This is a quote from Wikipedia. I don't think it needs verification from an outside source, so I'm inserting here in toto:
Giclée (pronounced /ʒiːˈkleɪ/ "zhee-clay" or /dʒiːˈkleɪ, from French [ʒiˈkle]) is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray".[1] It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne,[2] a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.
About a decade ago, in viewing a show in Massachusetts, I saw this term used to describe inkjet prints, only no one knew what it meant. I went to the show—which I've forgotten the name of—with the members of one of my photography classes, since the prints on view were all some kind of photographic images, ranging from huge black-and-white prints made in a darkroom to "giclée" prints that were obviously highly manipulated digital prints. Beyond being confused, I just passed off the convention as affected and continued to call my inkjet prints as I made them, on an inkjet printer.
Now, it seems, this term is accepted usage. This entry is primarily about ramping up the terms used in the fine art world to make silk purses out of what some artist perceived was a sow's ear. But is the term "inkjet print" less high-class than "giclée"? Frankly, I see no difference, except that the former is a description of the process used and the machine used to make the print, while the latter, being Frenchified, sounds more grand than it is. I absolutely cannot abide circumlocutions of this kind. If you check out my art site, you'll find all my inkjet prints so labeled, nor will I change the terminology. At least the viewer knows, from reading the label, how I made the print. I usually name the type of printer I used, furthermore, and my printer, an Epson Photo Stylus 2200, is an inkjet printer. It isn't referred to on the Epson site or anywhere else as a "giclée" printer.
Another Frenchified term is "photo gravure." I came across this one on a site operated by a photographer I met in Massachusetts. Since I know the process he used to make his prints, besides using a special inkjet printer for black-and-white prints, I know that the process refers to what we called "photopolymer plate" printing when I was in art school.
A photopolymer plate, or sun plate as it is sometimes called, is a zinc plate coated with a photoreceptive polymer coating that, after the appropriate processing, can be used to make intaglio prints. I think it's a wonderful process, in that it allows the artist to use photographs or other digital materials to make a plate for producing intaglio prints. (For those who don't know, an intaglio print is made by laying a sheet of dampened printmaking paper or other material on top of a plate that has been inscribed in any of a number of ways with an image that has been inked. When put through a printing press, the image on the plate is printed on the paper.)
In my case, I was in the process of using photopolymer plates with many of the images I inherited from my father to make intaglio prints while I was in art school. Whether I'll ever be able to finish the series I started will depend on whether I can obtain access to a print studio to continue the work.
The process of producing the plate involves printing the image, in black, on a transparency sheet, using either a laser printer or an inkjet printer. If one uses the latter type of printer, one must be sure to print the image with a halftone screen (as you would see in a newspaper). A laser printer automatically adds the screen. The halftone screen (or filter) is needed to get the ink to adhere to the image. Once the transparency is exposed correctly (part of the difficulty of the process), then one lays it on top of a photopolymer plate in a light table. The light table lid closes on top of plate and transparency, locks by having the vacuum sucked out of the space the two items are in, to hold them together, and flips over to be exposed to light, to engrave the image from the transparency onto the plate.
The plate is then placed in water, which as I recall is just plain water, and the person making the plate uses a soft brush to rub the image. After five minutes the plate must be left in a window, to dry and to be exposed to sunlight (hence the name "sun plate") for several hours. After that time, the plate is ready for use. One coats it with ordinary printing ink, blots off the ink as necessary to make the image, and uses it to edition a print. Because of the soft nature of the photopolymer, the plates don't last very long, so the number of legible copies one is able to make is small. I think this contributes something to the precious quality of making plates in this manner.
For me, though, the object of using the plates is not to produce a darkroom-quality photograph so much as what is obviously a manipulated photograph, which may then look "handmade" or rough in some way or another. In one of the plates I made, I hand-wrote one of the stories my grandmother told me about the family to accompany three photographs, all of which were about ninety-five or more years old. I loved the idea that my hand was visible in the work, and that the work did not attempt to emulate a proper photograph that was produced in a darkroom.
But that's my thing. In any regard I would not call this image "photo gravure." It's so pretentious! In general, I believe the artist's touch in a digital work makes that work transcend the medium used to produce it. I can't write on each individual print, but I can write on a piece of paper, scan it into my computer, then print it in an interesting way. Plus, by using this technique, I don't have to write backward, which is what one would normally have to do on a copper plate. There are steps I have to take in making the transparency and the plate that will allow whatever I write to print forward, but here isn't the place to go into a description of that process. Basically, just remember that the image on the plate must be backward in order for the writing in the finished print to be forward. And I'll probably call my image a photopolymer plate or an intaglio print from a photopolymer plate. Longer term, but plainer in its way.
No comments:
Post a Comment