August 2024 | Why Print is Important and Valuable (to me)

It is unfair, in 2024, to say that the digital world and that digital media is not “real”. As millennial born in the 90’s I grew up on the precipice of digital-normalcy in society with the mainstreaming of the internet and birth of the smartphones that we now take for granted.

I grew up reading books made of paper, which feels funny to exclaim but the truth is that while I read voraciously I have not sat with a paper book in some time. The screens in front of us, big screens on televisions to medium screens on laptops, to the smallest but perhaps most insidious screen in my pocket on my iPhone, demand our attention. The “attention economy” has succeeded in drawing so much of our focus that at times it can feel as though the world contained within our screens is more real than the physical world around us.

There are highly advanced algorithms built into these media platforms displayed on our screens like Instagram and YouTube that are designed to make us spend more time staring at our screens and engaging with the media displayed there. Or at least I like to tell myself that the algorithms are “highly advanced” because the alternative is that me, the consumer, may not be so advanced if only a “simple” algorithm may hold me so tightly.

But the fact is we do at some point have to put the screen down and occupy the physical world. We of course have to feed ourselves, wash ourselves, breath air and drink water among other things that are yet unable to be substituted by the digital world. We have to exist in the physical world. And my argument is simple: physical art makes the occupation of physical space better. Full stop; as they say.

Volcan de Fuego, erupting to my side while I work.

Well designed and decorated physical spaces have the potential to draw a lot of our attention. We go on fabulous vacations to visit grand museums and stay in fancy hotels and be served decadent food on decadent dishes rather than the fast grab and go items from a Starbucks to maximize the time and attention we devote to our jobs, to our screens.

My home is currently a one bedroom apartment, and by no means is it grand and fancy, but I do aim to elevate it with my darkroom prints which feel grand to me, and with fresh flowers that feel fancy to me and with organization and by keeping it clean.

It is certainly a work in progress, but for me I know it always will be and that is part what draws my attention and makes it interesting: playing with shape and light and space; learning what small changes might feel like.

When the physical world feels better to occupy, I spend less of my free time on my screen and if we think of time as currency which I think is appropriate, I tend to feel richer for it.

I don’t mean to assert that all digital media is bad. Quite the opposite in fact. But like most facets of well, everything, balance is quite the key component. I would argue that society, at large, is currently out of balance.

When things are new and different the pendulum always seems to swing too far on its first pass but hopefully with the even application of resistance from both sides balance can be found someplace in the middle.

My “ask” of society is that we work to apply this appropriate resistance by spending more of the currency of our time on the occupation of the physical world.

There are innumerable pathways to achieve this, but one vector that I mean to propose is through printed media. Specially in this case, through the large scale darkroom prints that I love to create and which I think are grand and serve to elevate physical spaces.

The pictures I make, I make because I am enamored with the process. I love these old mechanical film cameras, and the medium of film with its many finite properties and of course its physical nature. I love spending time in the darkroom and creating these prints with my hands using light and chemistry. Watching a print develop on a blank white piece of paper to a dramatic black and white landscape twenty inches square in just sixty seconds provides a rush that never ceases to excite me even if it is a negative I have printed many times before.

My images are black and white, they are dramatic, and they have a presence which demands attention when they occupy our physical spaces. They have texture, unevenness, and maybe even blemish from a touchup required because of a spec of dust.

I have an Instagram dedicated to these images: @silverhalideflowers which I regularly share digitized media to and it is a fantastic platform for communicating and sharing which provides much more reach than I might otherwise be able to achieve. But there is also SO much lost in translation of these big, striking images transposed on to our palm sized phone screens.

I understand that many of my darkroom prints are by their own nature expensive and hard to justify. In brainstorming how to perhaps make the barrier to physical art lower I came up with an idea that I am going to trial for the rest of 2024. On my YouTube channel I am starting a new video series which will have a monthly cadence. The subject will be the making of darkroom prints in my home darkroom and in each video I plan to give away three darkroom prints completely for free, shipping included.

The cost to me for shipping 8.5”x11” prints is extremely low, and the payment to me comes from the viewers attention which has a twofold benefit. First, it provides me the opportunity to actively promote the value and importance of printed art, and second, it capitalizes on the pursuit of an activity that I would be doing anyway even if no one was watching.

I hope that you’ll give these videos a watch, and even if you don’t I hope you’ll spend some time thinking about the physical space we all occupy. By no means to I intend to disparage the digital reality so many of us are tapped in to. In fact I hope to leverage the digital world and tools it provides to seek more balance.

With that I'll leave you with one last photo of my home, this one a close up of an Anemone flower that draws me in as I tie my shoes :)

Close-up of an Anemone Flower