Your comment about print versus screen image was interesting. I asked the archivist at MS what she valued more, the original film or the finished print? Without hesitation, she said film. But she is an archivist. If you as a gallerist, the would say print, something touched by the artist and produced in his vision. I see both points of view. The tricky thing for me is that most of my work is very, very far removed from the original source material. I have always view my negs and RAW files for that matter as a collection of information or data as it were. A jumping off point to create something often entirely different. In the darkroom and now the digital realm I would push and pull and massage the information captured on that piece of celluloid. I would often take the most mundane image and with enough cajoling, conjure up something quite interesting, yet far removed from the original. So to put my source material in the hands of an unrelated third party might prove futile, as they would have no idea as to where I might want to go with that image. For that matter, half the time I don’t. But that’s the fun of it, eh?
