AD5803 - Printing master Pablo Iniro

Pablo Inirio is the master darkroom printer at Magnum Photos in New York, he is in charge with the responsibility of making prints of some of the most iconic black and white images in history. His noted prints are very popular in the photographers community and looking at his notes is extremely helpful for my practice. In this post, I copied some interesting part of an interview of him.

"I’ve printed the James Dean in Times Square a bunch of times. Like a lot of times. It’s not an easy print! He’s a little bit under-exposed, and you want to have just enough information so he’s still kind of moody. Even though it’s kind of a rainy, cloudy day, the sky is kind of overexposed a little bit, so you kind of have to bring that down, you want to keep the contrast snappy… so it’s an interesting print to do! I have my notes and I follow them as much as I can, but it changes from day to day; I can do it one way one day, and the next day, for some reason, totally different. I like that print a lot. I found a very interesting interview with Pablo, here I copy the pieces I found more helpful."

"As far as science, it’s pretty straightforward. If you know how to mix the chemistry, you’re fine. I don’t do anything fancy, I keep it really simple in there. Basic developer, like Dektol, you got your stop bath, a basic rapid fixer, like a non-hardener, wash, sepia tone. Nothing fancy. I don’t have time to do anything fancy. It just has to wash really well, tone it nicely, then wash it again, and it should last for years and years."

How much time would you spend on a typical print, from the time you take out the negative to a finished print?

Let’s say an hour and a half to two hours to make it really nice. I don’t rush in there much. I put on the music, I got the mood lighting going, the water’s running… it’s a zen kind of a thing. You can’t rush your judgment too much, so you might go have some coffee, come back and look at it again, figure out what it needs and then you do the print. If it’s a tough print, and there are some areas that have to be lightened, and there’s no other way to do it, you have to make a mask. In Photoshop, you just make a mask in layers. Here you’re actually cutting out pieces of paper and you’re putting it on a piece of see-through plastic and you’re holding it over the print. All that stuff takes time.

What are the types of things that make a negative challenging to print? I’d rather have a negative that’s over-exposed than under-exposed. Under-exposed is hard because you want to bring out as much detail as you can—if you feel it’s necessary to the picture—and that’s hard to do without going grey. So when that happens, you end up working on a higher-grade paper with more black and white, which means less grey but you lose in the highlights, or you have to spend a lot more time printing for the highlights. So that’s hard. Whereas if it’s overexposed, I can always just add more time.