Category: Texts

Writings of all kinds, gathered over the years

Some Thoughts About “Searching for Sugar Man”

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This film gets my highest recommendation, so go see it.

With that said, you may not want to read further. If you haven’t seen it yet, some of the things I am going to discuss will fall into the “spoiler” category.

One question that this film brought to mind has to do with the color barriers in Apartheid dominated South Africa. It’s clear from the film that Rodriguez’ fans were mainly white South Africans and that Rodriguez’ political influence was on them. So what I am curious about is what would have been Rodriguez “color” status in Apartheid South Africa? Would he have been considered “white” or “colored?” Could Rodriguez have performed in concert in South Africa in  the 1970s? Was part of Rodriguez enigma and attraction to white South Africans (Afrikaners included) the fact that he was what some Americans nowadays call a “person of color?”

Innumerable questions come to mind about the corruption of the music business, then and now. Who got the money from Rodriguez’ albums significant sales in South Africa is never answered. Who is getting the bucks from the current CD sales is never examined, though things seem to be pointing back to Sony, who at least seems to be one of the backers of this film. We do learn the Rodriguez got the money from his South African concerts and chose to give much of it away.

But, the heaviest artistic question that this film raises is about the quality of Rodriguez’ lyric writing (and possibly his performing), and which leads to why his music never had much success in the States. It seems this last question may be perhaps ascribed to poor promotion and poor conjunctions of events, but we’ll probably never know for sure.

I personally think his singing style was a little too reminiscent of the early Bob Dylan, and Dylan and Rodriguez may have been in too close proximity for Rodriguez to compete effectively. (I should say that I am not a great fan of Dylan’s lyrics, feeling that they are generally much too abstruse.)  Maybe a better comparison in terms of the songs themselves is to Leonard Cohen’s first two albums, released  a couple of years earlier. Of course, forty years of covers make Cohen’s songs echo in our consciousness, (think Bird on a Wire) but Rodriguez’ songs like I Wonder, are certainly up there with the best songs of this era. And we’ll never know what forty years of obscurity have cost us. Thank goodness, at least, for the South Africans and their tenacious devotion to a singer-songwriter who spoke to their hearts. So, although this is a film of great joy, it is also one of great sadness–  of, dare I suggest, the “invisible hand” of the marketplace gone completely haywire.

Woman as Parent, Artist and Worker

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This talk was delivered to a group celebrating “Women in Photography” in 1986.

 

Historically, for a woman to choose to be an artist has meant choosing a male role. The popular cultural myths about artists involve men. Many of these myths come from the Nineteenth century, more specifically from the Romantic Movement, which, among other things, cultivated tie idea of the artist/poet as a super-sensitive visionary, in touch with realities above and beyond those accessible to most of us. These ideas are still with us.

To be an artist, according to the traditional male model, one has to be alone a lot, to think, to listen to one’s muse, to actually create the art. One doesn’t, in general, devote much time to cooking, cleaning house, washing clothes. The commitments of parenthood, if the artist chooses them, traditionally don’t require much time, though the emotional commitment may be deep.

This was a fairly viable, even attractive model. The individual artist has a lot of freedom to pursue these presumably higher goals. A social system of servants and women is, of course, essential. Nowadays, such a system is harder and harder to create. Nonetheless, one only has to read reports on the lifestyle of someone like well-known American artist Julian Schnabel to realize that the myth and a contemporary version of its reality goes on.

Artists who support themselves entirely by the sale of their artworks are a small percentage of the artistic community. Most artists, and especially those practicing photography, earn the money to support their basic needs by working at other jobs.

In fact, the situation of artist photographers is particularly dismal in relation to selling their work. Over a hundred years of debate about whether photography was or should or could be or may be or is or ought to be an artistic practice has left its indelible mark. Photography has only recently become acceptable as an art investment commodity. Few photographers sell prints consistently and at prices worthy of the work. Photography is still the bargain basement of the art marketplace. (Ironically, the few people close to supporting themselves by the sale of their work are not photographers who make “art,” but rather, artists who make “photographs”…)

As a consequence of this, photography has been more dependent upon the academy for its survival than other media. Indeed, if college and university art departments had not introduced and expanded photography programs during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, photographic art such as we have seen today would not exist. It has been photographic artists who earn their incomes by teaching who are the nucleus of the recent photographic explosion.

This leads me to a central premise about the position of artists in our society, a premise which is magnified for photographers, but which applies to all artists in greater or lesser degree. To be an artist you are expected to work twice as hard as everyone else, and feel grateful for half as much income as everyone else. You have to work to support yourself, and you have to work at your art. Artwork occupies a place in our culture similar to housework: it is unpaid, unattributed, and yet everyone expects someone to do it and do it well.

So the artist accepts that support from government and state agencies will be intermittent at best and non-existent at worst. For most of us, the reality, year in and year out, is artwork sandwiched between and around other jobs. But this situation is survivable, even rewarding, particularly if you are partners with someone who has similar goals and commitments, or who at least supports your own. Where things begin to get difficult is when artists chose to become parents. This discussion has been gender neutral so far-­- when I approach the triple obligations to parenting, to artwork, and to livelihood, I see this as a model that men must be encouraged to emulate, but I see it also as ground broken by women.

Women seem to be more concerned with parenting than men. Whether this ought to be is open to speculation, but that it has been the case historically is a fact. And this fact led me to the triple configuration that became the title of this presentation. It seems bad luck that two of the three elements in this triangle are held in low esteem by our culture. Government support of, the arts is inconsistent during “good” economic times and viewed as a dispensable luxury during “bad” economic times. Government support for parenting comes and goes in the token forms of tax deductions and credits and child care deductions. Since artists frequently have small incomes, they often cannot even exploit the existing deductions. But, is this bad luck, or a particularly strong cultural message to us that women are not supposed to be artists?

Women (and men) who choose to be parents and to participate fully in parenting are free to make artworks only insofar as they have support in the areas of livelihood and parenting. When the pressure is on, it is often the artwork that is sacrificed, sometimes for years. This situation would be alien to the nineteenth-century male artist, and even to most male artists today. It is hard for people who don’t have children, and particularly for artists who don’t have children, to understand how a commitment to a small human being could compete with and overshadow’ a commitment to one’s artistic endeavor.

For me, it was easier to be an artist before I had children, but my children have been more important to me than any art I have made and perhaps will make. On the other hand, I still choose to make art because there is a part of me separate from my children, a part of me which will continue to grow and create after my children no longer need me.

I didn’t know all of this when I started making the artwork I will show you today. I knew that I was dissatisfied with the conventional silver photographic print. I knew that the portraits I had been taking of other parents and their children were pushing me toward exploring material from my own family. I knew that hand coloring old photographs gave them qualities I found both poignant and amusing, but I also knew that viewers were easily charmed by the nostalgia of 1950s cars and hairstyles. So I added writing– at first captions, then longer narratives, to point the viewer away from the surface of the image, to another reality that connected with it.

In about 1974, I began copying and enlarging old photos, hand coloring them, then placing them on large sheets of paper, often with photo corners, then writing on the paper. Finally, I sandwiched the large pages between sheets of plexiglass, bolted them together and hung them.

One of my goals has been to make work which will encourage women to question their social reality, and to make connections between social, economic, and political realities. While each piece deals with the specifics of a particular place and time, I am always seeking to explore the relation­ship between the historical moment and the political present.

