Vision Quest: When Working with Fine-Artists and Photographers, Ask Questions First, Print Later

“What is the definition of ‘fine art’?” asked Dan “Dano” Steinhardt, Marketing Manager for Epson’s Professional Imaging Division. “For 30 years, I’ve been trying to find one, and I haven’t yet.”

Indeed, the question “what is art?” itself has puzzled artists, critics, philosophers, and the public in general, likely ever since the first “artist” made the first cave painting. Largely theoretical questions like “what is art?” don’t usually come up in conversations between service providers and customers, but there are questions that printers should be asking of artists that differ from the usual ones that arise when dealing with more commercially oriented customers. As difficult as, say, brand owners can be, artists and “fine-art” photographers can be an even more finicky bunch.

“Fine-art photographers tend to be—and this is not a negative thing—the most demanding about how their images should be printed,” said Steinhardt. “You almost have to have a different approach and understand the vocabulary, the nuances, and the irascible nature of the fine-art photographer.”

Photo Finish

Curtis Speer is not even remotely irascible—at least not on the phone—but he does have particular ideas about how his work should be output. Based in Laguna Beach, Calif., Speer began his career as a set designer for commercial photo shoots for the likes of Neiman Marcus, Williams Sonoma, and Nike. He asked many questions of the photographers he worked alongside and soon picked up a camera himself and began taking his own pictures, which were less commercial and more of a fine-art nature. “People started to respond and wanted to buy my work,” said Speer. Encouraged, he kept at it and is today a professional photographer who both does contract work for clients as well as his own fine-art photography. He’s reached the stage where he is now in demand by galleries.

“I just took an exhibit down in Palm Springs,” he said. “It was so well-received, the gallery asked to keep it up for another month. Out of the 17 pieces exhibited, 12 of them sold.” Another Palm Springs gallery will be including Speer’s work as part of a group exhibit in June, and they are currently in negotiations for a solo exhibit in the fall.

Early in his career, Speer hooked up with HP and got to experiment with the DesignJet Z3200 wide-format printer. At present, he outsources most of his print work. “I work with a photolob in L.A. that does impeccable work,” he said, although he is still pining for a wide-format device of his own.

Like many artists and photographers, he places special emphasis on the paper that is used.

“I started working with different kinds of paper because I don’t print on photo paper,” he said. “I print on a heavyweight cotton rag paper that absorbs the ink and kind of softens some of the edges a little bit, although the images are still really crisp.” He added, “But then it begs the question, is it a painting or a photograph?” Philosophical questions are never far from the artist’s mind.

Speer is a fan of Canson photo rag paper. “It’s super smooth, which is fantastic and I get a little more detail,” he said. “The other one I use is Hahnemühle, and it’s a cotton rag paper that’s got more of a coarse texture so it looks more like a painting.”

All artists and photographers judge “image quality” differently, of course, and for Speer, the key is the blacks. “How rich are the blacks? Are they intense, do you feel like you could reach your hand into them? If it’s dull, or gray, or flat, then it’s not a good print to me.”

He’s been happy with the individual images he’s had output—either from his own equipment or from a photolab—but a recent self-publishing venture was a valuable learning experience. In 2012, he produced the book Three, his account of having been abused as a child and how that experience shaped his current worldview. It was an intensely personal project, heavily illustrated with his own photographs. He did a prototype and got a quote from an online self-publishing-oriented book printer for high-quality luster paper and binding. When he finally got the printed books, however, he found they had switched to inferior-quality book paper at the last minute. The run of 600 books sold out, but it was a lesson learned. “I need to ask better questions and stay more on top of it on the front end,” he said.

And therein lies his advice for print service providers looking to work with artists and photographers.

“[As an artist], you have your vision,” he said. “The trouble I have with outsourcing anything is getting the person on the other end to handle it and treat it with as much integrity as the artist has. They’re not as emotionally involved as the creative person.”

Speaking in Tongues

Epson’s Steinhardt also stresses that print service providers need to understand the artist’s vision and what that artist is after. “The best practices are spending the time to ask the questions and understand the needs,” he said. “For a service provider who really wants to go that extra mile and go after the more discerning client, it’s more about asking the questions than just taking in the job.”

Part of that guidance is speaking the right language, and it’s a very different language, and a different way of working—and selling—than the average commercial print client.

