Irving Penn Platinum Prints

[John Camp]

Wandered through the Irving Penn exhibition of platinum prints at the National Gallery in Washington. His photos aren't the best for platinum printing, but the most interesting thing was that when I'd looked at a lot of them, it occurred to me that the "platinum look" would be much easier to achieve on a digital printer than in a silver print.

JC

[Geoff Wittig]

Absolutely! For a while some service bureaus using Jon Cone's original Piezography system advertised their output as "Digital platinum prints". The smooth tonal spread and good shadow detail that mark platinum/palladium prints are a relative piece of cake using digital methods. Last year George Eastman House exhibited Edward H. Curtis's beautiful platinum prints of Native Americans, and they struck me the same way- how simple it is to achieve the same rich look and feel using matte/rag paper on an inkjet printer.