Creative Use of Language or Stuffy & Pretentious?
 
We all know people in photography can be highly creative in the work they do. Here’s a great example of a high level of creativity and the person’s not even using a camera. It’s their written description of a photography subject that caught my eye.
In the Hartford Courant, Sunday June 17 page G1 & G4 , is an article about a fascinating photo exhibit just starting in New Haven pairing together Walker Evans and Eugène Atget. (See the full text: http://www.ctnow.com/stage/hce-walkerevans.artjun17,0,744041.story)
Adrian Brune writes to tell us how the exhibit came to be and how the prints in the exhibit were made. The passage underlined in red from the article makes the process sound highly esoteric, perhaps far beyond anything normal people would ever encounter. However, in translation, the term ‘carbon pigments’ means ink, and ‘microscopic jets’ indicate it was done with an inkjet printer.
No mention is made of the word ‘printer’ or ‘inkjet’. Instead, the image is ‘transferred’. If you strip away the bloated wording, it says the prints on the wall were made on an inkjet printer. And on paper, no less.
Why all this roundabout use of words? To give it a greater stature than it would otherwise have. To raise it above the level of the ordinary. Classical music does the same thing, as does oenology and viniculture.
“Silver gelatin originals” is used in the next paragraph in the article. Nobody cares anymore about that one, we’ve all come to accept that it means ordinary black and white photographic paper. But can you imagine going into the local camera store to restock your darkroom supplies and ask for “sheets of silver gelatin coated fibrous substance”? Ha! I’d like to be there to hear it.
 
June 25, 2007