As I move my focus more toward making prints, I keep coming back to the people who quietly nudged me in this direction. One of them is Nick Carver.
What I like about his work is how subtle it is. His fine art photography prints do not try to overpower the room they hang in. They sit there, calm and confident, and you live with them instead of being shouted at by them. That is the kind of photography print I would like on my own walls here, with my favorite subject the streets and facades of old Lahore.
Nick is a photographer and instructor based in Southern California, where he does a lot of architectural and commercial work, but his heart seems very much in film and fine art printing. He started with black and white film as a teenager and today most of his personal work still follows a hybrid path: shoot on film, scan, refine on the computer, and then make a careful print.
His desert landscapes and quiet suburban storefronts are often made on large format cameras, including long panoramic frames on six by seventeen film backs.
I came to him through one of his videos about making a photography print. He talks a lot about papers, surfaces, why he does not like reflective media, and the whole process of making a print at home. That may sound like a small thing, but for me it was the first time I saw someone treat the framed print on the wall as the real end of the process, not just the file on a screen.
One print in particular stuck in my mind: a piece from the Anza Borrego Desert that appears in several of his videos, often hanging on the wall behind him. In the video where he walks through how he made that print, you see the entire chain from negative to finished piece.
For a long time I kept wondering what he had used on top of the print for protection agains the environment. It did not look like a standard glossy surface, and there were no reflections. At some point curiosity won, so I watched the video more closely. He explains that he used a laminate over the print, but a specific kind that cuts down reflections rather than adding them. Like him, I do not enjoy seeing myself reflected in a print more than the print itself, so this made sense. It also helped me understand why his work felt so gentle in a room. It is not only the images. It is also the paper and the surface choices, which matters a lot when you are making fine art prints for people to buy and live with.
Even though I do not shoot film right now, I like watching him go through that whole painstaking workflow. The big cameras that are anything but portable. The limited availability of film. The time it takes to develop it. Then the scan, the dust spots, the scratches, and only after all of that, the print. There is a patience and consistency in that routine that I find admirable. It says a lot about the respect he has for the craft of photography and print making.
He seems very clear that the print, on paper, in a frame, is where the photograph really becomes itself. In one of the texts on his site he even says that making prints feels like his real muse, more than online sharing. That point of view resonates with where my own head is these days, especially as I think more about my own prints and anyone who might one day buy them.
So after having watched many of his videos over the years, I recently went a step further. I finally ordered the same family of printer he uses in his studio, the Canon imagePROGRAF Pro 1100 pigment inkjet printer (or in my case the Pro 510, which, from what I understand, is the same model for my region). It will take some time to get imported, so more on that later when I finally get to use it for my own fine art prints here in my home based studio in Lahore. It feels right to learn from someone who has already gone through the trial and error of building a print workflow at home instead of trying to reinvent everything on my own.
So here is a small shout out to him for his excellent videos, for the work he has produced, and for inspiring others to master their craft with patience. Also for the quiet prints that do not scream, for the honesty about how much work goes into film and large format, and for the attention to the boring things that turn out not to be boring at all: paper, laminate, reflections on glass, how a frame sits in a room.
I may never work with 6×17 film backs in the California desert, but I can share that same respect for the print as an object. That is what I am taking with me into my own work and into the prints I make and offer, hopefully.
In another video he comes back to that earlier print and talks more about how it was made, then creates a similar piece from a different photograph. The original was a lab C type print on a fairly reflective paper, which he likes because it almost glows when light hits it. To control the reflections he adds a low sheen laminate over the print. I found that combination interesting, because I really do not enjoy framed artwork behind reflective glass, yet I am drawn to prints that have a certain depth or glow to them. This idea of using laminate instead of glass is something I now want to experiment with in my own pigment inkjet prints once my printer finally arrives.
For anyone wondering, a C type print (or chromogenic print) is a traditional colour “lab print” made on light-sensitive photographic paper and developed in chemistry, rather than with ink sprayed onto the paper like an inkjet print. I don’t think such printing services are available here in Pakistan though… I probably will need to look if there is any.
After writing this note I went back to the small collection of fine art papers I already have in stock and started thinking more seriously about what I can realistically offer from here. I am leaning towards Canson, mostly because I have access to the distributor for the Canson Infinity range of fine art inkjet papers. I was hoping to find Hahnemühle fine art papers in Lahore or anywhere in Pakistan, more so for experimentation, but despite many searches I have not yet found anyone who can help with getting those. When it comes to fine art printing, we in Pakistan are at a real disadvantage. Apart from a couple of names that come to mind, there are very few people (if any at all) offering any kind of premium or creative fine art printing as a service.
If you are in Lahore (or Pakistan) and are thinking about making or buying fine art prints but are not sure where to start with papers, inks or printing at home, perhaps you can find a moment to reach out to me and we can figure things out together.