When Photographs Become Prints
Fitzroy Alley 2024
I’ve regularly been ordering prints from Image Science and stacking them away as part of my physical archive for a little while now. It still unsettles me a little that over twenty years of photography can sit on Dropbox servers and hard drives, so having physical copies makes the work feel more grounded and safer. Not everything needs to become a print, but the process of testing images, papers and print quality has been an important part of how I understand the archive for many years now.
The print of the image above also has a personal motivtion behind it’s. making. A friend recently helped witness my passport renewal, and I wanted to send her something as a thank you. She was also the first person to buy art from me — a painting, back around 2001 — so sending a photograph now felt like a nice full-circle moment.
I started looking through the archive for images from Fitzroy, because it was one of the places we spent a lot of time years ago. There were gigs, DJ nights, early mornings, and breakfasts at Atomica after long nights out. It has been far too many years since I’ve seen that group of friends, so sending a print for their home felt like both a thank you and a small way of reconnecting.
I chose this Fitzroy laneway photograph, made in winter 2024, partly because it felt right for the person and partly because it presented a useful printing challenge. It is a dark image, with deep shadows, wet brick, purple evening light and a small amount of warmth at the far end of the lane. I wanted to see how a quieter, more difficult photograph would hold up on archival paper.
Images like this can look rich on screen, but printing asks something different of them. The question is whether the shadows retain enough detail, whether the colour separates cleanly, and whether the atmosphere survives once the image becomes a physical object. A photo feels different off the screen, the texture of the paper, seeing it matte, and certainly seeing it in a way when it feels like an object, not just something flitting past on a social media feed. Paper is really important and is vastly superior to the digital environment for an image.
I think most photos feel stronger off the screen, the matte paper I choose specifically means there are no reflections on the image and the viewer can take in the whole scene easily. Plenty of images fail as prints, that comes back to the technical side of photography, exposure, light, iso, aperture etc, then the editing process
For my work I really prefer matte paper, I’ve used the same Hahnemuhle Photo Rag since about 2009 - I really should branch out sometime, but the matte qualities of the paper make the image clearer, there’s no reflection like you get on a screen. The physicality of a print is a much more satisfying than looking at a screen, Even an A4 with the right image chosen feels ‘more’ when it’s printed. The colours are more realistic and the photo really helps me to get back to that place, that time I shot it. The larger the prints become the more I see and I feel.
Shot in Fitzroy during winter, shortly after dusk: wet brick, purple-blue light, dark walls, and a small pool of warmth at the end of the lane. It is not an obvious print choice, which is partly why I wanted to test it.
I had been volunteering as an assistant in a large commercial portrait studio at the time, with fifteen or twenty shoots happening day after day. That pace reminded me of my years in hospitality — the constant movement, the energy, the sense of being inside a machine for a while and then stepping back into the street at the end of the day.
I should go back through the Lightroom catalogue and look at the rest of the images from that evening. This photograph has the feeling of being made during one of those concentrated bursts where I shoot quickly, following light, weather and mood rather than a fixed plan.
I printed it at A4 partly because that size is practical. It can be stored safely, shipped easily, and kept in the archive until it finds the right use — whether as a gift, a market print, or simply as a reference for future decisions.
There is a mood in this photograph that I really like. It makes me miss getting out and making new work, but it also reminds me that the process of reviewing, testing and refining older images is valuable in itself. Once I see the print, I may even make a second edit and order another version for comparison. It feels quite fuzzy on screen, which may or may not be a good thing going to paper. At best it will be a fun addition to the archive, at worst a test of the quality of my files and execution in more challenging light conditions. I shot it hand held, I’d probably shoot it on a tripod if I want in the situation again, just to sharpen things up.
When I review photos after I’ve been shooting I rate them all, then delete the obvious duplicates and mis fires. Then I select a few which are holding my attention and leave them a little while. With fresh eyes, I come back and edit the image to the way I want it, then save a jpg and a TIF and put them into my dropbox archive and send to a second hard drive. There are many decisions that I make, lot’s of them are unconscious.
I’d think that someone who has some connection to Fitzroy, particularly from the recent past, when it felt edgier and less dangerous, certainly more diverse than the boomer real estate syndrome currently in place. It feels like the spirit of 2000 not, 2026. I think this print would fit nicely into a small reading room or a study, I wouldn’t probably print it huge, A4 (As I printed it recently)might be big enough or maybe A3 with a nice white matt around it and a dark wooden frame. I might get it done as an archival framing project for myself, just because I haven’t framed anything properly for too many years, and the last ones are still in incredible condition, but there’s only so much space on the wall.
To me this piece is a quintessential Fitzroy urban alley shot without being a cliche, it rewards slow viewing with most of the picture being dominated by darks, blacks & purples..
This actually feels like it could have been taken any time there has been cars, it almost feels like a film shot, I would never pursue that as an editing end, but its an interesting result. I think anyone who has been in Melbourne on a winter afternoon and walked down a laneway would identify with this image, it feels like a facsimile of hundreds of days like this I’ve shot in many parts of inner Melbourne
The A4 size seems to fit nicely, I’m growing to enjoy smaller formats and matching up sets might be a fun evolution of curating, having said that for some images A2 seems like a beginning, I need to test an A1 print, just for fun really and because scale is a really important part of the way photographs communicate with the viewer.
Printing this confirms the way I’ve been working lately - purely digging through archives and seeing how they print is a really important way of working. I’ve been unable to get out and shoot this year the way I have since about 2003 so I take it as a gift to build other parts of my practice, there could be hundreds of images there for me to edit and print. It’s certainly made me want to shoot more, but that time will come. The real key is that if you’re a photographer, your work isn’t finished until it’s printed. Find your local fine art printers, ask them questions, shoot lots, edit lots, read lots, experiement lots but just PRINT.
If you’re in Australia or everywhere else explore the Australian print store
If you’re in the USA explore them USA print store
