For decades as an analog, and later digital, fashion photographer I had always worked with custom labs for processing film to my specifications and occasionally making prints. In late 2013, as I began to create abstract photographs, I looked for a lab to make what were then called “Giclée” prints. I discovered there was wide variation in the making of those prints - from cheap digital labs that anyone with an iPhone could upload their photos to, printed on inexpensive, poor-quality machines and substrates - to smaller shops that claimed they were Master Printers. I tried a few of the smaller shops and wasn’t satisfied with the results or service. I continued searching and finally found Jack Duganne, a one-on-one Master Printer who was credited with coining the phrase “Giclée” in 1991 (as noted in Wikipedia).
Jack Duganne at work in his atelier printing “Ostinato” by Steven Silverstein.
© 2017 Steven Silverstein. All rights reserved.
As luck would have it, Jack was located in Los Angeles. The problem was that he was already over 70 years old and was winding down his career. Although he was still printing, he wasn’t taking on any new clients unless he found merit in their work and liked them personally, or so he bluntly told me when I first spoke with him. Most artists probably would have taken that as a firm “no” and found someone else more accommodating but I sensed that Jack could give me something that others couldn’t - an education. And I needed that. I didn’t yet understand how the printing process could limit - or stretch the limits - of my work. As I would later learn, my instincts were correct about Jack. He was not only a Master Printer but a scholar of printing, a technical innovator in serigraphy, a seminal developer of fine art printing technology, and a mentor to an entire generation of artists. We also had a few things in common. Although our paths had not crossed before then, he had studied French in Paris and his atelier on Main Street in Santa Monica was just a few blocks from a studio and production office I had once owned.
He agreed to have me come by to the atelier for a chat, and somehow I cajoled him into printing a few tests for me. That first run didn’t go well. He later told me that in his career he had seen thousands of digital art pieces created by computer software and photographs of abstract paintings that painters were making into serigraphs but never art like mine - abstract photography created in-camera. It took him awhile to understand it. I wanted to replicate in the prints what I was seeing in the camera but there are limits to what can be accomplished between the camera, the export to a digital file, and the machine that prints it. The Master Printer’s job, then, is to work with the artist, to get as close as possible to that. I took my camera in and showed him the images on the back of it. Jack, the Master, decided he was going to master the challenge. And he did. We worked one-on-one with each other and made beautiful prints for five years. Perhaps just as importantly he taught me about substrates and what was needed in the printing process to reach the results that we began to achieve.
Jack Duganne’s atelier with Aerial View by Steven Silverstein on printer.
© 2017 Steven Silverstein. All rights reserved.
Then the unthinkable happened. Sometime in 2018, Jack told me he had a medical problem. He was having headaches. He went to see doctors and bounced back. We printed in early 2019 at the new house and studio that he and his wife had moved into but when I called him a few months later, he told me he wasn’t printing anymore. I called again and he never returned my call. I was heartbroken, understanding that something was wrong. After some trial and error, I found a new Master Printer but kept thinking about him. Finally, I got a text from his wife. He died peacefully earlier this year amid the coronavirus (read Los Angeles Times obituary.) I will never forget Jack - a Master and Mentor - and I’m grateful that the memories live on in the prints that we made together.