Wanda Martin: the art of printing

When Canon Ambassador Wanda Martin was offered the opportunity to stage her first major solo exhibition at the historic Deák Palace in the centre of Budapest, Hungary, she decided to combine a range of her professional commissions and personal projects.

Her eventual selection included commercial work for high-profile clients such as Marc Jacobs and Vogue Italia, as well as a series of deeply personal self-portraits. To give these very different aspects of her work a distinctive identity, Wanda chose to use three different Canon printers: the Canon Colorado 1640, the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 and the Canon PIXMA TS5350 Series.

"I'm mainly known as a fashion and portrait photographer, but my background is actually conceptual and art photography," Wanda explains. "During the last two years, I've had more time to revisit my roots and go back to my personal projects, and now I've developed a body of work that I felt ready to show to the public."

Songs of Innocence and Experience, which opened in December 2021, focused on the themes of love, femininity, sexuality and belonging and was divided into three parts: large-scale prints of Wanda's professional images, smaller prints of photos taken for her Lovers series, and images from her self-portrait/collage project made in 2020.

For the section showing her professional portrait and fashion photography, Wanda chose to display prints measuring 1m x 1.5m. "I have a painterly aesthetic in my work – it's usually a mixture of romantic beauty, historical references and rock 'n' roll attitude or unusual beauty," says Wanda. "I wanted to exhibit these images in very large scale to remind us of paintings by the Old Masters."

These images were printed on a Canon Colorado 1640, a roll-to-roll 64-inch printer that incorporates Canon's advanced UVgel technology. "The printer's wide colour gamut and the durability of the UVgel ink were really important factors – especially the colours, as I think one of the most important elements of my photography is how I play with and capture colours," says Wanda.

"Although the images had already been shown online, the people who saw them were surprised at how different they looked when printed at a large size. They were like, 'Now we get it!'"

Wanda also used the same printer for the 100cm x 70cm prints of images from her Lovers project, a series of photographs which celebrate the diversity of love by showing real couples in their personal environment. All the images were already retouched and edited, and most were saved as TIFF files. So, after deciding on the final image size, Wanda simply had to resize them before printing.

Wanda began her self-portrait project during the first Covid-19 lockdown. It was prompted by an inspirational video she made for Canon Europe, titled Keep on Creating, in which she shared tips on shooting portraiture, self-portraits and still-life images at home. After making the video, Wanda herself started taking hundreds of self-portraits.

Her photographic style is partly influenced by 19th-century artists including Rossetti, Millais and Vermeer. "I found myself in front of my camera, recreating famous paintings of women dying of heartache," she says. "I was going through a break-up at the time and it became my art therapy."

"However, what I love about the Canon PIXMA TS5350 is that even though it can produce great quality prints, I could also sometimes use a lower quality setting. I did this to reduce the perfect quality of the images shot on my Canon cameras to create a noisier, more faded analogue appearance."

For the collage images made on the imagePROGRAF PRO-300, Wanda used Canon's professional papers such as Pro Luster, Pro Premium Matte and Premium Fine Art Smooth. "I especially like the luster and semi-gloss papers because it gives a mild shimmering to my images and the colours appear rich and full of life," she says.

Wanda used Canon's free Professional Print and Layout software, which works with other image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. After soft proofing the images to preview how they would look on a particular type of paper, she then selected the correct ICC paper profile and made other final adjustments prior to output.

When printing with the PIXMA TS5350, Wanda experimented with various different media, including old newspapers, paper she had poured coffee or tea on, and pages from books or old notebooks. They were then layered and glued together to create a deconstructed effect. The resulting collages were then scanned to make new images and printed for the exhibition on the Canon Colorado 1640.

One of the main things Wanda has learned from her exhibition is the value of displaying physical prints of her images, and she advises others to do the same. "When getting your pictures printed professionally by a lab, try to be present throughout the whole process, so you can see the proofs and give feedback," she says. "If you're printing your images, it's great to experiment with different settings and try out different papers to see which best fit your images or the project. It's also good to try out different colour profiles."

And for anyone planning to stage an exhibition, she adds, "Putting an exhibition together is much harder work than I would have thought. Remember that it takes a lot of time to prepare everything, from putting the concept together to selecting the final images, printing and the installation process. And don't leave everything to the last minute, like I always do!"

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