There is a very interesting discussion going on over at The online photographer. It revolves around printing public domain images from the Library of Congress. Mike Johnston started out by offering archival inkjet prints, for a reasonable price, of one of photography's iconic images.

Print Offer: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"

This is not in any sense an "original print" of this iconic photograph, said to be the most widely disseminated and most recognized American image in the history of photography. Prints with actual provenance are essentially out of circulation, even to big-bucks collectors.You can buy a fiber-based print from the LoC for as little as $90, and they're not bad, but they look a little too much like what they are: prints produced in large numbers from a copy negative.

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Many photographers have major problems with someone printing another photographer's negatives and making money off of them. However, these negatives were done for and paid by the US government. That means there is no copyright protection. They belong the the citizens of the US. The Library of Congress makes high quality digital files available for download. You can order prints from them but a good printer, with Photoshop to clean it up and a good pigment printer, can make a much better print and that is what Mike Johnston did. The post has some interesting comments. Today Mike posted more on this issue.

On Printmaking

There was a tiny little controversy—not even as much as a tempest in a teapot—over my decision to offer a fine print of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" two weeks ago. A few people worried it might not be legal (it is) or ethical (it is) and a few others opined that it wasn't quite the right thing to do anyway (I disgree, but hey, fine, they're entitled).

The thing is, pace Ansel Adams, a print really is a performance. Take a look at this pair of pictures. The photograph is by John C. H. Grabill, and it's entitled "Red Cloud and American Horse, the Two Most Noted Chiefs Now Living." That was in 1891. Ansel said the negative is the score; in this case, the score is a TIFF filed downloaded from the Library of Congress website, which is on the right. On the left is a small JPEG of an in-progress file I've been working on to make a print out of. It's not finished yet. It may not get finished, either: the TIFF file is a so-so scan of an old, damaged print. The print, like most photographs, was not particularly well-made in the first place, and it shows all sorts of defects: water damage, metalizing, discoloring, fading, and a maddening number of flaws—some in the original negative, some in the original print, some in the scan, some not showing up except in my contrast-enhanced rendering of the scan. I worked on and off for two days on spotting the #$%! thing. There's still some left to do. Now, I suppose, one could ask just what the heck it is I'm doing, and what it is I'm making. It's not an original anything, certainly. A restoration? A pointless little prettied-up pictorial simulacrum of the original? Maybe you like the charms of the original in all its damaged glory—fine, but remember, you can't have the original. It's in the Library of Congress collection. All you can have is a digitized TIFF, or a reproduction print made from something like the version on the left, whether you let me do all the dirty work or you do it yourself. So would you make an inkjet print of the file on the right and hang it on your wall? I don't think I would. (I might hang the original, if I could.) What I think I'm doing, anyhow, is this: printmaking. I like printmaking. I like it because I like to look at prints. If I spend five hours of my life re-working a nasty old TIFF from the LoC, it's because I like the picture and want to look at it more often, that's all.

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Be sure and read the posts and all the comments. Very interesting. This is actually something I've been considering doing since I discovered the treasure trove that the Library of Congress has. By the way, I feel the same way as Mike.