whose wysiwyg?

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Obviously the same photograph, from William Eggleston's Guide. The first scan is from the 2nd edition copyright 2002 of the Guide. The second scan is from The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore, the 2nd edition copyright 2007. Both these books are recent additions to my library. I've never seen the original editions of either.

Given that Eggleston's color photography is supposed to be about color, and not necessarily the content, how are we to evaluate the photographs when the colors are reproduced in such widely varying shades of yellow? This is far from a scientific study, merely a quick & dirty reproduction of what I see when looking at the two books side by side. The prints are reproduced as closely as I see them given a reasonable amount of time. And what I see is that the reprint of the Eggleston book of his own photographs is not very well done. Both books are printed in China.

What this suggests to me is that our current obsession with color management is a fundamentally bogus concern. If you're making your own prints to either sell or hang on the wall of your own house, naturally you want to get them as close as possible to the originals. But that's never going to be very close, given the disparity of materials - digital and transparency film being transmissive, and paper prints being reflective. Once you enter the domain of book printing, whether POD or offset, the fidelity to the original becomes much more of a challenge. There are so many variables, that getting an image good enough seems to be a much more sane goal than chasing the vanishing tails of perfection.

The other thought this suggests is that our current obsession with technical perfection is merely an excuse for either pretty pictures or images that don't communicate much thought or feeling.

Comments

[TJ Avery]

This reminds me of my freshman psychology class ages ago when we studied about our ability to discern differences. There is a certain "threshold" - a point where we notice a difference in something that is changing (e.g. going from lighter to darker). Experiments showed that humans usually noticed change only after a lot of change had happened.

I.e. if you sit in a darkened room, and someone very slowly increases the lights, you wouldn't notice every little increment of change, but you're likely to notice several increments after a while.

On the other hand, the human mind can very easily see change and difference if BOTH conditions are shown side-by-side. So, say you were able to compare two lighting conditions side-by-side, one slightly darker than the other. You'd be able to notice the difference, whereas if you'd been sitting in isolation in that slowly brightening room, you'd usually NOT notice small shifts going lighter.

I think the same applies to color balance, and I've thought that for a long time. For example, I've been satisfied with certain prints of mine, only to be surprized years later when I re-post-processed, re-printed them, and then compared prints. The color balance of the first was "way off". Yet, when viewed in isolation, that original print looked okay.

The human mind tends to compensate, or rather, suppliments the viewing experience with past memories and visions. It's hard to turn that off (not that we'd want to, it's what makes us special). Our viewing experience is not just colored by stored memories, but also by our current mood, energy level, what we just had to eat, etc.

In the end, the subject is king. What you're saying with a photo is most important, whether you're consciously aware of that or not.

Anyway, all IMHO :-)

[KMW]

TJ,

The viewing experience really is a subjective one, that's for sure. In this instance of two books with the same photograph, the way I've displayed them makes it easy. But the way I originally discovered this difference was much less obvious. Admittedly, I was looking at the two books within the same time frame. I believe I found the image first in the Shore book, then several days later found it again in the Eggleston book. Even my memory of the two didn't coincide. There is enough of a difference that somehow the second presentation of the image disagreed with how my mind had already processed the photograph. Upon holding the two prints next to one another, indeed the physical evidence confirmed what my memory had told me was the case.