Pascal Dangin by Josef Astor
This week’s New Yorker has an entertaining profile about Pascal Dangin, retoucher extraordinaire and owner of Box Studios.
I first heard about Pascal Dangin when I saw the Guy Bourdin exhibition at Pace Macgill a few years ago. I was really impressed with the color and over-all look of the prints. I asked too many questions and found out that they were made by Pascal from the original vintage chromes specifically for the exhibition.
From what I could gather, there was quite a bit of work to do in order to get the colors to pop the way Bourdin meant them to. I’m not sure about what went into scanning and printing them but you could tell that someone worked extremely hard to make them as gorgeous and meticulous as they were.
For comparison, see the current Marvin E. Newman exhibition at Silverstein Gallery consisting of recently printed Inkjet prints of vintage chromes. While I admire Mr. Newman for dedicating himself to the newest in print technology (I was told he made the prints himself), I really wish he could have worked with someone more experienced on them. Not all the pictures are lacking but a whole bunch (even visible in the Jpgs online) seem to be flat with little color and no real blacks. I’m easily disappointed especially when I’m expecting images to just pop off the page.
I guess it would be interesting to see what someone like Pascal Dangin could do with Marvin E. Newman’s vintage photographs (the exhibition is still worth seeing either way).
Dangin has worked with the cream of the crop for years now and has built up an enormous business with 80 employees at his beck and call. Mario Sorrenti, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Annie Leibovitz, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin and Philip-Lorca diCorcia all trust and rely on his eye to clarify and perfect their images.
I suggest reading the entire story written by Lauren Collins as it contains quite a few interesting tidbits about the commercial photographic world of magazines and advertising.
Here are a few choice quotes in the meantime.
from Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty
About the Dove ad campaign:
“Do you know how much retouching was on that?”
“But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”
About bad retouching:
“I want people to have an understanding of the skeleton and musculature and how it works. There is nothing worse than looking at an ankle or a calf that’s wrong. This is what bad retouching can do—you see in magazines girls having their legs slimmed and they no longer have tibias and femurs, and it’s weird.”
About celebrities and fashion:
“But this world is not reality—it’s about drawing people toward an ideal vision, if we’re talking about fashion photography. You have to think that celebrities are playing roles the same way they do in movies.”
As an added bonus watch this video that circulated a few years ago showing what actually happens to a model from a photo shoot to the finishing touches on a computer.
Nice article indeed, god awful image, illustration, composite, whatever youmightwannacallit……portrait.
I’D Like to Have a Chance to Do this can of Work, like they say
it how you know not what you now.