Image Reproduction

Back to definitions. Reproduction: “A copy of a work of art, antique, or the like”.  So it’s not the real thing but it looks like it.  We start with a painting and end up with a print.  (I want to restrict this to processes suitable for producing small numbers of reproductions for artists rather than large-scale processes like offset lithography where quantity is the order of the day).

Right from the outset it should really be stated that perfection is just not possible.  If you have an oil painting with a thick application of paint and produce a print, the print is, to all intents and purposes, two-dimensional and simply cannot be exactly like the oil.  A watercolour would seem a better candidate for reproduction.  No concern over thickness just colour and form.  What about the area of highlights where the artist has left the paper blank?  Unless the paper of the print is an exact match surely this would be different even if the rendition of colour were perfect. What about the texture of the paper? If there were a noticeable texture would it show up in the print?  It might well do depending on how the image is “captured”.  This will either be by photography or by scanning.  You can imagine that as the angle of light illuminating the watercolour gets more acute the likelihood of shadows would increase.  In the case of the oil they could be considerable.  They would be observable in the originals but always changing as the observer moves slightly or the light changes.  In the print they would be fixed forever.

 What about the colour of the captured image?  Unless you are very young you will probably have experienced the variability of different brands of film.  A given brand would be consistent in its rendition of colour but a different manufactures film would give a different result.  Kodak versus Agfa versus Fuji.  If the capture is digital you have different camera makes with different sensors in place of film and the likelihood of differing renditions.  Olympus versus Nikon versus Canon.   Presented with three different photographs of the same scene taken at exactly the same time but using different films you might not notice any difference unless you could see them all at once. What you would not be able to do is to compare “reality”, that instant in time, with the photographs.  In the case of the reproduction of an artwork you can essentially compare “reality”, the work, with the “photographs”.  Therein lies one of the problems of reproduction, as much a philosophical problem as a technical one.

With a photograph of nature it is easy to accept it as an interpretation.  With a work of art you can make a direct comparison and though the technology and constraints are the same, you suddenly expect a different order of fidelity in the result.