Here's What 46 Prints Look Like

For several weeks I've been working on a large job for the Missoula Art Museum (MAM). This is a Big Deal for me, and perhaps my most "prestigious" client so far. While certainly not the Art Institute of Chicago or New York's MOMA, the MAM is quite nice, with one very large gallery, several smaller ones, library and media rooms, and an outstanding curatorial staff that's brought in some spectacular exhibits over the years. In 2017 they added, in cooperation with the City of Missoula, an impressive outdoor art "park" adjacent to the museum.

This job has been in the works for a year, and finally, in May, I received 46 files. The images, made by a Salish Kootenai College photography student, capture and narrate a story of modern Tribal (American Indian) life on and around Montana reservations. Some of the photos are beautiful, some are gritty, one or two are just disturbing. But my job is to make prints, so I'll withhold my opinions and get back to my story.

Part one of the job was to make small proof prints of the entire lot. I used letter-size sheets of Epson luster, in part because it's cheap, and also because luster has a tough, durable surface and would tolerate the handing I expected the prints to receive. They'd be spread out on a large table; the photographer, his teacher, and the museum's senior curator would rearrange, stack, sort, and otherwise cull the lot down to something appropriate to the narration, to fit within the available space for the exhibit, and to stay with their budget for printing and framing.

Everything about the job was routine. There is some time pressure, so I printed over four days. During that time the photographer and his teacher visited here to look at paper choices for the final prints, and I also had some other small client jobs to complete. The printer behaved as I've come to expect: each day's start-up and nozzle-check print revealed some missing nozzles (this aging 7900 is never 100% clean anymore at start-up), some cleaning was done (which, as always, required swapping out some ink cartridges for fuller ones, and usually required multiple channel-pair cleanings as I'd chase missing nozzles around the channels), and then I'd print the day's batch. One small problem: making room for 46 prints! I prefer to let them dry at least 24 hours before stacking them, so I often had a couple of day's prints spread out.

For the picture below, after all were printed, I spread them out on my main studio bench and a couple of temporary tables.

The group met at the college, culled the images, and then called me in to talk about final print sizes. With that sorted, I placed an order for the paper (more on that in another posting), and then did other work while burning off the lead time.

I'll follow-up with another posting or two about making the larger prints.

  --Jay