In most cases there are very few vintage prints – especially from people this age. In fact, they made a photograph and it rarely occurred to them to even sign it. They would make prints as they were required, demanded, or asked for. In many cases some of our best known photographers – Lee Balterman is a good example. He was unknown. He had a good career as a shooter. Most of the photographs in those catalogs are from prints he made in his own time, for his own interests. So they had a real love in them, and that’s our next show. But, as far as the vintage prints go, I would say that all too often with the images in this catalog anyway, there were one, two, or three good vintage prints that were available and that was it.
If the negative is available then a later print can be made. But it’s not in all likelihood going to have the same feel or look. Occasionally a newer print will actually be more satisfying than a vintage print in certain ways. Some of my older artists get angry when I ask if they have a vintage print of something for a museum. They’ll say goddamn it! I’ve been working that negative for thirty five years and I can tease and coax things out of it now, where I had no idea what to do with it thirty-five years ago. I’ll say, I know, but do you have a vintage print?
That’s changing to some degree. Some museums are buying later prints if they think that a certain size, or a certain approach has its benefits. There’s also a huge price differential depending on the print and the artist. Print prices depend upon four or five things: Who’s the artist? How many prints are there? How important is that print to the oeuvre of the artist? Where is its place in their body of work? And what condition is the print in? All of those elements go into the formula for creating prices. By in large, some of the older artists have a little bit of a hard time understanding the demand for vintage prints. Well, the old paper did have a lot more silver for one thing. So there’s a warmth, a patina, a sense if you know what I mean.
BP: How influential do you find the work of the students in comparison to Callahan and Siskind?
PB: Well, that’s still being determined. That’s real history that hasn’t been written yet.
BP: Do you see any examples of the students’ influence in contemporary photography?
PB: Yes I do. I don’t know if I could name them off hand. I will say that the Bauhaus/Chicago Institute of Design teaching template has been copied in institutions across the country – by people who learned at the Institute of Design, who are not as well known as the people who are on display in this room necessarily. But you can see that stamp. You can see that the programs at major institutions around the country were roughly, loosely modeled on this Bauhaus sensibility. I went to the American Academy of Art and our fundamentals program was based on Bauhaus when I was there in the 1970’s. As I’ve said, these people do have their own stamp.
The other thing you’d asked is how do we pick the pictures for the show? One of the things we did was with the better known artists – Ken Josephson, Barbara Crane being some of the best known in this area – we chose photographs that we had never shown before. If Ken Josephson were going to be remembered by a single photograph [one that’s not hung in this particular showing] in 100 years it would be the photograph of the hand holding the postcard of the boat over the water. That was on the cover of a book on the history of photography recently. That sensibility marks his individual contribution to the history of photography. That’s not something he got from Callahan and Siskind. Everyone on these walls does have their own vision, their own heart and soul.
I will say that people like Adam Fuss made a million dollars with this kind of work. Abelardo Morell has made a huge reputation with work where there are heavy antecedents in the work of György Kepes. Morell did a body of work entitled “Books”. Kepes had explored that thoroughly in the forties and fifties. And so as Cole Porter would say, “Everything old is new again.”
There’s also a photograph by Joseph Sterling that we don’t have on the wall today because again, it’s too well known. Where there were people with well known images, at least within our community, we decided to go with things that some of our regular clients hadn’t seen too often. But there’s a photo that Joe took that’s just a marvelous balance between humanism and formalism. You’ve got these pubescents on the edge of adulthood full of insecurity, full of unknowing. Then you’ve got this clean, hard, Bauhaus-like formal design around them. But it works.
BP: As people become more and more exposed to ephemeral imagery, the here and gone image, what role does photography play in maintaining an awareness of history?
PB: What photography does is capture the ephemeral, nail it to a board, and say this happened or I had this thought. That’s assuming that the photograph has been put in the right hypo-bath and is going to last a long time. It actually is a paradox because it hopefully is a permanent image of a fleeting moment. There are actually two kinds of photographs.
There are photographs that capture a moment, and there are photographs that capture eternity. Then there are those great, rare photographs that capture both at the same time.
I think that’s a great photograph–the one on the left (motions to Charles Svedlund’s photogram of an infant). There was a living, breathing infant on that paper for a few seconds. It gives you the sense of the mark of a human being in space, of a human existing. There are eternal aspects in that image that a good poet could sit and write pages on.
I think that in this age of multitasking, hyper-distraction, of editing of individual imagery, especially the kind of editing that Stephen Spielberg began–I think it’s necessary to have still images because we need a different kind of editing in this culture. That is, with so much imagery coming at you at miles per second you need someone who has a sense of history, someone who has a little bit of background to say: stop. That image. That image is worth looking at. That image is going to tell you something. That image is worth more that the other images. That image is going enrich your life, to challenge you. That image is one you can get something from tomorrow.
“Passing the Torch” runs April 16th through June 5th, is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday and by appointment. Coming soon to Stephen Daiter Gallery is “Gutshot: The Intuitive Photography of Jay King and Lee Balterman.” This show will be open June 11th through July 31st. The Opening reception with the artists will be Friday June 11th from 5-8pm.
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