What is your photographic/ printing background and how did you first get interested in printmaking?

I had my own darkroom when I was 14 years old and I had enrolled in some community college adult classes to learn darkroom printing. I went to Ohio University to study photography with Arnold Gassan and he eventually encouraged me to study the chemistry of photography in the school of science. Arnold was very interested in alternative photographic printmaking and I eventually…..graduated with a degree in traditional printmaking. I ended up as the Master Printer at Twitchell-Nichols where I made original print editions with artists including Warhol, Rauschenberg and many of the minimalists such as Robert Morris and many others. It was the Soho print studio at the time, but it was not very painterly. I became bored with minimalism and the last vestiges of pop art. A year later, I opened my own experimental printmaking studio in Port Chester, NY. That was in 1980.

Initially, i made prints with artists rather than photographers because my interest in printmaking was in collaborating with painters. My studio became known for painterly techniques and I developed unique process and materials for each of the artists I worked with. Being within 10 miles of Tyler Graphics I always felt that I was in the shadow of the great one, but my inspiration was Tatanya Grossman whos ULAE studio was across the Long Island Sound from my studio. I went her route, putting everything I could afford to into the projects at the expense of my own hunger. I stressed creativity over technology. But, that philosophy made us poor. We ate and lived poor in those days. We lived and worked out of our Port Chester loft. We had no choice but to buy an old lobster boat in order to fish our own nutrition out of the sea.

Suddenly, having enormous lobster dinners seemed to attract artists and their entourages and perhaps gave the illusion of our unbridled success. We ate lobster literally, five nights a week. The other two nights we ate out at restaurants which we traded lobster for meals. Collectors soon came to buy the prints and the studio became mostly self-supporting by 1983. We actually had to continue eating lobster, flounder, bluefish and scungili for protein up till about 1986 or 1987. Cathy and I actually loved the hard work of being lobster harvesters and we had a commercial license with 40 traps. All in the name of art.

In the 1980s my printing was always experimental and never photographic. When I incorporated the computer into my printmaking in 1984, I began to make some photo-generated imagery with artists. Two years later I opened a gallery at 560 Broadway in NYC to show and sell the editions and multiples I was publishing. The last editions I produced for the NYC space in1988 were computer generated etchings and silkscreens for artists David Humphrey and Joel Fisher.

When I moved to Vermont I in 1989 I dedicated Cone Editions to digital printmaking - never really intending to go back to photographic printing. When I purchased my first drum scanner in 1992 - I began to get serious again about photographic printmaking. The scanner and an IRIS printer were perfectly matched for this. Eventually I began making inks for the IRIS, developed one of the most popular interfaces to the printer, and one thing led to another. I began to install Iris printers and drum scanners into other art studios. I trained Rauschenberg and Saff Editions - two great printmakers from whom I had taken so much influence from. I trained more than 40 of the first wave of digital printmakers. And these studios were making art reproductions from transparencies. They were for all practical purposes - photo reproduction studios.

So the shift to include photography began the moment I scanned 4×5s of paintings. These were the first reproductions I had ever made in my career. Not in 12 years as a professional printmaker had I ever reproduced an existing work of art. And while it was ok for others to do that - it wasn’t particularly interesting nor appealing for me. The logical step then was to reproduce photographic transparencies and negatives. I began inviting photographers to work with me about 1992.

In 1993 I developed the first of my monochromatic inkjet systems. By 1997, I was introducing a quad black system for IRIS printers at the Photo Plus Expo in NYC. That was when I ran into customers of Epson. Epson was little known in fine printing in those days. They were on the eve of introducing the PhotoEX printer. But I began developing a commercial monochromatic product that year for the Epson 3000 that used ICC profiles. ICC was in its infancy and I found enough customers to warrant the opening of InkjetMall. In 2000, I would release the first Piezography branded products. I think sometimes I am known more for my ink-making than my print-making.