 

Book Review- Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography, by Vicki Goldberg

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In the 1940s, there were a few women’s names (besides those of movie stars and singers and Eleanor Roosevelt) well-known to the general public: Sonja Henie, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Margaret Bourke-White. While Sonja twirled on ice, and the “Babe” smashed tennis and golf balls, Margaret Bourke-White hung out of airplanes with a camera in her hands. That kind of life, like the open cockpit airplane and the Speed Graphic, is now an artifact of American culture, but parts of the myth are still with us.

Vicki Goldberg, in Margaret Bourke-White, A Biography, did not set out to write cultural or photographic criticism, and that was probably a wise choice. The facts and fantasies of Bourke-White’s life provide Ms. Goldberg with more than enough material for this one volume. Biographers inevitably face questions of selection, and with Bourke-White as subject these problems are enormous. The gossip and rumors about Bourke-White were and are as numerous as the reports that exist in print and manuscript. All these sources, plus Bourke-While’s many contemporaries who are still alive and very talkative, no doubt made Goldberg’s task most complex.

The book straddles two biographical worlds: the mass market world of such books as Sara Davidson’s Rock Hudson, and academic biographies like Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s O’Neill or Leon Edel’s work on Henry James. While Margaret Bourke-White contains too much scholarship and detail to make it a supermarket check-out rack favorite, the intended audience is clearly a general rather than an academic one. Whether this decision was Goldberg’s or her publisher’s is not clear, but her presentation of serious scholarship in a popular format and style is often disconcerting.

Goldberg presents her materials in a narrative format. She works at making Bourke-White’s story interesting, which is odd since Margaret Bourke­White was already a most interesting person. Goldberg holds back bits of information and reveals them later as  surprises. For example, following several chapters on Bourke-White’s rise to fame and, presumably, fortune, Goldberg tells us that she was broke. The author also avoids the frequent use of dates (several times I found myself trying to figure out when something happened). The book deserves a detailed chronology and, given the complexities of Bourke­White’s life, this is a serious omission.

In a biography one searches for reasons and explanations, but the complexities of Margaret Bourke-White’s personality are not easily solved. She was regarded by many people as an unpleasant person: arrogant, self-centered and careerist. Goldberg hypothesizes that her unconventional and idiosyncratic upbringing left her deficient in the everyday social graces. Kindness and generosity were not normal responses for her. As an adult, Bourke-White consciously taught herself to be charming and kind, if the situation demanded. Colleagues complained of the disjunction between her demanding perfectionism during the working day and her ability to tum on the charm at night.

Much of this is explained by her upbringing. Joseph White, her father, was an inventor in the printing industry, obsessed with his work. Both parents were dedicated to a life of reason and self-­improvement. As a child, Margaret was expected to achieve. Goldberg tells of the very young Margaret being trained to overcome her fear of the dark. Her mother initiated an after-dark game in which she and the child would run around the outside of the house in different directions to finally meet each other. The first night her mother ran quickly around three sides of the house, meeting the tiny Margaret after she had haltingly completed only one side. Each night Margaret’s distance was lengthened until, eventually, she was happy to play outside alone after dark and, later, to remain in the house with her slightly older sister after bedtime while her parents took evening walks. Margaret’s parents felt this regimen taught independence and fearlessness, and Goldberg suggests it accounts for Bourke-White’s love of solitude and her courage. But most psychological thinking today would say such “training” is bound to leave scars. Indeed, Bourke-White’s many years in and out of analysis suggest that her upbringing of rigorous perfectionism had its negative as well as positive effects.

While few of us pass through our teens and twenties with grace and wisdom, this period was especially hard for Bourke-White. She was more awkward than the typical adolescent, and attempted to make friends with attention-getting performances such as wearing pet snakes around her neck.

Her father died while she was in college, and she married early. After two miserable years, she separated from her husband, finished college, and began her photographic career. Goldberg sees this failed early marriage as central to Margaret BourkeWhite’s need to achieve personal success and her reluctance to make longstanding personal commitments to men. But while this marriage no doubt shook Bourke-White’s self-confidence deeply, my own feeling is that her relationship to her father and mother, her unusual upbringing, and her status as a middle child are probably more accountable for these deep-seated needs.

During her early years as a professional photographer in Cleveland, Margaret Bourke-White was not yet the worldly adult we associate with the image she (and Fortune and Life magazine) had created by the mid-1930s and ’40s. She dressed for work in color coordinated suits, hats, high heels, gloves and photographic dark-cloths. Her presentation of self was completely thought out, but she knew that to earn  a living she had to make good photographs as well. She over-shot extravagantly, as she continued to do throughout her career, and she began producing the work which would eventually make her a success and, later, a “star.”

During her twenties she was influenced by whatever social circles surrounded her at a given time. While photographing for the captains of industry, they were “the people that counted.” At this time also, she rarely read newspapers and didn’t follow current events at all. She was photographing the interior of a Boston bank during the evening after Black Thursday, October, 1929, and couldn’t figure out why all the staff had stayed late at the bank, thus interfering with her work.

Bourke-White does not seem a very sympathetic heroine or a genuine person until she begins to travel and gain some cultural and political sophistication. It is interesting to speculate what sort of person might have emerged had she not come under the influence of, among others, Maurice Hindus, “a foremost Russian expert, a famous, even a heroic liberal.” Would she have made her crucial first trip to Russia? Would her political education have had its leftist bias?

But a person of considerable substance and very real dedication and ability does emerge from this youthful superficiality. Her life illustrates the human potential for growth and change. She never gave up trying to improve her work, even during her twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s syndrome. And she never gave up trying to improve herself either. But an element remains, throughout her life, of that young girl over-willing to please, trying too hard to please.

In the early fifties she was attacked by the red-baiting newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler for her history of leftist alliances (the Film and Photo League, the League of Women Shoppers, the American Youth Congress, etc.), for her marriage to a playwright with leftist alliances, Erskine Caldwell, and for her books and films about Russia. In the midst of the HUAC frenzy it seemed as if her career might be ruined. But Margaret Bourke-White asked Life to let her cover the Korean conflict, and she produced a photo essay about a Communist guerrilla’s defection to the government forces and his reunion with his family. After the publication of the photo essay, and a year-long lecture tour which followed it, her loyalty could hardly be questioned. But what can be questioned here is the depth of her political thinking and commitments.

Whether Margaret Bourke-White became a more likable person as she matured is hard to say. People’s reactions to her continued to be strongly positive or negative throughout her life. Whole factories, from workers to executives, apparently “fell in love” with her. But others were quick to say, “everyone was her messenger boy.”

Bourke-White was also frequently criticised for behavior that would go unnoticed in a male. In her twenties, she consciously flaunted the double standard, presuming that doing a man’s work allowed her a man’s sexual prerogatives:

Early in Margaret’s career she was so successful she was rumored to be a front for a man; now [during World War II] men gave her credit solely for being female, and around Life she was soon labelled ‘the general’s mattress…: The world being what it is, some women certainly used sex for advancement, but whether they did or not many of the women who went to war as correspondents were accused of it. 