“You’ve got to know, if you talk to an artist, you’re looking at an hour-and-half-long conversation,” said Mike Hill, director at AoSA Image. Based in Orange County, CA, AoSA Image offers sustainable printing for the sign and display industry on a variety of materials. The company also has a sideline working with digital artists, specializing in dye-sublimation printing on metal substrates like aluminum. “You have to have the sales person understand the market and speak the language. It’s not an add-on. You can’t take a person that’s been doing prepress or sales for bound books and have them start doing art. You need an insider. You need an artist to sell an artist.”

It’s also about understanding papers. “People always ask me, ‘what paper should I use?’” said Steinhardt. “The best answer is to ask two or three more questions: ‘Tell me about the image, tell me about your personal taste, tell me about what you’re trying to convey.’”

Language itself, though, can sometimes get in the way. “Take an Epson paper like Exhibition Fiber paper,” added Steinhardt. “That is categorized by the industry as a photo paper, not a fine-art paper. But it’s the favorite paper of many fine-art photographers. So do I tell fine-art photographers they’re not using a fine-art paper? Some of the terms can kind of get in the way, and I always bring it down to helping people understand the difference.”

All Images Start At the Beginning

Printers, papers, inks—they’re all important. But as anyone who has ever output an image knows, it can take a lot of work to get to the output stage. Also, too: garbage in, garbage out.

“Everyone keeps their eye focused on the end point, which is a gorgeous print, but they forget sometimes that from the time they press the shutter button or they save a file, there are lots of steps along the way,” said Kimberly Brown-Azzarello, HP’s Large-Format Solution Architect. “One thing that people forget to think about is the actual file itself. Sometimes people are anxious to print and they don’t know the content or integrity of the native file.”

Any print provider who has ever received a 5 KB GIF file and told to print it at 8½ x 11 is intimately familiar with some of the limitations of a graphic file. Issues like resolution, file size, and the relation to maximum image size are all one thing, but more nuanced front-end issues like color spaces can still lead to disappointing output. Although purely creative artists and photographers are probably not trying to match specific corporate or PMS colors, said Brown-Azzarello, “if color information is there and was captured by the artist, being able to reproduce that color is valuable. They captured or created that color, I get the sense they would like to reproduce that color.”

This approach to “color management” will probably not require the creative to muck about with spectrophotometers and color profiles, but keeping images in a wide-gamut color space like RGB rather than a much narrower one like CMYK is vital. “My analogy is, it’s like having a 10-acre property and then keeping your dog in a 20 x 20 pen. That’s how I think of CMYK color space,” said Brown-Azzarello. This especially noticeable when you are printing to machines that print with up to 12 inks and can reproduce a much higher gamut than strict four-channel CMYK. “Always capture the most information you can,” she advised.

Then there is “fixing” files in Photoshop. Speer does very little post-production after shooting an image, he said. “So far, what I’ve witnessed when there’s a lot of post-production it’s done just to look like an advertisement,” he said. “I get it, you’ve got to create these striking images that compel people, but most of it is so Photoshopped that it didn’t exist in the first place. So what’s the point in taking the picture?”

One common fix that Steinhardt sees a lot is sharpening, which is often over-applied. “Sharpening is really a function of what the final print size is,” he said. “You sharpen differently for different sizes. The bigger the print, the less sharpening is required, and conversely, the smaller the print, the more sharpening. That’s based on viewing distance.”

Color also can change at larger sizes, said AoSA Image’s Hill. “You do a small sign-off swatch and it’s at 4 x 6 inches, but when you enlarge that piece the color will change. That was a huge lesson. You’re looking at a serious problem at that point when you have a 40 x 60-inch print that you have to eat because they didn’t like the color.”

Hand In Hand

Unlike ad agencies, professional graphic designers, marketing departments, or other commercially oriented customers, fine artists and fine-art photographers often need a lot of hand-holding through the output process—not because they are inexperienced or unsophisticated, but because the work they output is very personal. People make art because they have a certain vision, and until the day comes when we can output our thoughts directly—and what a terrifying day that will be—that vision still requires the “corrective lenses” of computer screen, output file, output device—and output provider. Being able to share technical information about papers, about inks, about proper file prep, and so on, and understand and empathize with the artistic temperament, can go a long way toward helping creative people realize their visions, and lead to satisfied customers and more business in the process.

“I would encourage wide-format printers, people who are experts in their field, to say, ‘This is our experience with retailers and consumers and what people are responding to,’” said Speer. “And then go that extra step. ‘Curtis, you print on cotton rag most of the time, can we send you a couple samples of a new substrate?’” Because I’m not necessarily going to be privy to what the latest and greatest stuff is.

“That could be an upsell. We could take it to a new level.”