“There wasn’t anything wrong with the new proof. It just didn’t feel like the mood I knew.”
Gabriela Baginski and I have been working through proofs and paper decisions at Image Works for the exhibition. For the color photographs, we landed on Canson Platine Fiber Rag. The black and white work was giving me a harder time.
I brought in a few prints from my 2014 Scarab Club exhibition, printed by Tom Stoye, so we could compare them side by side with the new proofs. Those prints have always had a particular feel to me. The show was hung without frames, so the texture of the paper was part of how people experienced the photographs (whether they recognize it or not, it is an accumulated impression).
There was one photograph in particular, the small group on Crenshaw next to the Impala, that made the difference clear. There wasn’t anything wrong with the new proof. It just didn’t feel like the mood I knew and wanted to bring to this exhibition.
Gabby was patient with me while I worked through it, even though changing paper at this stage meant some extra work. We started looking at other options and eventually changed the black and white photographs to Moab Entrada Rag Natural. It’s a matte paper that felt much closer to what I wanted to borrow from the Scarab Club prints.
A few weeks later we printed the full black and white set.
Seeing them come off the printer was proof. Even knowing these photographs will eventually sit behind glass, the difference in the surface of the paper still comes through.
If I didn’t know already, the exhibition is teaching me just how many little decisions it takes to make a whole. Some parts are difficult to know until the right version is laid out next to one that doesn’t feel quite right.
I’m grateful to be working with people who understand this and are willing to keep looking with me until things feel right.