While Margaret Bourke-White was hardly a conscious feminist, and while Vicki Goldberg’s presentation is not ideologically feminist, there is much illuminating material about the contradictions, difficulties and ambiguities of Bourke-White’s trek through the male dominated world of photography and news reporting. The question of how a woman ought to achieve success in a male dominated culture is one which feminists continue to debate. So, while Margaret Bourke-White’s life is fascinating and possibly instructive, there are many women for whom she could hardly be a role model.

The attitudes Bourke-White was most frequently criticized for– aggressiveness, determination, perfectionism, ruthlessness, strong sexuality– were seen as virtues in her male colleagues. Nobody demanded that men be ‘nice” and successful as well. But the mature Margaret Bourke-White seems to have been fairly immune to gossip and basically unaware of how much she was disliked around Life. For her, the work counted most.

Opting for work, and not family and personal life, is a choice few women have made on so conscious a level. While both men and women may question this choice, Bourke-White’s honesty in this area (particularly her decision not to bear children) spared her much of the painful dilemma of family versus career. (Dorothea Lange boarded out her two sons at an early age to concentrate on her photography, and there was a great deal of suffering by all three.)

For all the information concerning Bourke-White’s life that Vicki Goldberg provides, many interesting questions about that life remain unanswered. Why did America elevate Margaret Bourke-White to star status? Was it part of the Life magazine phenomenon and orchestrated by Time-Life or something deeper in the culture? What role did photography and femaleness play in her star status? Did she create the myth of the crusading photojournalist or merely bring it to its zenith? What has been the legacy from the tens of thousands of women she lectured to in the forties and fifties and the many women who emulated her?

And what about the work that Margaret Bourke-White valued above all else? Only a thorough critical assessment will guarantee her photography its place (or lack of it), in photographic history. While this sort of evaluation is beginning on the photographic work which has come out of the 1930s and 1940s, much remains to be done in analysing the area of cultural iconography– why did her images speak to the American public with such immediacy? What dreams, fantasies, and realities did her photographs fulfill?

An artist’s production must necessarily be seen in terms of his or her social reality. To separate Bourke-White’s photographs from the context of the times and approach them from a formal or aesthetic perspective would surely be a mistake. One study that comes to mind as a possible model for future work is Karin Becker Ohm’s Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition. Indeed, Bourke-White’s situation is interesting for studying the questions which pertain to photographing for mass media distribution and for the questions of personal versus professional expression and ethics-questions which seem to be very much in the air given the proliferation of such films as Salvador, Under Fire, and The Year of Living Dangerously. 

That Vicki Goldberg hasn’t given us all of the answers only suggests the breadth and complexity of the questions Margaret Bourke-White’s life and work raise. But, obtaining the biographical facts is always the first step, and Vicki Goldberg has done substantial ground work for future students and critics.

 

This review appeared in the Winter 1987 edition of Exposure magazine, Vol. 25, No.5, the Journal of the Society for Photographic Education and is copyrighted © by the SPE.


The Month of August (Le Mois d’Août)

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This was written, from journal entries, in the 1990s. The summer it refers to was the summer of 1970. There was almost no air-conditioning in rural France at this time.  A few public venues, like cinemas in the larger cities, had AC. Even now, Europeans have a more stoic view of creature comforts than Americans. I suspect that few of the countless maisons secondaires that cover the present-day South of France have air-conditioning.  

I was never in really hot weather until my mid-twenties. As a child I don’t recall much discomfort from the heat, but then, I lived in a very mild climate. One summer my parents and I drove Route 66 from California to Missouri and back again. It must have been hot. I remember the water bags draped over the car radiator, the wide ceramic thermos for which we’d purchase a chunk of ice each morning, and how sweet the cold the water tasted from the enamel dipper which would lay next to it on the floor below the back seat of the car. I was allowed to wet towels and hold them up to the open car window or drape them over my shoulders or make fat, wet pillows to lay across my forehead. But it was all very close to a game and because I was a child, it did not seem unpleasant. A friend of mine, who grew up in San Diego, and whose family, like mine, had migrated from the Mid-west, reports that her mother frequently repeated “I’ll never be hot again. I’ll never be hot again.” And that’s what it is like in parts of Coastal California: pleasant, but not hot, not like the San Joaquin Valley, not like the Mojave Desert, not like back East.

So I made it to twenty-five without experiencing serious hot weather, then found myself in the South of France, in August, in a trailer. The farm-house that we rented for the other eleven months of the year had been rented to us on the condition that we vacate it during the Month of August, when most of France, and much of Western Europe attempts to squeeze as close to the Mediterranean as possible. We knew that our landlord would earn from the month’s rental in August about as much as we paid him for the whole rest of the year, plus, the August renters had been renting for five years previously and would probably continue to rent the place for years afterwards, when we would be gone back to North America. Our land lord generously offered us his trailer and a tent canopy. It was “Le camping” he insisted, not bad at all.

The farm house we rented was somewhat primitive by American standards of the late sixties, but quite livable. It sat on a gently sloping hillside in the Var. To one side were cherry trees, and figs and rows of artichoke bushes. Behind the house were grapes. In front, to the South was large farm garden, and between it and the house ran a flat gravel space for parking cars or playing boules, the local addiction.

Just outside the main door was a mulberry tree which had been pruned, and pruned, to finally resemble an umbrella with a very fat handle, but it served as a perfect patio shade and had a table and some chairs beneath it. To the far side was the landlord’s pride, the basin, which was fed by a gently trickling stream. It had been recently refurbished in concrete and resembled a swimming pool for very small people. It wasn’t for swimming, of course, but was the house’s water supply, a true luxury in this part of the world.

I had gotten through the heat of June and July like other Mediterranean people– I slept during the hot afternoons and stayed up late in the marginally cooler night. The house, with its thick stone walls and hillside location, offered some natural protection, and, after all, it was the South of France, and it was supposed to be hot. But when the last days of July came and I saw our landlord positioning the little trailer and its tent-canopy beside the basin, I began to think: this is not going to be fun.

And it wasn’t. By some feat of foresight, my husband had planned to be in London for three of those August weeks, and that made it a little easier, though not as nice as it would have been if I had gone too. As I remember, I had probably stayed behind to look after our dog who could not travel to England because of their strict quarantine laws.

The trailer was amazing in its way. It was fat and almost round, like a giant bean to be pulled behind a square, little Renault. It had a tiny gas-powered refrigerator and a two-burner cook stove. There were also gas-powered lamps in the wall, which I was afraid to use, and so I used only the common little square flashlights everyone in the country used to carry around with them at night. There was a tiny sink and a toilet, but, of course, no shower. The bed was built-in cross-ways across the back of the trailer, and my husband was unable to fully stretch out in it the few nights he slept there.

The trailer was too hot for a nap in the day-time, and I tried to sleep more at night. It was too hot during the day to do much of anything, and so I sat under the blue canopy with its flaps up and tried to read, fanning myself. Early on, my dog learned that the coolest spot, if she wanted to be close to me, was under the trailer. If that got too hot, she frequently deserted me for the cooler shade next to the stone foundation of the house. I had a car, but not much money for gas. The countryside had become so uncomfortably crowded with tourists that I stayed pretty close to my strange little home, venturing out only on the market days, Wednesday and Saturday, to go shopping. I was terribly self-conscious about living in the trailer and tried to avoid the August guests living in “my” house. I heard them laughing during lunch on the gravel patio, under the mulberry tree. Their wine bottles accumulated in the trash pile beside the house.

