James J. Gardiner

The same thing that mattered 100 years ago still matters today: you need to be thoughtful about your craft, and have something to say and that has to ooze out of your soul. No matter what medium you work in, the cream will always rise to the top. Before the internet, amazing people were discovered because they were amazing people. Now everyone thinks they are amazing and need the internet to be discovered. It’s just not the case.

He also advises all photographers who are working with digital printing today to carefully notate, on the verso of all prints, the date the print was made, the machine it was made on, the number of ink-jet colors that was used and the exact kind of paper involved in the printmaking. Why? Because already intimately acquainted with the vagaries of the restoration process of silver prints – he understands that this may not be possible with machine-made photographs in future. Digital prints, having come into being far earlier than they theoretically should have without the science to insure longevity, and having undergone so many generations of materials in such a short time, have been fading at an alarming rate and many early prints are now gone or nearly so. How will restoration be possible in the future for these works? Possibly it will not, but without these critical notations, no possibility will exist.