Lesson 58. Print Your Work and Live with It

Almost nothing in the last year has impacted my own work and made me a better craftsman than beginning to print my work myself again. I’d been traveling for a while, with no real address, and for a couple years most of my photographs went into books. They were seldom printed, and when they were printed, they were printed by someone else. Returning to printing feels like coming back to a fuller photography, as though I’d been missing something for a couple years.

Printing our photographs, holding them in our hands, and living with them is one of the strongest ways to experience and learn from our work.

“Living with our work gives us time to get over the novelty of it. Often we think our work is great when it is merely new.”

Look into a printer that’ll allow you to print as large as you can afford to. If that’s nothing more than gorgeous 8×10 prints, so be it. Printing’s not cheap. But I’m not sure that’s a liability. A commitment to print the best of our work, and the fact that each print costs something, means that most of us will be more selective about the images we print and we’ll take greater care in our development of that image into a final photograph. It doesn’t take long before you tire of spending $5 or $10 on each work print only to find you missed a dust spot or you forgot to check for noise or chromatic aberration. You’ll quickly start paying more attention both while you edit and while you’re behind the camera. The benefit is that you’ll pay more attention while making the photographs, and that will result in better photographs.

Putting our images online, without cost, means more people can see them, and I love that reality. More people can see our work today than ever before. But the downside is that the signal-to-noise ratio suffers. Quantity goes up, quality goes down. The “good enough for Flickr” mentality cripples us as craftspeople and robs us of the chance to give greater care to our work.

I don’t want to be prescriptive about this; we all do this work for different reasons, and there is no “should” in art. But I think photography is incomplete until that photograph becomes tangible, which gives us a chance to complete the process. I also believe we need to live with our work a while. We’re often very quick to declare a photograph done and then move on. I think time gives us a little more objectivity, gives us the luxury of letting go of the need for this image or that image to be great, when in fact it could be stronger. Living with our work gives us time to get over the novelty of it. Often we think our work is great when it is merely new. Spending time with our work gives us that time to reconsider our edit, our processing, or the sequence of images in a series. I hang new work on a long cable wire hung in the entry of my loft, which means I have to look at my photographs each time I enter or leave home or use the washroom, which is down the same hall and ensures I see the work often. If we do not print our work and live with it, I think we rob ourselves of a chance to make stronger decisions about it.