Custom Printing and Artistic Ownership

There is a very interesting post at The Online Photographer blog about printing. If you have someone else make your prints are they still yours? I have always enjoyed the control available when I make my own prints, but there are times when it is best to have someone else make the prints. This is especially true when there are tight time lines or you are having a master printer make your prints. I'm sure you can think of other situations where this would be true.

According to the author:
"Last week, Geoff relayed a remark by David Plowden—"David Plowden has described a conversation with a custom printer who boasted that he could make a better print from Plowden's negatives than Plowden could. 'No doubt you're right; but it would no longer be my photograph.'"

"This is a remarkably nontrivial thought. Unlike Benson's remark to the effect that "...photographers who hand their images to someone else for printing are abdicating part of their artistic responsibility," which provoked in me a (completely justified) "this isn't even wrong" reaction, Plowden's observation is simultaneously and in various ways and circumstances right, wrong, sideways and off-axis in the complex plane. It's most assuredly not amenable to simple analysis. (Of course, I was not there for the conversation and I don't know just what that printer said to Plowden.)

"In an "average" sense, I'd disagree with the notion. When I do custom printing for people, no matter their level of printing skills, I'm going to be making suggestions about ways I think the print could be improved. Sometimes they're trivial—a slightly different crop, a modest dodge or a burn. They're tweaks on what the photographer's providing me as a starting or reference point. Usually the photographer agrees with me; on occasion they don't. It's their call; it's their vision I'm trying to fulfill (I'll get back to that).

"I think it would be wrong to say that the resulting photograph is in any way less theirs because I happened to come up with a good idea they didn't think of. People make suggestions to me all the time about my own photographs. On occasion I accept them. I don't think of the result as being less my own photo; after all, I'm learning new stuff all the time! That is part of being an artist."

The entire article can be found here.

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