multiple, deliberately, and I chose that. So when people lean toward the plate, they're leaning toward the one thing that can't be reproduced. I spent years arguing that the multiple is the honest form. Then I post a plate and the audience tells me they want the aura. Benjamin eating his hat somewhere.

The installation version of this is worse, I imagine. A room is finished the moment you stop moving in it, and there's no plate left at all. Do you keep the salvage? I'm curious if the pile survives the show or if it gets broken down, because that changes what the photograph is evidence of.