Image House Digital

To say Craig Yorke, president of Image House Digital Incorporated in Halifax, has spent his life in the photographic business is no exaggeration.

 
His parents were professional photographers and their Truro, NS, home had a darkroom and a studio. In fact, the basement studio was also the bedroom for Yorke and his six brothers, whose bunk beds lined the wall. The darkroom was next to the bedroom.
 
At the age of nine or ten, Yorke recalls “talking to a friend and finding out that he didn’t have a darkroom in his house and I thought it was very strange that somebody would have a house and no darkroom.”
 
Eventually his parents established what is today Carsand-Mosher Photographic, described as “the largest independent photographic retailer in Eastern Canada.” It remains a family enterprise, with his mother and Yorke’s seven siblings as partners in the business.
 
Yorke stepped out on his own in 1995 when he and Kevin Cunningham opened Image House which specializes in high quality, large format digital inkjet printing on different media, including fabric. “I was very intrigued by the digital printing side and I guess in a big family somebody always wants to do something different, so I felt it was a great opportunity,” he says. 
 
But he has not left photography behind. “Both myself and my business partner Hugo Ford come from the photography business, so we approach large format printing from a different direction than everyone else,” Yorke says. “Most every business is coming from the angle of either sign shops or blueprint manufacturers for architectural firms, whereas we approach it from the photography side. That’s why I say the photographic image is our specialty.”

Image House, which has annual revenues of between $500,000 and $1 million and a team of four employees, focuses on two key services: fine art reproduction and the printing of graphics for trade show displays. The company also provides hardware and assembles displays in-house.
 
Image House holds all of its work to exacting standards. Yorke says “good is not good enough,” and in this pursuit of perfection, innovation, resourcefulness and creativity come to the forefront.
 
Take for example Image House’s adaptation of a colour printer to print six different intensities of black and white using “pure carbon pigments, literally like charcoal ground very, very fine.” The advantages of using pure carbon include its high resistance to fading – Yorke says after 200 years the percentage of fading on an image in a household environment might be just five per cent.
 
“Artists can come in here and they can get this process done,” he says. “If they walked into a gallery in New York, most galleries would not even know what this carbon printing system is and the ones who did would say, ‘Wow, you’re doing this in Nova Scotia?’
It really is quite an extraordinary thing.”
 
Image House doesn’t settle for the status quo. There is an inconsistency in ink density that results when pigments, which float in water or solvent, “settle out.” Yorke says the problem is well known in the industry and one of the responses is to take the ink out of the printer every six months, shake it about and put it back.
 
But that’s not good enough. “We’re actually getting a machinist to make us a table that we can put all of our ink supplies on and the table will rock and turn as much as 24/7 if we think it needs it,” Yorke says. With this constant agitation, “we know that ink will always be consistent throughout its full life.”
 
Yorke continually researches new materials and approaches. “Weekend for me is going on the Internet and looking at what’s happening in the last month – what kind of new printers, what new inks, what new procedures, processes….” Yet he doesn’t believe in blindly abandoning the tried and true just because there’s a new offering.
 
Yorke’s reasoned approach is appreciated by Steven Slipp, co-principal of Halifax’s Semaphor Design Company, in which senior communications design consultants offer a wide range of creative services. Slipp has known Yorke for some 20 years, going back to Carsand-Mosher days.
 
“He was the go-to guy when there was a particular technical issue because he seemed to be doing a lot of current research on products and materials and so on,” Slipp recalls. “The same is true when he moved and opened Image House. He seemed to be the person in the forefront of the technology, always pushing to understand not just what the latest was but what the options were, and what the best solutions might be. That’s one of the things that I love about working with them. I feel like I’m getting the best possible solution in this market.”
 
Halifax fine art photographer Margot Metcalfe also has high praise. She appreciates Yorke as a person and as “an amazing printmaker.”
 
“What you want when dealing with your work is a perfectionist,” says Metcalfe, who describes herself as a colour photographer in the contemplative tradition. “Plus, because he’s a perfectionist he has a very high-end system for doing the prints. So I get wonderful results from my work.”
 
Yorke, whose primary attention is on fine art reproduction – business partner Hugo Ford focuses on the trade show dimension – also has a great appreciation for the artists of Nova Scotia.
 
“We have a very diverse and very dynamic artist community who, if they were given opportunity to show their work in larger centres, I think would be a huge export,” he says.
 
As well, Yorke feels Nova Scotia has a great deal to offer visiting artists. “For an artist this is Eden,” he says. “You’ve got oceans, you’ve got mountains, you’ve got rural, and you’ve got city all in a small space. Artists in other places have to travel days to go from one geographic zone to another.”
 
And that’s something which someone who has spent his life immersed in a creative business, with high-quality images at its heart, can truly appreciate.
 
Feature story written by Marie Weeren