Yesterday, Dave Hodson asked:
"As someone relatively new to printing, I wonder if you could put together a post on what you look for and how you go about critiquing a print. Do you have different criteria for B&W vs. colour?"
Here's my answer.
First, I think the best guide to how I'll go about critiquing a print is to wait until I do it. Then you can see for yourself. Hopefully more than one person will send a print in.
Now then—his might be a bit unfair to Dave—he did say he is relatively new to printing, after all, so he may very well be seeking basic guidance, and there's nothing wrong with that—but if you will, please permit me a sort of "meta" comment here, even though I know I'm stepping a little too far back from the question.
My experience when I was an art teacher is that people who are naturally good students are usually looking for hoops to jump through.
That is, they want the teacher—the evaluator, whoever happens to be occupying the authority seat—to set a clear, defined target for them, to better enable them to hit it.
That works in most academic subjects. But not in art.
I've told this story before, but it's my favorite story that illustrates this point so I'll tell it again. I taught for a while in a high-end school for girls, which drew students from very high-functioning, successful, accomplished families. Many of my students went on to high-powered careers, and all would go on to college, and most to graduate school. As well as being bright and charming, many of the girls were also high-functioning: go-getters, you might say, and even—how to put this nicely—somewhat, er, entitled.
Students had to supply their own cameras, and some of them bought cameras just for the class that were nicer than what I owned, but the school supplied their film for them. As the photography teacher I controlled the goods. So one Friday at the end of class I passed out a 24-exposure roll of film and assigned everyone to shoot it over the weekend. The assignment was open—they could photograph anything they wanted. One girl rushed out of class quickly, singing out cheerfully, "I leaving before he changes his mind!"
Four older girls, all of them among the top students in their grades (I taught students from grades 9–12 together), were having none of that nonsense. As one put it, "you have something in mind that you want us to do. You're just not telling us." Another chimed in: "Yeah, that's not fair. We want to know what we're supposed to shoot really." I explained carefully that I wasn't fooling; it wasn't a trick; I wasn't going to judge them based on what they shot. They could take pictures of anything they wanted to. It was completely up to them. No foolin'.
This mollified three of the four, who left the classroom even though they remained dubious. One lone girl remained behind. She demanded to know what she was supposed to shoot. I protested that I said anything and I meant anything. Garbage cans, her little sister's doll collection, the color purple (the film was Tri-X!), the night sky, whatever.
Well, she still wasn't having it. She insisted I had something in mind, and that the assignment was a trick, and she'd find out about it on Monday when it was too late for her to do anything about it, etc., etc. We argued a while, and finally she said, "I'm not leaving here until you tell me what the assignment really is!" (She went on to Yale, bless her heart.)
"Fine," I said. "I'll guarantee you'll get an A+ if you take 24 pictures with your feet in them. Anything else and you flunk."
"What?!" She retorted. "That's absurd! I'm not going to do that!"
"Too late," I answered sweetly. "Now you have to."
I'll admit the thought didn't cross my mind that the head of the department would confront me the following week demanding to know if I had really assigned a student to take pictures of her feet. ("Please tell me you didn't really....")
I rather frequently exasperated the head of the department. I confess I did not even know at the time—I'm being 100% honest here—that such a thing as a foot fetishist even existed. Had I known, I would have picked some other equally outlandish but less provocative subject for her.
The Yale-bound young lady and I argued a bit more, but now it was my turn to stand firm. Each frame better have a foot in it somewhere or she got an F. Success or failure—it was in her hands now. Finally she left, even more cross than she'd been before.
On Monday, she showed up surly and glum. But she was, as I said, a standout student, and sure enough, once developed, every frame in the roll had at least a bit of foot in it. I was pleased with her, and she got her A+.
One of the pictures was actually quite nice, and we made friends again when I had her print it. It was a photograph of a gracious and elegant room in her house with a great band of sunlight streaming in through a big window, her crossed legs up on an ottoman in the lower left corner. I praised the print sincerely. I still have a copy around here somewhere. I can see it in my mind's eye.
(Don't ask. Projected mean time before finding: 3.5 hours. Box in the barn, and who knows which.)
But you see what she needed? She wanted me to set the terms of her success, so she could be assured of success. It's an A-student type of move. And even though I knew what she was doing, I capitulated. But I tried to do so in a way that would show her that the original assignment was the more desirable state of affairs.
Moral of the story: studio art isn't like other subjects. If you want to be a good student, don't jump through anybody else's hoops unless you want to. In the end (or the "final analysis," as the phrase goes), nobody else can define the terms of success for you but you. That's because there are no exogenous or external assurances of success in creative, expressive art.
Heck, nobody liked the Impressionists at first!
Of course, pace Dave's actual question, almost all of us do have to begin with imitation, and there's nothing wrong with that. So stay tuned for a print critique or two (five, actually, is what I promised), and you can at least get a little of my input—even if, on consideration, you eventually decide you don't agree with me and want to go another way.
Mike
(Thanks to Dave)
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Featured Comments from:
Alan Ampolsk: "Maybe what a beginner is looking for isn't a goal or a specific set of qualities but rather a framework. 'What things should I be thinking about when I print?' Your post reminded me of the time when I was studying piano in college. I wasn't trying to be a performer, just wanted to be able to work out passages so I knew how they were put together. But the teacher didn't care about that—he'd played with Toscanini and held us all to a high standard. I was terrible at rhythm—couldn't keep time to save my life. Once, trying to lighten his frustration, I said that I was trying to follow the example of Willem Mengelberg, a conductor who was famous for free rhythms. The teacher's immediate answer: 'Yes, but he knew what rules he was breaking.' When I learned to print black-and-white, I was taught the zone-system-related rule that a print needed to have a full range of tones, and that somewhere there should be an absolute white and an absolute black. In practice, I left that behind fairly quickly because I decided that not every print worked well that way. Maybe that was my rhythm problem coming into play again. But in this case, I did know what rules I was breaking. The full-range-of-tones standard was valuable to me, not because I followed it, but because it gave me something to react to."
