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Description: Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Volume 1: Essays and References)
Richard Diebenkorn cared greatly about the accuracy of color reproductions of his work. He doubted that a reproduction done with four...
PublisherYale University Press
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Notes on Photography
Richard M. Grant and Carl R. Schmitz
Richard Diebenkorn cared greatly about the accuracy of color reproductions of his work. He doubted that a reproduction done with four colors of ink could capture the appearance of light reflecting off pigment. Indeed, the ability to accurately represent the color of a work of art on the printed page has always been an elusive goal, but recent years have seen great progress. The development of direct recording of an image to a digital sensor has eliminated the vagaries of film—in which dyes may be variable from one batch to another—and its vulnerability to environmental factors. Digital sensors, of course, have their own challenges, both physical and in method of use, but their advent introduced a degree of stability. Over the two decades since Diebenkorn’s death, technological advances in camera sensors and the development of software tools such as Adobe Photoshop have made possible far more accurate reproduction than the artist ever saw. The difference between a postcard reproducing the Des Moines Art Center’s 1974 Ocean Park painting (which Diebenkorn sent to director Jim Demetrion in 1977, gently chiding him about the colors) and the digital photograph taken in 2012 for the present catalogue (figs. 13, below) clearly demonstrates this improvement, as do comparisons of reproductions of Untitled (Berkeley) (figs. 46, below) and Ocean Park #94 (figs. 79, below) dating to the end of Diebenkorn’s life and to the present day. Even though the finest professional art photographers took the earlier pictures with great care, and top-level printers printed them, the color simply could not be as rigidly controlled as current technology allows.
In 2006 we decided to take new photographs of every Diebenkorn artwork to which we could gain access. While the Richard Diebenkorn Estate owned many of these, approximately 2,500 works belonged to nearly 1,000 other owners, including museums, galleries, and private collectors. About a third of these works were concentrated in single collections or cities, but the rest necessitated a great deal of travel, not only in the United States but in Canada and Europe as well. In the end we have produced new digitally color-controlled photographs for 4,917 of the 5,197 works in the present catalogue.
Once we determined that the key to consistently accurate color was to use the same camera, lens, lights, and color target for every shot, it was clear that our equipment would have to be self-contained, portable, and easily carried by two people. We were sometimes required to shoot under very challenging circumstances, photographing an eight-foot-tall Ocean Park painting in a five-foot-wide hall, for example, or a painting twelve inches from a grand piano. We tried to shoot everything, particularly oil paintings, in place on the wall. Since we often could not ask people to unframe works under glass, we developed a technique to eliminate reflections, inserting the camera lens through a hole in a length of black theater fabric—a satisfying combination of nineteenth-and twenty-first-century technologies. Between the early years and the project’s end we changed equipment several times, finally settling on the equipment listed at the end of this section. Our workflow became so much more efficient and effective that we found ourselves rephotographing many works we had shot earlier.
Our photographs have been used in various exhibition catalogues and books, most recently in Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966, the catalogue of an exhibition by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2013. This use of our photographs has allowed us to test the results of our work over time and continue to make improvements. The present catalogue is printed by Trifolio, who has developed the AreaW4 proprietary separation process, which provides for a wider range of colors than standard color separation methods.
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Description: Recto and verso of postcard of "Ocean Park #70" (Cat. 4168), sent by Richard...
Fig. 1. Postcard of Ocean Park #70 (cat. 4168), sent by Richard Diebenkorn to Jim Demetrion, Des Moines Art Center, December 1977
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Description: Recto and verso of postcard of "Ocean Park #70" (Cat. 4168), sent by Richard...
Fig. 2. Back of postcard from Richard Diebenkorn to Jim Demetrion, December 1977
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Description: Recto and verso of postcard of "Ocean Park #70" (Cat. 4168), sent by Richard...
Fig. 3. Ocean Park #70 (cat. 4168) as reproduced in the catalogue raisonné
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Description: Reproduction of Richard Diebenkorn's "Untitled (Berkeley)" (Cat. 1313) in...
Fig. 4. Untitled (Berkeley) (cat. 1313) as reproduced in 1988
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Description: Reproduction of Richard Diebenkorn's "Untitled (Berkeley)" (Cat. 1313) in...
Fig. 5. Untitled (Berkeley) (cat. 1313) as reproduced in 1997
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Description: Untitled (Berkeley) by Diebenkorn, Richard
Fig. 6. Untitled (Berkeley) (cat. 1313) as reproduced in the catalogue raisonné
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Description: Reproductions of Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park #94" (Cat. 4264) in 1976,...
Fig. 7. Ocean Park #94 (cat. 4264) as reproduced in 1976
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Description: Reproductions of Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park #94" (Cat. 4264) in 1976,...
Fig. 8. Ocean Park #94 (cat. 4264) as reproduced in 2001
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Description: Reproductions of Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park #94" (Cat. 4264) in 1976,...
Fig. 9. Ocean Park #94 (cat. 4264) as reproduced in the catalogue raisonné
Photography Equipment
Nikon D3X camera (24.5-megapixel, 14-bit depth)
Nikon 28-70 f/2.8 lens
8 Nikon SB-800 and SB-900 AF Speedlight flash units
Nikon SU-800 Wireless Speedlight Commander
X-Rite Macbeth ColorChecker Digital SG 140 patch color target
Apple MacBook Pro laptop with Image Capture application for tethered shooting
Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw, and Photoshop applications for raw image processing and analysis
Color Profiling
For every setup, a custom digital color profile (ICC) has been produced by processing the image of the color target with the Monaco Profiler software.
Image Handling
Adobe Camera Raw engine (Camera Calibration Process version 2010 for consistency). Files saved as 16-bit, 120-megabyte TIFFs. All images were stored in the Adobe RGB 1998 color profile until conversion to CMYK by Trifolio using AreaW4.
Every image has been corrected for lens distortion and manually silhouetted in Adobe Photoshop to preserve edge detail, and has had its aspect ratio cross-checked with the listed dimensions of the artwork represented.
Match Proof Printing
Epson Stylus Pro 4900 SpectroProofer printer
EFI Fiery XF RIP
Notes on Photography
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