The Online Photographer

Jayanand Govindaraj wrote: "The simplest way to feed this hunger to see prints regularly is to take part in print exchanges—I have been doing so, every month, for the past 15 years, despite living in India. It started with only B&W on digital printers, which was a voodoo-like art worth learning in 2004 when I started, but nowadays encompasses both B&W and colour. The other advantage, of course, is that you effortlessly build up a print collection."

David Lee wrote: "I was a member of the APUG forum. Every now and then they would organize a postcard exchange. You could sign up for either 20 or 50 exchanges as far as I remember. You would have to print, in your darkroom, 20 or 50 postcard-sized photographs and then send them in the mail to the 20 or 50 people you were given on a list. Then, you would receive, in the mail, 20 or 50 black and white darkroom prints, postcard or 5x7's.

"It was amazing. Once, my neighbour got one of them by mistake and when she brought it to me, she told me how excited she was, thinking that she got a postcard! Maybe we can do something like this, Mike. My darkroom is back in Mexico and now I live in the middle east, but I can still manage to make some nice digital prints and they still have postal stamps around here."

Rodolfo Canet Castelló wrote: "One of the most exciting activities I did with other members of some photographic forum was a print exchange: within quite relaxed rules on size and format, every month we posted a print to a member and got another from a different one. It was a mixed bag: most times I didn’t get something so much worked on and cared for as I had sent, but several times I got prints I treasure and, once, a photo that truly resonated with my soul and got me close to tears. Curiously enough, when I proposed to change the rules to make public the senders and receivers before posting, so making it possible to choose the picture from our online galleries, everyone preferred to keep it secret and, therefore, random. Ah, the thrill of expectation!"

Mike comments: Very interesting—and how great that would be. The only thing I've ever participated in that came close to that was an email music group called C60Crew, semi-ironically named after the code for an hour-long cassette tape and the slang word for "gang" that prevailed at that time. There were six or eight members, and every month one person, in turn, sent out a mixed tape of music to all the others. Eventually the tapes became CDs, and then it sort of atrophied because we had gotten to know each other's musical tastes so well. It survives today (probably 25 years on) on Mixcloud, where the leader of the old group, my ex-dj friend KK, regularly posts mixes of new, obscure, experimental, esoteric music and electronica under the old name. The latest one is called "She's So Heavy" and features a black-and-white portrait of a young Gina Lollobrigida on the cover. [UPDATE: Sophia Loren? I'm not up on Italian bombshells of my parents' generation, and the Internet is not very good at history.] (Also, check out the cartoon on the cover of "That Falling Feeling"—I keep laughing at that.)

I don't think I could handle a print exchange, personally. Everyone has their crosses to bear, and I'm not complaining, but my personal ones are a lack of energy and a distinct, though not quite crippling, lack of organizing aptitude, ability, and skill. Keeping a small house passably neat and decently organized is at the limit of my capabilities. My computer is an appalling mess—if it were physical instead of virtual, it would be the equivalent of that woman I saw on A&E's "Hoarders" whose husband had bought three houses for her, one after the other. She had relentlessly filled each house with stuff until the couple had to buy the house next door and move into that. (The husband approached the show's producers in extremis because the third house had become too jammed with junk to move around in and he couldn't afford a fourth mortgage.) (By the way, "Hoarders" is a show which makes sport of torturing people with mental illness, so I stopped watching it. Hoarders are just sick, that's all. Torturing sick people doesn't help them.) (Should I count digressions as my third weakness?)

Back to the subject: I don't think I'm personally capable of helping readers organize print exchanges, because I'm too, like I told you, disorganized. And if I were to participate in one I'd just be the FU who messed up the system for the others. But it's a great idea and if anyone has any ideas as to how I might help connect readers who want to form groups, chime in below.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

hugh crawford: "Gina or Sophia? I’d go with Sophia, but that’s definitely taken on the Staten Island ferry. Pro tip: if you want to do an iconic celebrity in NYC photo, not have anyone in the background or get bothered much by tourists, spend about an hour with your subject on a pleasant cruise past the Statue of Liberty and other interesting backgrounds to include. And everyone has at least one crazy only-in-New-York story to tell. And it’s free! I even think there is still a bar on board."

Mike in R. Colorado: "Prints are great, no question about that, but sharing photographs is also worthwhile. I get together monthly—it just happens to be this evening!—with a group. We meet at a pub. Some of us are mostly film, some mostly digital as far as cameras. Most, but not all of are sharing is via digital files. Twenty or fewer from each person are projected as a 20-second timed slide show. There's not much time to talk about them as the photos go by, but sometimes we stop it and talk for a bit, and we all usually have more to say at the end of each person's presentation. Occasionally a few of us bring prints that we set out on a table and all gather around. It's not a competition, or even a review, it's just sharing. Lots of fun."

Roberto Carlin: "Definitively Sofia Loren And by the way did you know that Gina Lollobrigida is also a photographer?"

Mike replies: I did not. Thanks.