Lou Spitalnick: Photographs For The Ages

Lou Spitalnick of Montauk is a master of platinum printing, one of only 500 or so photographers in the world who use it exclusively. The arduous process heightens the Old World painterliness and intensifies the details in the still lifes that are his obsession.

An art history scholar and a former newspaper art critic, Mr. Spitalnick lives on the bluffs overlooking the ocean with two massive dogs, a Great Pyrenees named Tiberius and a briard named Imogen.

He tore down an old shack there 28 years ago and built a house that plays on a visitor's senses like a contrapuntal melody. It has the stained-glass and lofty-ceilinged grandeur of a fine old church, but its cluttered corners and country furnishings make it the coziest of beach cottages. The dual effect is not unlike that of his photographs.

Medieval Image

In his studio, he had arranged against a plain brown cloth some pink and white lilies, the flowers no larger than a child's palm, in a narrow, chipped glass vase. A pair of old crosses on chains, one wooden and one of tarnished silver, lay nearby.

With sunlight hung across it, the image was medieval Italian or Spanish, yet almost Japanese in its restraint - and about to be tossed in the trash. The flowers, which appeared perfectly fresh and lovely, were an hour too long out of the Red Horse Market, said the photographer.

"I like to have an almost botanical style, showing flowers at their most beautiful and ideal," he explained. "My pictures aren't iconographic. There's no program, no dead flowers."

He had been at work that day on the last print he needed for a show at the Pace Collection in Manhattan, which runs through April 21. The image was baroque - quinces, a flute, sheet music, and old books, all scattered across an antique cloth of silk damask, frayed around the edges.

Mr. Spitalnick's art history studies have left him with a deeply classical sensitivity, although, he stressed, "I don't want pastiche. I don't want my photographs to look like copies of paintings."

The platinum printing process makes that impossible. According to John Stevenson, owner of the Platinum Galleries in Chelsea and Santa Fe, it results in "the most expanded tonal scale of anything in the world. It leads to extremely beautiful highlights that are octaves above what silver processing can do."

"Platinum photographs have a distinctly holographic quality," said Mr. Stevenson.

Dealer's Theory

The dealer, whose galleries may be the only ones in the world devoted exclusively to platinum, has a theory as to why: "We are being confronted with so much more visual data, more details, than anything we've ever seen graphically before, that our brains are compelled to turn that into a three-dimensional experience."

The difference between platinum plate and ordinary methods is that platinum produces an archival image to last for "a galactic generation," said Mr. Stevenson.

Mr. Spitalnick said it sometimes seems that making one perfect print takes that long.

"It's maddening. It'll print differently in summer than in winter. If it's a damp summer, I'm in real trouble."

Painstaking Work

He finds profound joy in having mastered a most difficult medium, but said the work is enormously straining. Mr. Spitalnick uses a view-camera, so he sees all his images upside down, takes dozens and dozens of shots to find one that pleases him, and then develops all his prints by hand, as the medium requires.

It involves a decision of near spiritual dimensions to choose from among 30 types of nonabsorbent paper. The photographer must make copious notes on correct exposure time and measure and mix some valuable and potentially dangerous chemicals.

Trying over and over for a perfect print of an image of calla lilies, to be used in a Manhattan show, Mr. Spitalnick mixed some drops of platinum, for high contrast, with some palladium, for warmth - an alchemist working with materials even more valuable than gold.

Photogravure

"Every picture is hand-coated," he said. "It's tiring. Maybe I make a lot of trouble for myself. I have my own peculiar rituals. Not everybody goes through the same tsoris."

Occasionally, he steps away from still lifes to photograph the bridges around Manhattan, depicting them as still lifes to photograph the bridges around Manhattan, depicting them as suggestive images that are always emerging from or slipping into fog.

He is making a collection of miniature portraits, too, of friends and acquaintances - Arkady Lvov, also a platinum photographer, posed with White Russian intensity, in a massive fur coat - and is experimenting with photogravure, a process that results in more grainy and impressionistic pictures, and that is itself experiencing a comeback.

"It's like taking a break. So much easier, far less expensive, and a million times less time-consuming than platinum," he said.

Georgia Peaches

It took Mr. Spitalnick several hours to make one print of what has become his trademark platinum image - Georgia peaches in an abused-looking pewter bowl. (Mr. Stevenson said a certain well-heeled collector of 15th, 16th, and 17th-century Flemish oils had bought one to hang among his paintings "because it fit there so well.")

Platinum-plate printing, the first method ever invented for developing photographs, fell out of use during World War I, when the price of platinum skyrocketed and the required paper was unavailable.

Still among the most expensive images on paper, platinum prints are now reserved for museums and connoisseurs - the Queen of England is a collector - and the medium, as costly as it is time-consuming, is only for the most devoted and meticulous of photographers.

Art Posters

Each mistake or substandard print represents 100 wasted dollars, and Mr. Spitalnick's editions are of just 25 prints. That has been limiting, as it is for all platinum-plate photographers.

Recently, he agreed to have some of his photographs reproduced as art posters. Even as the first ones are being distributed around the world, the photographer continues to debate with himself over the merits and dangers of moving outside the rarefied strata of platinum photographers and collectors.

"I don't like to call myself an artist," he said. "Everybody wants to be an artist. I'd rather not be in that crowded category. But I am very serious about this work. I'm excited about what I do, and I'm beset by doubts about whether it's any good, special, and distinct."

A show of 17th and 18th-century Italian paintings at the Academy of Design about 15 years ago "got me fixated on still lifes," he said. "I was fascinated. I wanted to do work like that."

"I tried to paint as a kid, but I got waylaid and didn't pursue it. So in some ways, I'm picking up where I left off, being true to my childhood. I just found a photographic medium through which I could produce the effects of the still life."

Mr. Spitalnick was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, then a working-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood with, he said, more than the average number of writers, artists, and musicians. It was there, said the photographer, that he developed his love of the finer arts.

Newspaper Critic

He shared with an older cousin, who became an architect, an interest in classical and Renaissance painting. His father played the violin, imparting an appreciation for opera and ballet, and his mother introduced him to other forms of classical music.

Even before studying comparative literature in graduate school, he learned to read French, Italian, and German. His literary tastes were "conservative," he said, leaning toward Shakespeare and Proust.

It was not until after graduate school that he became preoccupied with traditional still life. As the New York and East Coast art critic for The New Haven Register, though, he had little time for anything but writing. For more than 10 years, he was immersed in the art world as its correspondent.

"I wrote about El Greco, 19th-century French artists, anything. And I'd go wherever I could."

Although he has been handling a camera for 35 years, he began to work seriously in the medium about 15 years ago.

Pioneering Mentor

"I'm privileged to have the time to make a lot of blunders, and the means to pursue certain things until I see they are leading me down blind alleys," Mr. Spitalnick said.

He learned the platinum process from Lois Conner, a modern pioneer of the medium. She taught him the necessity of finding a format.

Hers - panoramic shots of far-flung landscapes resembling Oriental scroll paintings - was dictated by the old "banquet" camera she uses. He went in the opposite direction, looking for new images by getting as close as possible to "very small, very special things."

He shoots for the process, allowing it to dictate his choice of fruit, flowers, bowls and other subjects. The medium becomes the message.

But, said Mr. Spitalnick, Ms. Conner also taught him to allow the form to set him free.

"Think of a sonnet, something formal. And then, getting close, that shifts your attention to things you've never noticed before. The tiny details. And then you want to explore more and more of those new images."