When photographer Ed Rode’s documentary-style images started to gain traction and calls for display, he needed someone to help turn his “fly on the wall” photos into “hang on the wall” prints.
Rode tried his luck with different shops around Nashville, but a conversation with a mutual friend from Rode’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, brought Chattanooga’s Mark Lakey into his viewfinder.
Lakey, with his brother Mitch, had been running the custom print shop Art Warehouse since 2000, first staging model homes for builders then adding a retail store in 2006. So he was already well-versed in taking images and making them larger than life.
“We’re a boutique printer that does everything from retail, wholesale, commercial and franchise printing,” Lakey says. “What we bring to the table is, we’re not the most expensive, we’re not the cheapest, we’re just the best bang for the buck.”
A couple phone calls between Rode and Lakey found common ground: family, photos, general gear geekery. So when Rode charged him with creating large-scale images of three familiar faces in his portfolio – Chet Atkins, Willie Nelson and Neil Diamond – he uploaded a handful of scans that weren’t exactly up to Lakey’s standards.
“He sent me those three negative scans that he had done and he said, ‘Hey man, I want to print these big and you’re my guy,’” Lakey remembers. “I told him I didn’t want to do the scans as big as he originally wanted to do them, but I finally agreed and said, ‘You’ve gotta take the handcuffs off me and let’s co-birth these because they need some serious love; these are not great scans.’
“He said, ‘Do your thing,’ which doesn’t happen every day in my world,” Lakey laughs. “We’ve gotten along over the years because we’re both old school, and trust takes time to build.
“I spent eight to 10 hours per negative, cleaning but not changing anything, just getting rid of extraneous data. I didn’t want to take away the film look, but we really had to clean them up,” he says. “Ed and I kind of jelled that way. We both got along great because we found all these similar personality traits, and the printing side was just what I brought to the table.”
Rode has used Lakey’s Art Warehouse services to print almost all of his large-scale work ever since, including commercial work for restaurants such as Dave & Buster’s and Nashville’s Puckett’s Restaurant chain, several FirstBank locations throughout the state, as well as exhibition prints for the Bluebird Cafe and a new exhibition at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Virginia.
Lakey says it’s rewarding to see Rode’s work getting a wider audience after years of collaboration.
“It’s not so much ‘faking it till you make it,’ but it’s working your tail off trying to get someone to recognize that you’re dedicated to your craft. You want to be good at it,” Lakey says. “You don’t have to be a millionaire or super famous, but if you want to be known for something, make it be the quality of your work.”
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