The trailer heated up so early in the morning that I was often awake, sweating, and had gotten up, walked the dog and fixed coffee before six. I checked out the garden and picked any ripe vegetables before anyone in the farmhouse was up. It was the only time during the day when it was possible to use the stove without suffocating. I took to making breakfast my hot meal, cooking my veggies and sometimes making an omelet. I had newspapers and books to read, letters to write. Things went better if you moved slowly.

The light in Provence has drawn visitors and commentary for centuries. In summer the sky is an unrelenting white-blue, day after day, and the sun is a blinding white-yellow. There is little wind, (the famed Mistral blows in the Spring– and that’s a whole other weather story). In the summer, the light and the heat make the colors dance. The hillsides are terraced and planted with olives, and gardens. If the ground is too rocky, then sheep graze it in the spring. Water is a serious issue. There is no rain from March to November. Many houses have roofs which channel the winter and spring rains into cisterns for use during the dry season. There are few wells because the water table is so low, and the water table is low because the region was deforested, most recently, in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Thus, our farm-house, with its spring fed basin, was unusual. The spring itself had been encircled in concrete, like a little grotto, and the water trickled out over a small lip a few feet up a hillside. The rectangular concrete basin, immediately below held a couple of carp and lots of water lilies. A small electric pump drew water into the house and to the outside spigot I got my water from.  A small sluice gate on the downhill side of the basin allowed water to be channeled out into a series of irrigation ditches, one of which watered our garden.

I would like to say that the basin made August bearable, but since I couldn’t put my feet in it, or wade in it, much less immerse myself in it, it was a tantalizing fixture. I resented it more than anything else until, near the end of the month, I noticed that the trickle from the pseudo-grotto had diminished. At first I thought I was hallucinating. Then I checked the water level of the basin itself, and, sure enough, it was a little lower than usual. At first I blamed the August tenants, but I soon realized that this accusation didn’t make sense. They used water from the basin, of course, but they could not change the flow of the water from the spring. I began to worry. What if all the water in the basin got used up? What would happen when we moved back into the house in September? Would we have to carry those huge containers to the market to buy water from the truck, the way so many of our neighbors did? What would happen to our garden?  Would all our vegetables dry up and die?

I drove over to our landlord’s house and reported the situation. He listened with patience to my story and assured me that it was “Normale, complètement normale.” The spring dried up in the summer and then came back. He did not think the spring would be exhausted, it never had been. But, it was possible, he shrugged, as if admittedly anything were possible.

In the last days of August, I watched the spring dry up, and the basin inch its way lower. The tenants finally left, and my lucky husband returned from London. My husband, not a great lover of hot weather himself, knew how unpleasant my weeks had been, and asked me many times how had I  done it. I didn’t honestly know the answer, but I knew how petty my complaints could sound. Well, I spent a really hard August in the south of France: sad, sad story.

As the weather began to cool in late September, I saw a trickle of water again at the spring and the basin began to fill up again. At its lowest the depth of the water had probably been less than a foot. When full, it was close to three feet in depth. We had had enough water throughout to drink and bathe and water the garden. Our garden had been producing bounteously for weeks and we had been canning and storing food for winter. The funny trailer was long gone, and those dreadful hot days were only a bad memory.

Art Photography and the Digital Future: Reinventing the Status Quo

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This was written for a digital literacy course in 2001.  My ideas haven’t changed much since then.  I am leaving out the footnotes, except to note where references exist, but if anyone would like the references, please feel free to contact me. 

The end of semester student photography exhibit is a common occurrence in colleges where photography is taught (ref). On  the surface, such exhibits do not look very different in 2001 than they did in 1991. The print quality is usually excellent. The prints are carefully archivally matted and framed for gallery or museum-like presentation. The sophistication and complexity of the students’ photographic vision varies widely, as is to be expected with student work. Contrary to superficial appearances, however, there are substantial differences between the photos on the student gallery walls in 2001 and those in 1991. As one student put it: “I don’t think there is a photo here which hasn’t passed through Photoshop.” What is surprising about this is that the images don’t show obvious indebtedness to Photoshop. With one or two exceptions, there is very little montage or collage among the works. They don’t look like Absolut Vodka ads. They look very much like photography has looked for a long time. There are sensitive and thoughtful portraits. There are carefully composed landscapes and cityscapes. There is some mixed media and combining of texts and images. The primary way in which the images differ from those in 1991 is that they are not traditional silver photographic prints.

These images were, in fact printed on photographic quality paper with an ink-jet printer through a computerized system. Such printers spray tiny jets of ink to create the image. If looked at with a magnifying glass, the lines of the ink-jet path across the paper can be discerned.  A traditional silver photographic print, if looked at under magnification, will reveal the clumping together pattern of the grains of silver. This patterning is random, not linear.  However, when viewed at a conventional viewing distance, even up close with the naked eye, these prints are indistinguishable from their darkroom, silver based predecessors. Without a discernible difference in the appearance of the product, the nature of art photography practice has changed. The potential for digital imaging to change the nature of photography has been remarked upon for some time (refs). digitization alters the nature of the photographic process. The digital file can replace the negative. Photoshop and the ink-jet printer replace the enlarger and developing trays. Will art photography evolve into a new digital art form or will it cloak itself in new technologies to make an art product similar to what has been made for the last fifty years?

Photography has always occupied a somewhat ambiguous position in the art-making community. At first it was considered too mechanical to be an artistic practice. By the time silver prints were finally gaining museum and collector acceptance in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the digitization of the medium was underway (ref). Part of what established photography as an art was the cachet attached to unique silver prints. While a photograph could never be like an original painting or drawing, the argument went, the process of photography involved the hand of the artist: at the moment of exposure and then later in the darkroom. Art photographers were encouraged to sign and number their prints, like printmakers. Photographers who relied on commercial or machine-made prints or who had assistants print their work were held in less esteem than those who did their own darkroom work. The idea of an intimate connection between the artist and the finished product was important in photography’s attempt to gentrify itself into a high art form. Even though photographs were mechanically produced, it was suggested, they still had many attributes of traditional high artworks and were, thus, collectible.

In 1998 a Dorothea Lange print sold at auction for $244,500. (ref). Entitled “Human Erosion in California 1936” this print is one of her most widely reproduced photographs and so would be easily recognized as a well-known photographic work. In addition, this particular print had an element, a portion of a child’s hand, in the lower right corner, which Lange had removed in later versions, thus making it a very unique print and contributing to the high price the Getty Museum paid.

Lange’s is an interesting example because it parallels some of the issues brought up by the digitization  of the medium. Photographers have altered photographs since the invention of the medium (ref). In the late 19th Century the fact that photographs could be altered  increased their acceptability as art in some circles. Artist intervention was seen as superior to strict mechanical representation. Digitization can aid this tendency toward artistic control. While Lange had to alter the negative or crop the print in some way to remove the child’s hand, the contemporary photographer can alter the digital file.

With lens and silver based photography, the starting point of the photographic image is the negative (ref). Historically, as in Lange’s case, and in thousands of others, negatives were manipulated and combined to create the works photographic artists saw in their imaginations. Digitization can intervene at several stages in the photographic process. A digital image file can be the starting point if the original image is taken with a digital camera. Or, the negative or transparency can be digitized and a file created at that point. Lastly, an already existing silver print can be scanned or photographed, resulting in a digital file.

