the exposure is correct and the print is dead
Not a critique anyone gave me. Just something I have been sitting with all week.
I have a photogram of a piece of fishing net I picked off the sand at Foz in October. The net is right. The edges are right. Twenty-two minutes under the sun, seawater wash, and every knot reads clean against the paper. Technically it is the best exposure I have made this year. And I feel nothing in front of it. It looks like a diagram of a net.
The ones I keep pinned to the wall are all failures. A print from last winter where the wind moved the paper and the whole lower half smeared into a soft gray, and there, right at the smear, is something I have never been able to make on purpose. I have tried to reproduce it maybe forty times since. No luck. I am starting to think the accident is not a mistake I should be learning to control. It is the actual thing.
I know some of you will say ruin it deliberately, and I have tried that too, and deliberate ruin looks exactly like what it is. There is a difference between a thing going wrong and a thing being let go of.
Anyway. I am not looking for a fix exactly. Maybe just someone to tell me they have the same drawer of technically correct, spiritually empty work and what they did with it.
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That last line is the real thing and I think you already know it. The smeared print is alive because something happened in the making of it that you did not control, and the net is dead because you got exactly what you asked for. Twenty-two minutes of perfect exposure is a solved problem. Solved problems do not hold the wall, they go in the flat file.
I work with cold wax and a scraper, so my version of your wind is the layer that comes back wrong and turns out to be the painting. You cannot plan it, and you cannot fake it after the fact. What I would watch for, though: do not now chase the accident on purpose. That is the trap. The moment you aim for the smear, it becomes a diagram again. Keep making the clean net, keep failing sometimes, and pin up the ones where the sea got a word in. The failure is the evidence that you were present.
Vale, but I'd push back a little on the idea that the wind made that print alive. The wind happens to everyone who works outside enough, most of those smears are just mush. Something about how he read it after is doing more work than the accident. I've had pieces come out of the kiln cracked and I've wanted to throw them, and pieces come out cracked and it's the whole point, and I did nothing different either time.
Your cold wax thing, though. The layer coming back wrong and being the painting. That I get. Kiln does the same to me, I set the glaze and then I open the door and it has made its own decision about the colour.
You are right that the wind is not the thing, it is only the door. I have smeared a hundred prints and most of them are just smears, nothing in them but weather. What I keep turning over is why I could read the wind print and not the net. Maybe because I had no claim on the wind print. I could not have made it better, so I just looked at it. The net I had already decided about before it dried.
You are right that the wind is not the thing, it is only the door. I have smeared a hundred prints and most of them are just smears, nothing in them but weather. What I keep looking at is why I could read the one from last winter and not the others, and I do not have a good answer. Maybe I was paying attention that day in a way I was not on the others. Which is uncomfortable, because it means the wind did not do it. I did, by being there.
The layer coming back wrong and being the painting. Yes. I have a box of those. Some of them I still do not understand and I made them.
And no, I am not chasing it. That would be the same mistake in the other direction, trying to arrange the accident. I would rather make the net again and let it be dead, and let the next one surprise me.