The print was more honest before the fix, and I fixed it anyway
I printed a photogram last week, a piece of net from the beach at Foz and three strands of kelp, on a sheet of Arches I had coated a bit too thin. The exposure came out uneven in a way I can only describe as accidental, one edge dissolving into nothing, the net reading almost like smoke.
I showed it to someone whose eye I trust and they said the bottom left was muddy.
So I went back in and I fixed it. Re-coated, exposed eleven minutes instead of nine, washed it in seawater the same as always. It is a cleaner print. It is also dead. The thing that made it worth looking at was the part I called a mistake because someone else named it one.
I keep the bad one pinned above the sink now, where it gets the steam from the kettle and has started to curl at the corner. I am not going to pretend that is a statement. It is just where the nail already was.
What I actually want to ask, and I am not sure I want the answer, is how you tell the difference between a flaw you should defend and a flaw you are just sentimental about. I have been at this long enough to know the second one is real. I just cannot always see which one I am holding.
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The muddy corner was probably the whole print. I don't say that to be contrarian, I say it because I have lost years to this exact instinct.
The person you trust was judging it by printmaking standards. Even exposure, clean edge, no error. That's a craft standard and it's a real one. But you weren't making a demonstration of even exposure, you were making a sheet of paper that had weather in it. Two different jobs and the second one doesn't care about the first.
My rule now, after too many "fixes" like yours: keep the accident print, make the clean one too, and don't throw either away for a month. The mistake is deciding which is better on the day you make it. You're still in the room with the smell of the fixer. Come back in October and see which one you'd actually put on a wall, and be honest, because sometimes it is the clean one. But the fact that you already wrote "it is also dead" before anyone asked you tells me you know which one this is.
"a sheet of paper that had weather in it", I am going to be thinking about that for a while. You are right that they were two different jobs. I think I knew, and I let the craft standard win anyway, because it is the one you can point at, you know? The clean print is defensible. The muddy one, you just have to say it is better and hope someone believes you.
I have both of them on the wall now, actually. Not to compare. The clean one is at the back, and I find I keep walking past it.
The accident one, I am not touching it again. But I want to re-coat and try the same net and let the sea decide twice, on purpose this time, thin coat and all. Not to fix anything. Just to see if the weather comes back.
Anyway. Thank you for this. It was a generous thing to write.