William J. Mitchell argues that with digitization the file itself becomes the “original” work of art (ref). Mitchell goes on to suggest that digital files create artwork that is allographic, functioning something like a musical score. The work is never completed, never static, but changing with each generation or re-generation. The digital work of necessity becomes a group or team endeavor. This description is appropriate for NASA’s image files and many scientific applications, but it is not so easily applied to current art photography. Art photography continues to be a fairly solitary endeavor and not very group or team oriented. Group process may not be intrinsic to digitization. In fact, given the nature of computers as a one-on-one work environment, individualization seems at least as appropriate. Individual authorship in art photography may not diminish, as Mitchell predicts (ref), and future photographic artists may well preserve individual authorship very successfully.

When photographers make prints from individual negatives, the longevity of the negative during the repetitive process is something like printmaking. As a lithographic stone or printing plate deteriorates with use, a negative deteriorates as well. However, the negative’s degradation is more a result of handling than actual physical pressure, as in printmaking. The negative gets scratched. Dust collects; the negative has to be cleaned. It gets scratched again. Photographic prints made earlier in a negative’s life will likely be higher quality than those made later. Mitchell is right to point out that this just doesn’t happen with a digital file (ref). Even though digital image files can be ephemeral and highly mutable (ref), they have the potential to be much more stable than negatives or printing plates. What this means is that digital prints can theoretically be generated at any time without regard to intrinsic longevity.

In practical terms, there may be a caveat: computer systems and software change. Today’s file from Photoshop 6.0 may not open in later versions of the program. However, this potential for reproducibility is what really makes the May 2001 student photo exhibit different. If all those prints on exhibit were to deteriorate or were destroyed, one hundred years from now, if someone came across the CD-ROM, the prints could all be produced again, exactly as the students had intended them to look, provided the “antique” software and appropriate printers could be re-activated.

This is heart warming in some ways. All that artwork is preserved from the ravages of time and air and light and moisture. If a print in a particular exhibit or collection gets damaged, just print another one. But, consider the havoc this can create in the already fragile photographic art market. If artworks are easily replaceable, where is their value as a collectible?

First, there is no doubt that silver prints, signed and made by art photographers, will appreciate dramatically as the implications of digitization begin to sink in to the consciousness of the collecting public. This is already the case with the big names, but anything silver-based will be likely to appreciate. There is a brisk market in vernacular photography on eBay, and this will only accelerate as attic troves of silver prints become more and more scarce.

Color photography presents other problems. A large percentage of the vernacular color photographic prints of the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s were unstable, and these have already degraded badly. On the art production end, photographers were aware of these permanence problems, and many attempted to use the most stable color processes for their work. These more stable color prints, along with Kodachrome slides, which have always been well-known for their longevity, will probably rise in value along with black and white prints. An excellent recent example of the increasing attention to Kodachrome slides is the Cushman Archive at Indiana University (ref). While the decision here has been to share these wonderful Kodachrome images on the WWW, their implicit value is recognized by the university library’s decision to create the archive and so valorize them.

But museums and libraries that readily collect black and white silver prints and Kodachrome slides may well be suspicious about collecting digital prints. Current research indicates that high quality ink-jet prints are very stable and permanent, (ref). Longevity, historically a bugaboo with collecting color photographic work, can no longer be seen as a serious issue, and digitization has created the potential to make infinite multiple artworks from the same source.

Right now it may take some time for the collecting public to notice that there are fundamental differences between digital and traditional silver photographic prints. After all, the digital and photographic print can look superficially identical. Will digital artists find ways to make their work attractive to collectors and museums? The notion of signed, limited editions (always kind of silly with photography) will probably continue. Some artists may advocate and follow through on destroying their digital files at the end of an edition of digital prints. Collectors may initially shun digital prints the way the painting and print buying public originally shunned silver photographs, but eventually, just as photography became accepted, digital art photography will be accepted, displayed and collected. A.D. Coleman also suggests that a new category of artwork is emerging which he calls “computer art” (ref). Such works, whether they exist on the WWW, on CD- ROM’s, or in printed versions may in embody the true potential of digital media in the visual arts. Like photographs at the birth of the medium one hundred and fifty years ago these digital artworks will now be the poor cousins in the art establishment and occupy the ambiguous position photography occupied for so long.

Graduation Memory

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This was written about 1995.

I graduated from high school in 1959.

I don’t remember much about my high school graduation. We wore robes with hats and tassels. The high school orchestra played “Pomp and Circumstance.” They were slightly off-key but it was music I liked, and it gave me goose-bumps. Both my parents attended my graduation, an event in itself, because they were not much given to public occasions. I was glad they had come. I was glad they were proud of me.

School was my life, it had been for a long time, and I sensed that it would continue to be for a long time. I kept hoping, even then, that my parents might understand this. My father, at least, was somewhat open, in the vein of “whatever you want to do is pretty much OK with me.” My mother was more rigid and fearful: “you’ll get so educated you’ll never find yourself a husband; it’s more sensible to go to work and earn a living; you’ll end up an old maid school teacher if you keep this up.” She didn’t exactly say those words, of course, though she had come close many times. She was good at silent disapproval.

I knew, fortunately, that I couldn’t please her and also please myself. I was lucky to have had teachers and counselors who said I would be crazy not to go to college. Even so, it was an ambivalent choice, and one I tried to attenuate by both working part-time and going to college as well, and eventually moving away from home. Those were rocky months following my graduation. I did get a pretty good full-time job during the summer, with the false promise that I would continue in September but I quit and started college.

Since I was still seventeen, my mother didn’t want me living away from home, and I wanted the freedom of a college girl. There were bizarre arguments about clothing, the posters in my room, and, of course, money. I had paid for my tuition and books. I had my part-time job. I had some spending money. Basically, I just slept at home. Yet I felt I was being held hostage and counted the days until I turned eighteen.

When I actually did move out, the strain eased. Years later my mother brought up the subject and offered a sort of explanation. She said she felt everyone was against her just then, especially me. And, years later, my sister told me that she thought that at that time our mother was abusing the tranquilizers she had been taking for back pain.

How to transfer photographs to fabric using an ink-jet printer

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There is a very useful video on YouTube detailing how to print photos onto fabric using an ink-jet printer. It’s called “Transferring Photos onto Fabric” and was posted by pennyh123.

This  post links back to my first post about transferring photographs to fabric using color copiers and transfer paper. For the complete text, look under Transferring Photographs to fabric. 

Enjoy.

Ironing

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Written about 1995.

My iron started acting unreliable and became over-heated a few days ago. Some weeks before, when I had attended a quilt show in Paducah, Kentucky, my traveling companion and I discussed the virtues of the latest, brand new super-sonic, float-on-a-bed-of-steam, drive themselves irons which were not only available during the show, but were on sale at reduced prices.

My friend, an excellent life-long seamstress, said she had given up on steam irons completely. When her last one died, (and she remembered paying close to $100 for it), she had searched the second hand stores for months until she found just the right kind of extra heavy, non-steam, no-holes-in-the-base plate old fashioned iron she wanted. She had it rewired, got out the spray bottle, and was quite happy, thank-you-very-much. I had, nevertheless, looked somewhat longingly at the float-on-a-bed-steam, new super duper irons, not knowing I would have an opportunity to consider their purchase so soon.