But, I have continuously printed for great photographers of our time. I produced the last living portfolio for Avedon. I did the color printing for Gordon Park’s retrospective. Countless photographic projects while at the same time developing inks and software. I literally have two businesses. One is Cone Editions which makes prints, and the other is InkjetMall which sells inks.

In 2005, Gregory Colbert convinced me to join his Flying Elephants production team. I developed the replacement technology for his 40″x80″ Polaroid transfer process. I spent nearly 200 days a year in NYC from 2006 until 2008 making enormous 8 x 14 foot photographs for Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow exhibitions. I developed the inks, designed the printing process and executed these amazing prints on giant sheets of hand-made paper that cost a fortune to make. It was an ultimate printmaker’s gig. These prints have been seen my more than 10 million people worldwide making it the most seen exhibit ever. I actually think of myself as a printmaker first - and then an inkmaker second.

Where do you see, or would you like to see, the future of digital printing go?

I suppose away from where it is now, and yet that is the kind of statement that seems contrary to what most believe is a better evolving medium. I believe that it was better before the printer manufacturers themselves tried to get into it. Their guidance really, has been solely in the interests of selling consumables rather than furthering the medium. They use (in every sense of the word) creatives as their evangelists to give a much different illusion to their intentions. But, it’s all about consumables - and it wasn’t like that in the 90s. Today, the Epson patent lawsuits which generated a Bush Administration sign-off on the ban of importing third party inks is possibly Epson’s greatest contribution in the history of this new medium. It’s an anti-creative contribution and a terribly obvious one at that.

At a time when the equipment is more sophisticated than ever, the ability to actually experiment with it has been shut off by patent lawsuits and now third-party ink disabling technologies. But, I am looking at it as a creative from my point of view. Others may see all of their creativity wrapped up in how they manipulate Photoshop. The push button convenience of high-quality output is perhaps what they consider printmaking. These are surely two opposite view points. To me one is about printmaking and one is about image making.

So I have a different slant on what I want the future to be like. I know it will become difficult if not impossible to choose your own inks. Wilhelm published a paper in 2007 where he described that he no longer had the ability to analyze the color shift of the new Epson ink sets that use three shades of black. At the same time however, Epson began to publish these enormous longevity claims on their black & white prints. These ratings fail to mention that they are only in regards to density and not color shift. The ABW system uses color pigments in combination with three black shades in order to make every tone of monochrome other than the greenish cast of their blacks.

I realized after reading that paper that an endless sea of b&w photographs is being produced by photographers on the Epson ABW systems. In my opinion, those prints will eventually produce a very dark spot on the history of photography. We are not used to looking at color shifted monochromatic prints, and it is entirely possible within the next decade that color inkjet may be the only viable solution for fine black & white photographers.

This year I decided to take advantage of the slowing of the economy and restock my studio with all new printers. I bought additional machinery to take us well into the next decade. Redundant layers of the same printers we use on a day to day basis was my strategy. Finally, I began to import spare Epson print heads, pumps, dampers and capping stations in order to become self-sufficient.

My vision for the future is the Piezography Archives. It is a program I will launch in 2010. I have enough equipment to print continuously well into the 2020s. So I plan to make carbon based Piezography prints for photographers and make these prints available online to collectors. To me historical longevity is critical. Ultimately, I can only be responsible for myself and my clients. I can make inks, but there is no guarantee that photographers and labs will be able to buy new machinery that will allow a third-party ink to be supplied to it.

What is your best piece of advice for someone who is new to digital printmaking or wants to reexamine their existing view?

First, they need to read about printmaking from a historical viewpoint. Donald Saff’s “Printmaking” might be the bible. They need to understand that it was never a process of reproduction. They need to understand the entire concept of what an original print is. Then and only then, can they try and push and stretch the boundaries of digital printing. But of course, they need to be interested in that. For most, it is a convenient way to reproduce existing works of art or to print digital photographs. For many, the technology remains a barrier to access.

