You don’t look at a David Prince photograph, you allow yourself to sink into it slowly, like lowering yourself into a steaming hot spring. For years he’s produced stunning loose-leaf portfolios consisting of several signatures wrapped in a cover sheet, which enables him to insert and remove photographs depending on the potential client receiving them. But with his latest, he did something truly daring – he allowed it to be printed digitally for the first time, and bigger than life in more ways than one.
To begin with, the 24-page book is an attention-grabbing 11 x 14 inches, which makes for spreads that feel large enough to dive into. This oversize format plays extraordinarily well with David’s frequent photographic subject matter of choice: unique still lifes expertly styled and shot with an eye for extreme detail. At this size you don’t feel like you’re simply perusing photos, but rather peering through a window at something so tantalizingly close you could practically reach out and touch it.
The printer, Kirkwood, further enhanced this illusion by extending the printed color gamut beyond CMYK by adding Orange and Violet (CMYKOV) to the digital print run on an HP Indigo press. This not only makes for unusually vibrant colors – just look at the red in the cover images – but also heightens the gorgeousness of tone-on-tone images like the white-on-white we find in the skull and other items in the tabletop spread.
David’s photographs deal as much with subtle shadows as light, and the digital printing here captures every nuance perfectly. When you consider that a portion of his client list reads like a Who’s Who of fashion, glamor and wealth – including Louis Vuitton, Coach, Rolex and Tiffany – you can appreciate the risk he felt he was taking going the digital route, which makes the beautiful results seem all the sweeter.
The final ingredient in this sumptuous feast for the eyes, of course, is the paper. Not the glossy sheet you might expect, but the photographer continues his long-time reliance on Mohawk’s offerings, this time opting for a 100 lb. Mohawk Superfine Ultrawhite sheet with an Eggshell finish [Get Swatchbook!]. This luscious, archival-quality paper transforms each signature in this unbound portfolio into a potential art print suitable for framing.
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