I am not a person who buys clothing that requires ironing. The ironing that I do is related to my quilt making. I grew up hating ironing, and perhaps because I have been freed from it for so many years, I have come to regard the little Ironing I have to do in a neutral, if not pleasant way.

It is impossible to iron fast; or rather, it is impossible to iron too fast and do a good job of it. If you rush, or turn the iron up too high, you can end up damaging the garment. Perhaps that is what I found so frustrating about ironing originally. It was there; it had to be done; it took a certain amount of time, and there was just no avoiding it.

I went to junior high school in a time of blouses with puffed, starched sleeves and full cotton skirts, likewise starched and ironed slick. It was a time before the household dryer was commonplace. The few motorized washing machines, with round windows in their doors, were watched by groups of curious children with just a tiny bit less fascination than the first television sets would be watched a few years later. As I frequently remind my own teenage daughter, we just had fewer clothes. They got washed once a week, and, of course, ironed, and they were worn several times before they were washed again. School clothes were taken off after school, so that they would be clean to wear again later in the week.

I wasn’t responsible for much of my own ironing until I was in my teens. As a little girl I had a toy ironing board and iron, and even later, as an older child, I had a small toy electric iron that actually heated up. Ironing is on of those things that look easy, and I thought I could do it. I was allowed to practice on table napkins and dishtowels; later, on pillowcases and sheets. It was only after scorching and damaging a few household items that I was cautioned to observe more carefully and even ask for advice about how to do this. I learned to use a spray bottle and damp down all the clothes, and to wait before ironing them. I learned the mysteries of gooey starch.

But I learned to iron seriously by preparing my gym suit for junior high school gym classes. Gym suits were brought home each weekend for cleaning. Our laundry day was during the week, so the gym suit was out of synchronization with the rest of the washing. Thus, the gym suit was washed out by hand on Saturday and hung out to dry. Then it was sprinkled and wrapped in an old but clean pillowcase sometime Saturday evening or Sunday, then, hopefully, ironed on Sunday night to be taken to school bright and early Monday. Starching the suit was not required, but ironing was. One of the ways to make the fact that the suit was clean and ironed more obvious was to starch it; so many girls, myself included, did that.

The gym suit was not an easy garment to iron. It snapped down the front and had a pocket. The “bottoms” were gathered around the leg and thus puffed, like bloomers. We all knew that the ridiculousness of this garment’s construction was so that boys wouldn’t be able to see our underwear as we played sports. We tried to make these silly outfits more fashionable by rolling up the elastic legged bottoms as high as our teachers would allow. But this was all after they were delivered to school in neatly folded, starched bundles each week.

Scorching was the most serious risk with these garments. One time I scorched a leg so badly I could smell it all week during gym class, and the brown burn mark never really washed out. I scorched other blouses. I scorched skirts. I probably scorched most of the garments I owned at one time or another, until the advent of the steam iron. And the steam iron didn’t stop my scorching all together. It just made it harder for me to do.

Thus, like the Amish, I was pleased with the advent of wash-and-wear clothing. It was late in high school, or maybe I had already started college, when the first daring housewife hung out these marvelous new shirts (for men, of course) to dry on hangers, dripping wet. When I got my first job after college and felt enormously affluent, I still had my clothes ironed at a laundry. Then slowly, over the years, the fashions and technology changed. Clothes were designed to be tumbled dry in the new automatic dryers; rumpled, soft cottons became fashionable. People, at least in North America, owned lots and lots of clothes.

So it is somewhat strange that I find myself ironing at all. When I first started quilt making, about six years ago, I did not own an iron. I resisted buying one, and the companion ironing board, until it became just too obvious that an iron and ironing board would, in fact, make my work much easier. And they did. And I’ve used the iron enough to wear it out in six years and face choosing a new one. Should I go all out for the latest model super-steam version, or like my seamstress friend, hunt the second hand shops for an old-fashioned, simpler-but-better model?

I haven’t made up my mind yet.

Script for a National Library Week Video

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My name is Aneta Sperber and I teach photography here at Rodriguez High School.

This is National Library Week, and I’d like to share a bit about what libraries have meant to me.

As a child I grew up in Oakland, California, and my local library was the Temescal  Branch of the Oakland Public Library System.

The Temescal Branch was, I think, a Carnegie built library. It was brick and solid, and survived even earthquake retrofitting. It stands proudly today and is still a wonderful, magical place to me.

When I needed a place to relax, where it was quiet, so I could think, the library was there.

When I needed a place to study and do my homework, the library was there for me.

When I needed a place to explore, to travel in my imagination and dream, the library was there.

When I needed answers to questions, when I needed information, the library was there.

When I needed entertainment– music, DVD’s, and books– the library was there for me.

Libraries are still free, and they offer more than ever. Libraries are there for you, just waiting for you to use them.

 

Transferring photographs to fabric

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This piece was first written in the mid-1990s, and was last updated in 2001. It still contains information I consider valuable, although a couple of points should be noted:

  • Color copiers have substantially changed, and few now use the resins that made the early color copier transfers so permanent and beautiful.
  • Ink-jet printing now dominates the printing on fabric market. (Though this is not the case for T-shirts and other fabric items that will not lay flat to pass through an ink-jet printer.)

Transferring photographs to fabric

with transfer paper: the pros and cons
(probably more than you ever wanted to know…)

Finding out the directions, so you can follow them correctly?

What are the differences between thick and thin transfer paper?

Why is all this crankiness about putting transfer paper in color copiers, anyway?

Why are some places willing to put pictures on transfer paper when some won’t?

Irons and dry mount presses

Other ways to transfer: computers and printers

What about the fabric?

I did all this just right and my transfers still look lousy!

There are many brands of transfer paper available for people who want to transfer photographs to fabric themselves. Transfer paper is, so far as I know, the only safe method, which does not use a computer, to try at home.

Some persons have described using solvents to transfer the toners from color copiers, but I would highly recommend against this approach. SOLVENTS are incredibly DANGEROUS and require a high level of safety precautions. They are definitely in the DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME category. 

Transfer paper is, therefore, the medium of choice for transferring color copies at home. There are many brands of transfer paper available, and I am not going to talk about specific brands. Anyone can buy transfer paper in bulk and market it themselves. Just because it comes in a package from the XYZ Quilt Boutique doesn’t tell you a thing about what kind of transfer paper it is. (Believe me, the XYZ Quilt Boutique is not manufacturing transfer paper in their back room.) To figure out what kind of transfer paper you are using, it helps to know the manufacturer, not the distributor. Some distributors tell you what brand of transfer paper they are selling and pass on the manufacturer’s instructions verbatim. Others rewrite the instructions.

Why is knowing the transfer paper manufacturer important? 

By knowing who manufactures the paper you can get some idea of the paper’s actual specifications. What you really need to know is the paper’s heat sensitivity range. I’ll explain the importance of the heat range below in talking about color copiers. (All transfer paper is, actually, is paper with a coating of plastic on it. The coating of plastic is lightly bonded to something like a silicone base, so that it will peel away when heated to a certain temperature.) Most transfer papers today describe themselves as “thin.” The “thin” papers were especially designed to go through color copiers more easily. The older transfer papers which have been on the market for years and years can be considered “thick,” and it still possible to purchase them.

