Is Printing Worth It?

If this ques­tion was posed thir­ty years ago it would have been met with a per­plexed look from the recip­i­ent as it was most­ly prints that pro­vid­ed you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to wit­ness once again the moment in time you pressed the shut­ter. With the arrival of dig­i­tal cam­eras that all changed very quick­ly. Rather than head­ing into a dark­room or hand­ing your film cas­sette into the local pho­to lab, you instant­ly have the lux­u­ry of view­ing on the back of your cam­era and lat­er, your computer.

The pho­to­graph­ic print was an inte­gral com­po­nent to enjoy­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, and if you were a ded­i­cat­ed enthu­si­ast, the film was devel­oped by you along with the final prints in your own dark­room. There is no argu­ing that the speed at which we can now review our images is won­der­ful­ly con­ve­nient, and for most, the images we see on our com­put­er mon­i­tors are almost cer­tain­ly big­ger than most of the images we would have paid to be print­ed on the high-street branch of long-gone com­pa­nies like Supasnaps. 

Spoilt for choice

Giv­en the per­ceived obsta­cles from the age of film, not to men­tion the added cost of hav­ing to buy film and pro­cess­ing, there seems to be lit­tle point in yearn­ing for the days of ana­logue, except maybe one, tran­sience. I have had the ben­e­fit of trav­el­ling to some of the most beau­ti­ful land­scapes in the world with the sole pur­pose of pho­tograph­ing them and on my return, I have none of that com­plex­i­ty to con­sid­er at all. The only task in hand is to plug my camera’s mem­o­ry card into its read­er and with­in sec­onds every moment I encoun­tered is before me dis­played in rows of thumb­nails, and often very many of them. 

As many of us do, I choose a selec­tion of the best and edit them and some­times make a print and I feel my job is done when it often isn’t. There are sev­er­al things at play here. First­ly, because each time I press the shut­ter I have no cause to con­sid­er how much film I am using or its asso­ci­at­ed cost, I am free to make as many expo­sures as I choose. Sec­ond­ly, on my return, because I have so many image files to choose from, I often select the can­di­dates that stand out from the crowd, and they get my full atten­tion leav­ing the rest as superfluous. 

It is this free­dom and choice that makes dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy tran­sient as many of the mul­ti­ple files we did not edit may have indeed been some of the best. Fur­ther­more, the can­di­dates that were afford­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be edit­ed but not finalised in print are soon for­got­ten when the fold­er of images is closed and remains out of sight in stor­age. When the print remained as the final stage of image mak­ing, all, or cer­tain­ly many of the expo­sures that were made, result­ed in a print which has the innate prop­er­ty of draw­ing the view­er back, and more impor­tant­ly, not forgotten. 

Being back there

There is still to this day an emo­tion­al con­nec­tion to mak­ing a print. If you com­mit to pro­duc­ing a print and elect to dis­play it on a wall in your home, it becomes part of your every­day life. See­ing a print dis­played can trans­port you back to the land­scape in which it was made, or for oth­ers around you, they share this expe­ri­ence and its often remem­bered. We walk past it, are beck­oned back to it and see things we missed dur­ing pre­vi­ous gazes. A print has an integri­ty to it that a dig­i­tal image does not. A print reflects light, in the same way that we use reflect­ed light to make the expo­sure in the first instance, 

Also, com­mit­ting to mak­ing a print makes you a bet­ter pho­tog­ra­ph­er. If mak­ing prints is a part of you being a visu­al artist then when using the cam­era, you will be more con­sid­ered and thor­ough, as what you are cre­at­ing is some­thing that may be seen by oth­ers in print form. There­fore, you will be far more like­ly to take your time and make few­er expo­sures, which in my opin­ion has nev­er been a bad thing. I spent many years work­ing in large for­mat when every expen­sive sheet of film count­ed and if you made a poor com­po­si­tion or mis­cal­cu­lat­ed an expo­sure, you very quick­ly learned from it. Tak­ing your time was as impor­tant as under­stand­ing the equip­ment you were using whilst you were doing it!

Today, who cares if you make a mis­take or the com­po­si­tion may not work, you can sim­ply ​‘fire away’ and choose when you get back in the hope that one of the exten­sive col­lec­tion will pos­sess the qual­i­ties you hoped for. Fur­ther­more, the prac­tice of pre-visu­al­i­sa­tion has most­ly been for­got­ten in the free­doms we have been afford­ed. If we can, at no fur­ther expense, make as many expo­sures as we choose, we are not allow­ing the time to engage with our sur­round­ings and think of prints that will say some­thing ​‘about’ the place rather a pho­to­graph ​‘of’ it.

Lessons from the print

If mak­ing a print is the inten­tion of the pho­tog­ra­ph­er, then edit­ing becomes a crit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion. It is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent propo­si­tion to be pleased with the result­ing image on a com­put­er screen than it is know­ing you are com­mit­ting it to print where every tone, colour, and ele­ment of the com­po­si­tion and even pos­si­ble dis­trac­tion will be pre­sent­ed to you as a fin­ished piece of visu­al art. I have seen it time and again when a pho­tog­ra­ph­er presents me with a ​‘fin­ished’ file only to be still read­just­ing and clean­ing the image twen­ty min­utes lat­er pri­or to the ​‘print’ but­ton is pressed.

I don’t believe every pho­to­graph needs to be print­ed, nor do I think that print­ing auto­mat­i­cal­ly makes a pho­to­graph more valu­able. There are plen­ty of images that work per­fect­ly well as dig­i­tal files, but I do think we should be ask­ing our­selves why we pho­to­graph in the first place. Is it sim­ply to pro­duce an image that some­body might briefly look at on a social media feed or is it to cre­ate some­thing that has enough mean­ing, qual­i­ty or emo­tion­al impact to war­rant a more per­ma­nent exis­tence? Fur­ther­more, when we have our fin­ished print in hand, we eval­u­ate our work more and move beyond sim­ply admir­ing what we have cre­at­ed but con­sid­er how we could have improved the com­po­si­tion, but more often, the way we have edit­ed the orig­i­nal file. 

I may well be old fash­ioned, but I still believe that the image on the screen makes us image-mak­ers whilst the per­son hold­ing the pho­to­graph­ic print makes them a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. We all as pho­tog­ra­phers should reverse our think­ing process and when we are out there with our cam­eras, imag­ine what the image we are com­pos­ing could look like as a fin­ished print adorn­ing a wall. Maybe then the val­ue of our actions will car­ry more impor­tance and be guid­ed by the wise hand of intention.