Re: [Leica] Leica in the future

[Mark Rabiner <mrabiner@concentric.net>]

A Month ago:
After sweating away during sunny days in my darkroom for the last years
I had been enthralled with what a revelation the split printing thing
was for me and worked it out for months to years. Worked out a technique
for myself that I was under the impression that others were doing as
well that gave me ten times the control over my prints from my previous
life in the darkroom over thirty years. And that was good because the
process had just stared to feel constraining and otherwise frustratingly
up in the air.
And this new technique is possibly not for everybody.
But then some guy posts in that he read in a magazine four years again that
IT DOESNT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE!
I said a few things in my defense in a tone that might have gotten a tad caustic.
I think that when we are told that all are efforts to which we devote
are life to don't make any difference we get a little red faced and say
a few things.

I think that when you have a bunch of scientists sitting around on their
coffee break shooting the breeze they are much more likely to put in
verbal footnotes in their statements and observations that they make
back and forth to each other. They are more likely to qualify their
statements, its the way they are thought to think; the scientific method
I think they call it.
You get a group of artist types in a coffee clutch and what do they talk
about? 
Sex and Rock and Roll? Then they nod off. Which paper to use cause they
like the smell, I don't know and this is probably my category.
Then there are Business types: dollars and sense? Stockquotes? Don't ask
me. 
Social worker/Shrink types: Catharsis with no cleanup.
Main categories of job descriptions that make us different types of
people because we are what we do in most cases.
We've got to respect each others frames of reference.
Some of us take brilliant sharp technically perfect and boring pictures.
Others of us take phantasmagorically brilliant expressive piercing
images with dust spots and hypo stains and we are amazed when our film
comes out at all.
We have to have a little bit of both sides of the brain going for us or
we are in a little bit of trouble here... in photography.
Mark Rabiner 1999.9