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Mirror Image: Printing Perfect Portraits Kimberly Barlag Mirror Image uses its award- winning T-shirts as a calling card to attract new business. |
Mirror Image specializes in printing photographs by famous photographers. Here, Colin Cheer and Rick Roth frame
a print of Marilyn Monroe photographed by Richard Avedon.
 The computer is the key to Mirror Image's superior printing capabilities, making it easier for the art staff to handle complex separations. |
Mirror Image, a Cambridge, MA-based screen-printing company and grand-prize winner of Screenplay's 1994 Terrific T-Shirt Contest, has modifed the sage advice "If the shoe fits, do business." With this in mind, the firm that specializes in printing photographic reproductions of fine art searches for clients, with shoe in hand, looking for a perfect fit. Therefore, Mirror Image courts only companies that reflect its own standards for high-quality fine-art printing.
And they're hard to find. But being picky has paid off. Mirror Image has found what it's looking for in a few select companies that are equally picky about the printed T-shirts they buy. These companies are usually intermediaries - companies that are already working with artists to reproduce their fine-art prints on paper or postcards and wish to branch out into other mediums. And Mirror Image uses its award-winning T-shirts as a calling card to attract this new business. Rick Roth, owner of Mirror Image, explains that he doesn't use sales representatives, brochures, or advertisements to generate business because he believes, "The best advertisement is an excellently printed T-shirt." So when he sees a company that is producing quality fine-art reproductions on posters and postcards, Rick introduces the idea of T-shirts to the firm and holds up his masterpieces to prove that cotton is also a worthy canvas. What makes these T-shirts so special that Rick can afford to be so selective about sales? Mainly, it's the company's tedious separation process and printing technique. A lot of the designs that Mirror Image reproduces are challenging black-and-white photographs or images with a limited palette of colors. And they are usually printed on black T-shirts. |
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Colin Cheer, who "wears a lot of hats" at Mirror Image and is primarily responsible for engineering the company's color separations and research and development, explains the technique. "I thought I made [the process] up," he laughs. "I found out later it had been done for quite a while." The technique has been used in offset printing for many years. It uses duotones to reproduce a wider gamut of colors in a four-color-process image.
For example, the grand-prize winning design, called "Lolita", is a black T-shirt featuring a William Wegman photograph of a Weimaraner (a breed of dog with a smooth grayish brown coat) sitting in a black chair. Achieving the right coloring was a challenge. "Weimaraners are not a color that is in the Crayola box," laughs Colin. "They are a very hard color to reproduce. "Mirror Image used 65-line screens on black. The company printed the T-shirts for Fotofolio, a large New York-based fine-art printing company and Mirror Image's second-largest client. "Yo' Mama," a T-shirt displaying a Renee Cox photograph of a black woman holding her baby against a black background, won second best of show. The design used a 75-line quadtone. Mirror Image printed the T-shirts for the photographer for her gallery opening. "Revenge of the Goldfish" won second place in the multicolor, light-on-dark, large-process category. The 65-line, nine-color print on black was again for Fotofolio. Not too long ago, companies like Fotofolio may have turned their noses up at the thought of fine art on T-shirts, but Colin explains that the quality of Mirror Image's designs has converted fine-art printers and artists alike. "They are starting to accept it a little more," explains Colin. "We still run into artists who are uncomfortable with something they consider fine art on such a populist item as a T-shirt, but by and large, we have turned their heads around by showing them what we can do." Of course, a long path of learning and hard work led Mirror Image to its capabilities today. But printing artwork on T-shirts was always the mainstay of the business. Rick started printing T-shirts using homemade equipment. He was printing designs that a friend of his, Ken Brown, created for greeting cards. Now that protion of the business, which is still very successful, is an affiliate company to Mirror Image called Ken Brown Designs. As Rick learned more about screen printing and his business expanded, he contracted his work to a screen-printing company that operated as a youth program to rehabilitate juvenile offenders. When this business went up for sale in 1987, Rick bought it, renamed it Mirror Image, and hired an employee. It was, and still is, a union shop, and it printed jobs for a lot of unions and nonprofit organizations in addition to the Ken Brown designs. A year later, Rick, with several more employees, moved the business to its present location housing 8000sq ft. Fearful of becoming a "slave" to an automatic press - the "big pet you buy and then have to feed," Rick contracted his large-run orders to other printers. But to keep an eye on the quality of their work, Rick sent his own employees to unlead the dryers or package the printed T-shirts. At one of these contract printers, Rick met Colin. When colin joined Mirror Image, he took the company into the age of computers and improved the color-separation process. Colin reveals that he and Judy Winters, the art department manager, spend a couple of days separating a color image at 75 lines. He also claims that nine times out of ten, they will print a sample and decide to reseparate it. But he believes that their time investment makes a difference. "I think the reason we have been successful in getting images to work on T-shirts is because we are really in control of both the art and printing, and they are working hand in hand," explains Colin. And the purchase of a 12-station automatic press last October brought everything together and made it easier for the company to control quality. In fact, in an effort to ensure that each piece printed at Mirror Image is up to snuff, the company places three folders at the end of the dryer so they have time to check each print adequately. Rarely are shirts returned to Mirror Image, and Colin claims that most of their clients don't even open the boxes before they ship them to their final destination - retail stores, museums, art galleries, etc. the 30-some employees at Mirror Image work together to keep their collage of T-shirt designs printed at an exemplary level - whether they are the "bizarre, New York arty style, cartoony illustrations with hip humor" of Ken Brown or the award-winning photographic reproductions that Colin "likens to higher-end serigraphic printing." Both team effort and well-researched printing technology make up Mirror Image's recipe of success. According to Colin, one of the reasons the company won the awards is that the images were not only very interesting, but also lent themselves well to screen printing. But perhaps more importantly, the team of hard-working, detail-oriented, and quality-conscious employees is the most important contribution. Because his staff consists mostly of artists and musicians, Rick believes they have an eye for what looks good aesthetically and can see when something is technically correct or incorrect. He gives a lot of credit to the Mirror Image team. "We work well together and have a lot of pride. Everyone celebrated when we heard we won the awards because everyone had a hand in it." |
 Best of Show First: "Lolita," Mirror Image, Inc. |
 Best of Show Second: "Yo'Mama," Mirror Image, Inc. |
 Multicolor First: "Yo'Mama," Mirror Image, Inc. |
 Multicolor, Light on Dark First: "Lolita," Mirror Image, Inc. |
 Multicolor, Light on Dark Second: "Revenge if the Goldfish," Mirror Image, Inc. |
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