I’ve given a dystopian viewpoint of current printer technologies as they refer to printmaking. You’ve been asking me solely about printing. I’ve been talking about printmaking intentionally. If we throw digital fine art printing and digital photographic printing in with regular “printing” - we end up with nothing really to talk about other than the technology.

Historically, every great printmaking medium from relief print to lithography has come out of artistic experimentation with a commercial version of the process. That was the period of the 1990s in inkjet. My best advice for someone young who is interested in printmaking and who is still in college is to hook up with the software geeks. Start to experiment with printmaking by finding ways to drive these printers differently. Differentiate themselves from the push-button Photoshop artists. Push the boundaries of the medium by pushing the printers themselves, rather than the images that are being output with a couple clicks…

You can still see this type of wonderful exploration when you attend a SIGGRAPH conference and look at the emerging technologies. People learn to use printers for the most amazing things that you would never think about. The artistic implications of their experiments are enormous. And they bare little resemblance to what everyone else can do with them.

Otherwise, really what is there other than improving one’s skills in Photoshop or applying something to the prints after they are printed, or perhaps printing on unusual substrates. Printmaking is about technique and accident through exploration of the process. I can’t emphasize enough that the process is everything that happens after the Print button is pushed.

What traditional printing process inspired your want to create a printing system dedicated to black and white images?

Silkscreen. In college I began making my own monochromatic inks out of finely ground graphite. I had found some strange industrial business in Columbus, Ohio that ground it very, very finely. I can hardly recall why they ground it so fine, but they did.

So, I began to divide my photographs into tonal separations from light to dark. I used these films to photo-silkscreen the increasing density photo films over each other with ink I made from the graphite. I could make a continuous tone b&w photograph out of maybe 5 or 6 tonal separations. Eventually I used 21 steps.

Nearly 20 years later I would try the same approach with inkjet. As a development partner of IRIS Graphics, I had access to their technology. I learned to make ink for their printers by merely following a “recipe”. I gained access to their suppliers, and I developed a quad-black process I called DigitalPlatinum for IRIS. Piezography came five or so years later. I am still partitioning images into separations of tone associated with a density of ink. I just need fewer now than I did with silkscreen.

The K7 ink system has allowed for an extremely wide range of tones. Do you feel this has allowed for a K7 print to surpass a silver gelatin print, digital or traditional? Or has K7 become a printing medium unto itself?

This is a super good question. K7 inks when used to their best advantage with a really good linearization process surpasses anything that has every been accomplished in traditional photographic process. Film has a wider tonal latitude than silver papers. A drum scanner can pull so much more tone in the highlights and shadows and K7 is perfectly suited to reproducing that extra tone with much greater latitude than a traditional inkjet printer such as the Epson ABW.

But really, because photographers will have never “seen” this extended highlight and shadow detail - it can’t really compare anymore. We used to say it was as good as a darkroom print. But, now that we have exceeded the darkroom print it literally becomes a new medium. So, I see Piezography really as some historical marker in the history of photography. An exceedingly good milestone that will most likely become antiquated because only the best of the best really need to go that further mile today. Most photographers are settling for making b&w prints with color inks and a few shades of black. They are misled by longevity reports published by Epson and whose author of these reports has already published that he no longer has the ability to estimate their longevity. A sea of countless b&w inkjet prints will eventually morph into magenta or green cast images that in my opinion, will become a stain on the history of the medium.

With the new Piezography Glossy process, the extended tonal latitude is also taken into the dMax range above 2.75. This begins to present a print which is hard to comprehend. They look so much more like conventional silver prints. But, the shadow detail seems like an illusion. These prints still amaze me when I make them. It’s not quite Jody Foster looking out the window of the time capsule in “Contact” and repeating over and over “it’s so beautiful”. But, with the right image, I sometimes feel like I am looking out at something I simply have never seen before. Something beautiful