Postby mark l » 24 Aug 2012, 10:39
That would be a shame John, you have a lot of experience to share.
There still are silver print photographers in Australia, but funnily most don't print themselves. the fact that Cris Reid can make a living from printing for others shows how many still need a good silver print.
I own a kodak shop on the far north coast and because I have a black and white darkroom at home for everything from 35mm to 8x10 I started offering wet processing and printing to hopefully help make up for the dramatic downturn in colour film work and have been pleasantly surprised by how much work I get. Some is from the sad Lomo crowd, but I currently dev and print for several professionals, two in advertising and two fine art photographers, but I cannot tell you there names because they tell everyone they print themselves! I used to be an exhibition printer when I lived in france during the nineties and made about half my living from it. I think there are more silver printers making money off their work, but like you they mostly sell overseas. I even know of one guy on the coast near me who sell loads of tintypes. My nearest gallery runs the Olive Cotton portrait prize ($20,000 first prize) and I was pleasantly surprised to see that about 35% were silver prints, including a recent winner. I currently don't have any photos on the web because in the early days of the web I got badly burned with people using my photos for free having ripped them off my website. Like others here I do commercial work such as weddings, portraits and much artwork reproductions for books and the web, but that is all digital. All my personal work is silver and medium or large format and I do sell some from galleries but truth to tell whenever I've made a large portion of my income from my photography it's kinda spoiled it. Frankly I'm 53 and not in real good health, which I blame on twenty years of being up to my armpits in c41 and ra4 chemicals from maintaining my own machinery, I'm looking to sell all the property I built up over the years and retire to the bush like you, but I'll probably just do my photography for myself, just pure pleasure. Having said that, I've started doing a little teaching of darkroom technique and there is quite a demand for that, which I enjoy.
I think you will find that there are many fine art photographers still using wet printing, but they are "artists" not photographers and have little use for a site like this which is largely technical, not that it needs to be that way. The sydney gallery scene still includes many photographers using silver, but I have little time for there work unfortunatly, I'm rather old school, and like your sort of work, not 'conceptual' art, art with a capital F.
I'd actually bookmarked your site years ago, and would only ask that you give this site a little longer, it's still very early days.
all the best,Mark