PRESS RELEASE
The Untold Story of One of the Greatest Printers in Photography
August 17th, 2010
Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA, and Paris, France — Youʼve probably seen his work.
But for many years, he remained in the shadows, a mysterious figure few people in photography
knew much about. One heard rumors, murmurs…“Henri Cartier-Bresson has a
darkroom guy in Paris who makes all his prints….” “Josef Koudelka is finally selling
prints—theyʼre being made by the same custom printer in Paris who a lot of the Magnum
guys use.”
Today, Mike Johnstonʼs The Online Photographer (TOP), a photography news and
discussion website for photographers, has published a significant original article. Itʼs a
profile of Voja Mitrovic (“Voja” is pronounced “Voya”), the darkroom master who printed
for Cartier-Bresson, Koudelka, Sebastiao Salgado, Werner Bischof, René Burri, Marc
Riboud, Robert Doisneau, Edouard Boubat, Man Ray, Helmut Newton, Raymond Depardon,
Bruno Barbey, Jean Gaumy, Frederic Brenner, Max Vadukul, and Peter Lindbergh
to name a few.
The two-part post was written by the renowned photojournalist Peter Turnley. Peter
and his twin brother David have been featured on CBSʼs “60 Minutes,” and Peter has 42
NEWSWEEK covers on his long list of publication credits. Peter is a dear and longtime
friend of Voja Mitrovic, who has been his own printer for many years. Peter traveled to
Paris specifically to interview Voja for this article.
A number of photographs are included, several never before seen.
Here is the permalink to Part I (Part II is linked at the bottom of Part I):
We hope you will have an an opportunity to share this with your audience.
For further information contact:
Mike Johnston, TOP, mcjohnston@mac.com
Excerpt:
Both Voja and Picto would have a tremendous impact on my own destiny. In June of
1979, after arriving back in Paris, I went to see Pierre Gassmann at Picto and asked for
a job as a printer. Pierre, with his tough-love gruff voice, asked me what I knew how to
do—and I exaggerated and told him that I was a great printer and knew how to do everything
with black-and-white prints. He said to me, “We will see. You will have a three
day tryout, and if you aren’t as good as you say, you won’t get the job.” On my first day
of my tryout, I was given 100 negatives and told to make 8×10-inch prints of each by the
end of the day. At 4 p.m., a tall, handsome man with a foreign accent, one of the printers
in the lab—Voja—came to my enlarger and asked how it was going. I told him that I had
only printed 20 negatives. He said to me, “You will never get this job—give me the
negatives.” I watched him take the hundred negatives to his enlarger, and in one hour,
he printed the remaining 80 negatives, putting each sheet of printing paper in a closed
drawer after exposing each negative. At 4:50 pm, he took out 80 sheets of exposed
photographic paper and went to the open developing tank. I watched him chain develop
all the prints, and one by one put all 80 prints, perfectly printed, into the fixer. At 5:10
p.m. that day, Pierre Gassmann walked into the lab and said, “letʼs see how you have
done.” He put his foot on the foot pedal to light up the fixer tank with bright red light, and
went through my 100 prints laying in the fixer-and a few seconds later, looked up and
said to me, “you are as good as you said; you are hired!” After Gassmann walked out of
the dark room, I took Voja aside, and said, “thank you. I will find a way one day to thank
you for this!” He looked at me and said, “I was an immigrant also. I know what it means
to need work—we need to help each other!”
—Copyright 2010 by Peter Turnley, Paris, France