Brooklyn Desk Creative is the quasi-business site of Jeremy Speer, itinerant photographer and web geek. The name comes from my time in Minnesota while my wife was getting her PhD. I used to send letters and emails to friends back east and called them “dispatches from the Brooklyn desk.” For better or worse the name stuck.

Photography has been a part of my life essentially since birth. My father was what you might call a “practitioner” of the craft. A consummate lousy businessman, he never made much money with his camera, but photography was part of his life. He was a student of Minor White and agreed with White’s opinion that photography could be a meditative, and personally transformative tool. Through his association with White, who later founded Aperture, he was asked to write the frontispiece/introduction for an edition of Aperture’s monograph of White’s work “Rites and Passages” (but amazingly there is no evidence he actually did this if you don’t happen to own a copy of the book). I suspect he was asked to write the piece by Aperture’s editors as a way to placate his growing frustration with Aperture not paying his consulting invoices.

Little wonder he never earned much money with a camera, eh?

Years later I struggled to set up a darkroom in most of the places Annette and I later lived, but the cost, the chemicals, the aging equipment and increasing frustration took their toll. When we moved back to Brooklyn the idea of having a solo home darkroom was laughable given the cost of real estate.

After a while, along with two friends, we did manage to set up a pretty good shared darkroom in the basement of a Williamsburg row house. But it didn’t last. For me it was too hard to regularly get to, too expensive to maintain, and too difficult to justify given the fact we had to earn a living and film, paper and chemicals weren’t getting any cheaper. Besides digital imaging was becoming better and better and the smelly alchemy of the darkroom was seeming more and more archaic.

So now, 20 years later, i hope to re-invigorate my simmering passion for photography by adding the one piece of equipment i’d been missing: a truly professional output device. Specifically a Hewlet/Packard Z3100 inkjet printer.

Why now? Why this printer?

The time is now because technology has finally reached a point where quality and price intersect at a level I find acceptable. Who wants to spend tens of thousands of dollars and hours of time creating prints that have no shelf life or where the quality fails to reach traditional analog photography. This latest advance by HP finally combines image quality with acceptable longevity at a price point i can at least wrap my head around.

Why make prints at all?

Several years ago i was fortunate to meet up with a guy who ran a letterpress shop in Saint Paul producing various custom printed pieces. I’m no fan of dead trees and i realize most paper-making is a nasty business, but i agree with a marketing piece they produced that read: “50 years from now nobody is going to find your emails lovingly tied with string under your bed.” So while i’m happy to read online versions of newspapers and magazines I do feel there’s something to be said for holding a beautifully made photograph in your hands.

And that’s what i want to enable. I want to make it possible for people 50 years, 100 years or even more to find physical images of digital files. It’s all well and good to watch slide shows on the TV… just think of the chemicals no longer being dumped down drains to process all those snapshots! But to have a physical photograph, maybe just one image—the “pick” of the slideshow—to be able to hold it in your hand, illuminated by sunlight rather than a plasma screen, and to know that with a little care some member of a future generation might hold this photo and think about this particular moment in time, i cannot help but feel encouraged.