It was March and it was 99 degrees, the world still ending and also creating a new self. We spent time this month working on prints and working out technical nuances — testing out settings combinations we had never tried before, pushing the software to reproduce detail we didn’t think would be possible, pushing together tables to hold a currently still in progress 132” print (more on this soon), pushing paper to hold ink we didn’t know it would hold.
And after one pickup, the shop was one flat-packed print lighter and 7 avocados and 40 loquats fuller. At another, we were several servings of chocolate cookies richer. When we are at home at dinner, each pulling a loquat from the bowl, we talk about the colors of a print. When we’re in the parking lot, if we’re not talking about how we better bring about liberation we’re talking about how the content of this print is making something feel one way or another and how we can track that better in the print process. Your prints are our prints, your work is our work. The fruit from your parents’ trees is on our table tonight.
We made a print for Sean Lamoureux — a dark menacing black and white that with a long stare starts to feel imagined, like a photo of a vision. An image with no real whites and somehow answers to all its riddles right there if you look hard enough.
We tested a handful of luster papers and landed on a baryta, a paper with a barium sulphate layer that helps deepen blacks and has a distinctive luster. It felt right for this file — it held good contrast and detail from how the ink sits on the paper. It looked like a darkroom print and had the same feel as a darkroom print in the hand. The paper reflects light differently in sunlight than under the controlled light of our daylight bulbs, especially with the UV light from the sun in the mix, and usually it’s a small difference. But here with Sean’s print it felt like a field of a difference, and it stumped us. Were Emilía and I losing our sight? Had the image changed right there on the paper?
We would test just too far in one direction and then go back the smallest possible step and were too far in the other. Too magenta for sure. But maybe it’s too green, too blue, too red. Turns out there was nothing to it, there was no middle ground with this paper, with this file, with this printer. It’s the kind of paper where neutral isn’t a set fixed point because it depends on the light. Plus, magenta doesn’t have its own wavelength — it’s how our eyes perceive a mix of red and blue light rather than a single color in the spectrum. A single minded pursuit of neutral got us to a print that had a lot more to say. The baryta as much a collaborator as anyone else. We packed this print, rolled up safely, to go to New York, to get placed behind a grey mat, inside a grey frame and we added a second version we printed — on another paper, a paper with less to say. On a sharp white luster paper, the image more technically at degree zero, and distanced from its more alive version, but also not wrong.
If you’re not in Los Angeles, we can still be your print shop. 💌
In these hot days, I remember this song, with a visceralness as if I had uncomfortably been in the back sinking away seat with them: Monja, by who knows who is the one I first heard because there are so many versions but each one works because like so much wonderful art the thing is in there inside already injected in all, the aura stays somehow.
The scene where it plays is from the film Hundstage (Dog Days), and I probably think about it every few years. Probably every few years when we experience wild heat waves, between the years we experience wild flooding rains, between the years it’s 37 degrees in the mornings in so called southern california, between, between. There are so many wonderful quiet pauses of people trying to exist, trying to sync up their hopes to someone else’s or at least get their hopes met despite the hopes of another.
We met with an artist this month who said they appreciated that we took their work seriously, that they had made test prints at another shop that weren’t turning out how they wanted and the extent of their helpfulness was basically, “you tell us” — and I guess as people who are happy to help suss things out and share our knowledge, we see our role as a lot more collaborative than that.
So, if you have questions, are stuck, or whatever, let us know. We will dial in your work with you like it’s ours — that’s how we see our task as the people that have the printers the size and cost of a high-mileage 1988 short bed Jeep Comanche 5 speed 4x4 with the 4.0-liter 6-cylinder and rebuilt mechanics (no racing stripes), which is the same way we felt when we had a drivers license in high school: Of fucking course we’ll pick you up. Hop in the back!
And as a ñapa, some documentation of the last photo assignment before we send them out to each person who submitted. A nice stack of 4” x 5” prints we hope you put on a wall or gift or tuck in a notebook — your thought on paper.
Come make a test print or talk things through, feel some paper. You can make an appointment and talk through your ideas and mark it down in your agenda as a Studio Visit. Call it a field trip and sign your own permission slip. We’ll see you soon.
We make your work as carefully and thoughtfully as if it were our own and there is nothing we’d rather be doing. It’s pay-the-list-rate for those with capital or power and a sliding scale for artists (you can also help fund our work here or on Venmo). Come visit us and see how fucking good your work looks printed. Reply to this email or DM us on Instagram.
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