What are the differences between “thick” and “thin” transfer paper?

For practical purposes, the thick transfer papers make a stiffer, thicker transfer than the thin ones. If you think about what transfer paper is actually doing, it is easy to understand why. The transfer paper is making a sandwich. The bottom of the sandwich is your fabric. The middle stuff in the sandwich is the toners or ink from the copier or printer. The top stuff on the sandwich is the plastic from the transfer paper. The thicker the layer of plastic from the transfer paper is, the more plastic or stuff there is to hold the whole package together. The thicker the transfer paper is, the better it will stand up to washing (although there is a point of diminishing returns here, for, if the transfer paper is too thick, it will start to crack under stress).

Historically speaking, the early transfer papers were thick and fairly low temperature. The low temperature meant that some of them could be ironed on at home, although even pressure has always been a tricky issue with transfer paper. This lower melt temperature for the plastic, however, presented problems for the color copiers (CLC’s) that came on the market in the late 1980’s. The newer, thinner, higher temperature transfer papers  were specifically developed to meet these problems.

What is the problem with transfer paper in the color copier anyway? (or why can’t I get that done here?)

Color copiers use resin toners to make the image. Resins are plastic, and they are fused to the paper with heat. The last stage when the color copier makes a copy is that the paper passes underneath a fuser roller. The fuser roller is HOT. It is so hot that many transfer papers melt and jam, or at very least leave a gunky residue which will eventually mean extra maintenance for the copier. The transfer paper manufacturers face a two-edged sword here: if the transfer paper is made so that it melts at a higher temperature (and messes up the color copier less) then it is much harder to get the image to release from the paper onto fabric at home. If the transfer paper is made to melt at a lower temperature, and is thus easier to iron on at home, they face the wrath of the color copier maintenance folks.

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Why is color copier maintenance such a big deal?

(Or, why I use my sewing machine to sew leather when the instruction book says it wasn’t designed to sew leather and why does the needle keep breaking… or, when was the last time you took apart your computer mouse and cleaned it? )

These may not be perfect analogies, but they will give you an idea of what is going on. Color copiers are notoriously temperamental machines. They cost anywhere from $1000 (used) to $60,000 (new with bells and whistles) and up. The “purchase”of a color copier is usually done by a lease/buy out agreement. Very few folks just pay cash for a copier. Part of the initial lease contract includes a maintenance agreement, and it is obligatory. (You don’t own the copier yet, and you won’t, fiscally speaking, actually own it for a few years. The lease company still owns it, and they can call the shots.) The maintenance agreement means that in addition to the money paid each month to the leasing institution for the copier, the copier user/owner also pays a monthly service fee to a local copier service organization. In this maintenance agreement, the copier service folks can specify many things, and one of them is that only a certain kind of paper be put through the color copier. Now, why would they do this? Clearly, it saves the service people labor and parts and money.

What will happen if a user/owner puts transfer paper through the copier anyway, in violation of their maintenance agreement?

The usual consequence, if the maintenance folks locate the source of the problem, is that the monthly maintenance fee is increased substantially, and the person is warned not to do it again. If they do it again and get caught, the service contract can be terminated. That means that the color copier service is then on a per call basis, at upwards of $100.00 per hour (Yes, that’s one hundred dollars an hour, and I’m told that’s cheap.) The out of pocket costs for “per call” service on a color copier can be astronomical compared to a monthly service contract. So this is a big incentive to NOT put transfer paper through your color copier.

Why then are some copier places willing to use transfer paper and others won’t?

A lot depends on the copier place’s volume, the age of the copier, and other variables. Some Mom and Pop and other independent copy places do not carry service contracts. They may have someone on the staff with a copier repair background. The volume is important because service contracts are tied to it. A very large volume copy store which may be part of a national chain (which shall remain nameless), may have sufficient color copy volume so that a few sheets of transfer paper every month are not going to be noticed in the overall maintenance pattern.

A number of years ago the large chain which shall be nameless started doing T-shirt transfers in a big way. My personal theory is that the transfer paper people convinced them there was a fortune to be made in T-shirts. Anyway, with so many stores and so much volume, the thinking may have gone: who cares if our maintenance goes up, we’ll make it up from the profits on T-shirts. Well, they apparently didn’t, and now only a few remaining stores in the chain will do T-shirt transfers. I haven’t a clue what they have based this decision on.

I have also known of some places which approached the issue in other ways. One Mom and Pop store is always careful to run twenty or so sheets of blank paper through the copier after every transfer paper job to clean out
the gunk. Another place, in an amusement arcade, and specializing in T-shirt transfers, found that their T-shirt volume and profit was sufficient to allow them to negotiate a higher priced service contract to keep the copier clean and running. And now, back to transfer paper…

With all this going on, it is no wonder that people using transfer paper get frustrated. (And we haven’t even touched on the issue of getting a decent quality image on the transfer paper itself!) As I said, most of the transfer papers available today are of the thinner variety. The problem with the thinner ones, from a washability standpoint is this: Remember that the top layer of the sandwich is a thin layer of plastic. When these are washed, the plastic cracks ever so slightly. What then happens is that loose fabric fibers migrate up through the tiny cracks. Think of grass growing through cracks in the sidewalk. After these transfers are washed, they look fuzzy. That’s why many of these thin papers recommend ironing the transfer after washing it! In all fairness, these papers were designed for the T-shirt industry, but imagine having to iron the transfers in quilt after washing it!

Irons and dry mount presses

Most transfer papers are designed for commercial use rather than home use. They therefore assume that you have a heat press or dry mount press. Heat presses and dry mount presses are the presses you see in framing shops and T-shirt transfer places. There are many varieties which will work. They are pretty expensive new, so I wouldn’t recommend buy one just to do transfers for your quilt, but you are likely to find them sitting around unused in community center crafts or photo workshops, libraries, high schools, etc. They are built to last forever, so they can be cleaned up and used very easily. These presses make doing it yourself almost fool proof. If you can get past the copier issues, and have a good looking copy on your transfer paper (this is pretty much a “what you see is what you get” process), and find a heat press to use, you are home free. Using your iron at home is really the major technical glitch in home transfers.

Heat presses deliver an even amount of heat and an even amount of pressure for a specified length of time. Even heat and pressure is the key to a lasting and good looking transfer. For larger transfers (bigger than say, 3″ x 5″), the heat press becomes more essential. Think of how small the base plate of your iron is. It can only deliver even heat and pressure to an area that fits on the base plate. Every time you move the iron you are changing the heat and the pressure. Most people, pressing down very hard on their irons deliver about 8-10 lbs per square inch of pressure. A heat press delivers about 30 lbs per square inch of pressure. Therefore, the plastic is going to be more thoroughly pressed into the fabric by a factor of 3! The reason that the pressure is so important has mostly to do with the heat and pressure exerted by the color copier’s fuser roller. Those toners are really bonded to the paper, and it takes comparable heat and pressure to get them to release onto the fabric.

How do I tell how hot my iron is?

Most irons do not have thermostats, but fabric settings, like, cotton, wool, etc. This is a serious problem. I understand there are temperature strips you can buy to test how hot your iron is. It is most important that you are confident that your iron stays at the same temperature once you set it. (I’ve had irons that seem to cool and reheat, even though they are not supposed to.) Experimenting with transfer papers at the settings you do have, and writing down what you use, is one way to go. Most transfer papers work in the +300 degree (F) range.

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Hasn’t anybody figured out any other ways to do this?

There are really lots of transfer systems. There are pastes you paint over the color copy and then iron or scrape off. There used to be a home transfer method called “Picture This” which used a plastic about as thick as a credit card. I heard that product was discontinued due to some legal issues, but it was easy and foolproof and very permanent if you didn’t mind the thick plastic surface.

There are also a number of “two step” systems. The “two step” systems were developed to avoid to plastic-in-the-copier issue. Basically, they insert an extra stage in the process. You make the copy on plain paper; then you press the copy onto the transfer paper; then you press the transfer paper onto the fabric. There are folks who have happily been using these “two step” processes for years. When the CLC’s first came on the market, Canon attempted to market its own two-step system, but it never seems to have gotten off the ground, and now they seem to have put their marketing emphasis on the home bubble jet transfer paper.

Can I use my computer printer instead of a color copier?

First of all, we need to distinguish between two basic kinds of color computer printers. If your printer has a fuser roller which is hot and the print comes out hot, you have a printer which uses toners. These are very high end (expensive) printers, like the Apple LaserWriter, and the Lexmark Optra C.

If you have a print which comes out cool and/or wet, you have an ink jet type printer. These are also called bubble jet, and (somewhat deceptively) laser jet printers. The first important consideration, aside from transfer paper and everything else, is that only the computer printers which use toners make permanent colors. All of the ink jet and bubble jet inks are fugitive *, that is, they fade in the light. Spraying a fixative spray on an ink jet transfer may make it more washable, but it does not change the nature of the light fastness of the inks. I know there are companies working on the issue, but, as of this writing the most light fast, commonly available ink jet inks will only last about 18 months. (There has been a whole to-do in the art world about the permanency of the “giclee” prints, and one of the companies which had claimed to have a permanent ink, has now backed down and is doing the equivalent of recalling the prints they made…..) The more permanent inks which do exist are mostly available for the high end ink jet printers, like the Iris series. Toners, on the other hand, are extremely permanent.

Given the printer you have, there are most likely transfer papers available for it. All the heat issues that apply to color copiers also apply to computer printers which use toners, and even more so, because computer printers can be even more temperamental than color copiers. Since the transfer papers which go through the ink jet printers are not exposed to heat,  they can iron on very easily because their overall melt temperature can be lower. Be sure to use a paper designed for your printer.

A recent product has come on the market which promises to make the computer printer a very viable method of putting your images on fabric. It is a product which you use to coat or soak the fabric Then you dry the fabric, iron it to freezer paper, then print to it directly. Caryl Bryer Fallert markets this product, called Bubble Jet Set on her Web site at http://bryerpatch.com/faq/bjs.htm.

In addition, there are still more transfer systems. One is thermal wax transfer, the second is sublimation transfer. Thermal wax comes from specific computer printer ribbons in Fargo (and possibly other) printers. Sublimation transfers have generally been avoided by quilters because they only work on polyester, but this process gives very soft transfers, with wonderful detail. (My thanks to Barbara McKie for reminding me of these methods)

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What about the fabric?

If you are using transfer paper, fabric you want to transfer onto has to be ableto stand the amount of heat you will have to use to transfer the image.Some synthetics start to melt at about 250 degrees, so they would not be good candidates for high temperature transfer papers.

In transferring at home with your iron, there is often a certain amount of image size distortion because you are pulling the transfer paper away from the fabric, usually at an angle. Thus the print turns out some sort of diamond shape, rather than rectangular. Most transfer papers can be ironed on (or should be able to be ironed on… Don’t use one you can’t iron it….) You can easily iron the image square again.

Some people like to transfer onto fabric that has not been washed because it is stiffer and seems to distort a bit less than pre-washed fabric. The only issue of concern here is that the sizing in the fabric be able to withstand the heat you need to transfer without scorching. In general, the cheaper the fabric, the more sizing and the more likelihood of scorching. Almost all fabrics which can withstand the heat can be transferred onto. I have done some wonderful transfers onto open weave fabrics like exotic linens.

There are certain aesthetic issues involved here too. If you want a transfer that is stiff and remains stiff, use a thick transfer paper and an unwashed fabric with lots of sizing. Poly-cotton polished broadcloth makes a transfer that has a sheen like satin and is quite wonderful for certain  projects. If you want a transfer that is soft and drapes like fabric, start with a softer fabric and use the thinnest possible transfer paper.

You can transfer onto colored or print fabrics. The thing to remember is that the background color of your fabric is going to be the background color of the photo. (To have a white background photo on colored fabric is a whole other kettle of fish… silk screeners do it on T-shirts with a layer of white paint first. I know of no easy way to do it with transfer paper on fabric.

You also need to be careful about using those overprinted, tone-on-tone fabrics, (i.e. little white designs on a beige fabric). I have found that the ink/paint/dye on these fabrics is often very low temperature and melts, making a mess. Hand screen printed fabrics can do this as well, so test them first.

I did all this just right and my transfers still look lousy!

The color copier is a marvelous machine, but it is only as good as the technician operating it, and it is also only as good as the service level at which it has been maintained. A good color copy should really look a lot like your original photograph. It should be focused as sharply; the color should look the same; and all the colors should be in register. There is really very little loss of image quality with a well working color copier, except at very extreme enlargements (say over 200%). In general, the transfers will look darker than the copies. If you prefer lighter transfers, start with lighter copies. If your copies on transfer paper don’t resemble your original photos, don’t bother to try to iron them on. They aren’t going to improve much in the transfer process…

A good color copier technician should have lots of experience with the color copier. A background from the four color printing or photographic printing fields is a bonus. The color copier itself is maintained by the service people to copy photos within an “average” range. If your photos are the least bit unusual (old and faded, for example), the color copier has to be adjusted by hand to accommodate them; its “average” settings won’t work well. If the copier technician has no sense of how to make these adjustments, you are going to get yucky copies. Ask the technician to run tests on your photos before they actually put the transfer paper in the copier. You may have to pay for these tests, but it is better than wasting transfer paper. Talk to the tech or store owner/manager before you start, to make sure you both understand their policies on tests, color correcting, special settings, etc. Mirror image is one setting that always has to be used with transfer paper and some shops charge extra for it.

Suppose you have four photos to copy onto transfer paper. The technician will hopefully find an average setting which is a compromise to accommodate all four photos. If two photos are very dark and two photos are very light, the tech will copy them at a setting somewhere between the two photos. Thus the dark photos will transfer on the light side, and the light photos will transfer on the dark side. If you want each photo to transfer at its very best, you will probably have to use at least two, maybe four sheets of transfer paper, and put each photo on its own sheet of transfer paper. You will also probably have to pay for each photo as a separate copy. This can sound pricey, but it may really be worth it in the long run. Think of it as an investment: you are going to put dozens, if not hundreds, of hours into your photo quilt project, and you don’t want to stint on the quality of your images. There’s an old farmer’s saying, “You don’t dig a two-bit hole for a two dollar tree…”

Good luck with whatever method you choose! 

* The longevity of some ink-jet inks has improved since this was written, but be sure to check this issue thoroughly before you invest a lot of money and time in a large project.

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