UPDATED 14 April

For the trickster is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town (the one where a little market springs up). He is the spirit of the road at dusk, the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither. There are strangers on that road, and thieves, and in the underbrush a slight beast whose stomach has not heard about your letters of safe passage.

-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World.

These days it never ceases to amaze me how a chance conversation can start a whole line of new thought. I’d like to share one such conversation and the thoughts that have begun to emerge from it.

I have a friend, a little older than me (well, a lot older than me). I have enormous respect for him, both as a person and as a photographer. We get together from time to time, and share work with each other. I know he’s never going to read this article, because he doesn’t have the Internet, he doesn’t have an e-mail address, and he doesn’t own a computer. Frankly I can’t see him ever going there. Good on him. He uses film, and yesterday when we caught up, he told me with great joy how he had swapped his Nikon F5 for a Nikon F6. He was beside himself with delight, and waxed at quite some length about the wonders of the viewfinder in his new camera. To the best of my knowledge that makes only two people I know who use one.

When I flip open my laptop and show him what I’m currently going, he shakes his head in wonderment. He finds the capacity of the digital photographer to move an image in whatever direction seems appropriate a thing of wonder. He then turns to defending film. Really, he doesn’t need to, because it seems to me that what he is doing is entirely appropriate for him. Film has its own ethos, it’s own aesthetic and to pass some sort of judgement upon it (which usually includes the words obsolete or irrelevant) seems to me to do it a disservice. I drive a diesel vehicle, while most of my friends drive petrol cars. To say one is better than the other seems to me a pointless exercise. Both vehicles achieve the same purpose, namely to get the driver from point A to point B. To value one over the other really says more about the Speaker than it does about the topic being discussed.

I sense however, that the gap between the two is widening, that the two aesthetics are moving in somewhat different directions, and that’s what I’d like to discuss here. To do, so we need to go back to the roots of the medium, to somewhere in the early 19th century. Photography came into being as a way to more accurately represent the world at the time. It was a technology responding to a perceived need. Over time it moved away from this, as artists like Steichen and Stieglitz explored its limits and move the boundaries outwards. However, while various artists (Man Ray, Michals and Rodchenko) continued to extend the concept of what was possible with a silver halide medium, others kept drawing photography back to its roots, to a more representational modality. Dorothy Lange, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston are cases in point. Over time the medium settled down, and a continuum was established, between representation on the one end and innovation on the other.

Then somebody went and invented the silicon chip, and everything changed.

Nowadays most photographs are made digitally, using a sensor rather than a piece of film coated in silver compounds. The question that seems to arise is: is digital photography the same as film photography, or is this an entirely new medium that is only now beginning to find its own aesthetic?

And do the words digital and photograph really belong together? Would digital and art be a better fit?

I imagine some of you are waiting for me to supply an answer. Well, I don’t have one, and anyway you need to do your own thinking on this one, because the answer you come up with will determine the future path of your own photographic practice. There are no rights and wrongs here, no easily-accessed absolutes to which a lazy intellect can cling. You going to have to build your own lifeboat, and be prepared to row it yourself.

I have been accused of being a trickster, so, in true coyote tradition, I’m going to put some thoughts out there and offer you the opportunity to make a response. I am going to take a stand. Keep up and find out what are my conclusions(in a couple of thousand words or so).

When photography first came into being back in the 19th century it had of course no tradition, no aesthetic. So what were photographers to do when faced with a new visual art tool and no back-story to refer to? Of course they did the obvious; they turned to they turned to the only visual art medium they knew with some sort of history-painting. The early portrait photographers (who were making a killing at the time) borrowed heavily from the traditions of portrait painting, including posing, lighting and the manipulation of picture space. The early landscape photographers burrowed deep into the art-historical archive, often as far back as the Renaissance aesthetic, and used that to inform the way they structured their particular picture space. For a time photography was the poor child of painting, but then as it grew and gained in self-confidence, it began to realise it could speak with its own voice. It looked in the mirror of its own intention and realised what it was that no other medium had; an ability to look relatively dispassionately at a very fine slice of time. It came to be seen as the ultimate tool for documenting the ‘real’ world. And for a time that was the pedestal upon which it sat.

But of course it couldn’t help itself. It began to develop airs and graces. For a time it thought it was the modern high-tech form of Impressionism. At one stage it mimicked Expressionism, and even tried on Dadaist clothing. But inevitably it would return home and put on its comfortably-fitting, if a trifle dreary, representational suit. And so time passed.

Then, enter stage left the silicon chip, the digital camera, and the Prince of Darkness, Photoshop. Like silver halide before it, digital needed a role model, and the role model was representation, which had served silver halide photography well for 150 years. Because it was a camera (of sorts), it decided that must be its purpose in life, and the practitioners of both media lined up on opposite sides of the net and hurled abuse at each other, each claiming the moral victory. But time passed, and bit by bit, silver halide aficionados were seduced across to the digital dark side by the apparent promise of considerable economic savings.

And all the time the Prince of Darkness was whispering in the ears of the digital photographers, offering them opportunities they had only been able to dream about before. Why not try sky A on landscape B, he murmured. After doing this for a time they realised they had been duped. More saturation than Velvia 50? They tried that too. Dragan It? They loved that one. But all along, they were torn between their allegiance to the traditions of film photography and the excitement of the Brave New World. In the end confusion set in. They tried to separate out the two technologies, but that didn’t work very well, especially when most had changed camps. For all the experimentation, most of the practitioners clung grimly to the pictorial traditions of film photography, and most continue to do so.

Quo vadis, photography? And is photography the right word to be using in an age when we can make anything look like anything else? Is the radical amount of alteration we are able to make to an original capture really photography? How far do we need to go before we have vanished out of sight of photography’s roots and traditions? And does it really matter?

Actually it does, and it doesn’t. If we accept that we now have a range of picture making possibilities our forefathers could only fantasise about, why not embrace them and allow digital picture-making (you’ll notice I didn’t use the word photography) to find its own voice? I would venture to suggest that we should stop pretending that we are photographers, making photographs, get over it and embrace the possibilities that digital picture-making has to offer. If we stood on a windswept and darkening plain, and the clouds that were looming above us resembled the wings of a passing angel (see Appropinquat Raphael as the currently featured image), then why not allow ourselves the freedom to bring that inner vision into an external reality? If, when we show it to other people, they turn and ask us accusingly: did it really look like that (and it is clear from the time of the voice that they think otherwise), then why can we not quietly reply: well, it did to me, and honour our own imagination?

It is time to drag a much-treasured photographic myth kicking and screaming from the dark cave of its self-consciousness and hold it up to the light. Photography never has, and never will be the accurate depiction of reality. For as long as this thing called photography has existed, its practitioners have either covertly or overtly manipulated some allusion/illusion we conjoin to call reality, all the time maintaining the hypocrisy of realism and representation. What confuses us is the fact that the tool we use today resembles its film-based ancestor in both form and method of operation. Because the technology in its application is similar, we assume both are the same, an misconception which continues to confuse.

Digital picture-making offers us a new opportunity to move away from those traditions, to openly acknowledge that the silicon process has little in common with its silver halide ancestor, and to move on from that. Then perhaps digital picture-making will embrace its own aesthetic and take its place in the visual arts alongside its forebears.

A number of you who know me well will be wondering if this is what I really think. In answer can I suggest this: go back to the beginning of this article and reread Lewis Hyde’s quote. The answer is there (if you need to know it).

Had a comment from Doc which I want to share:

Hi Tony, just got a great book to read ” first doubt, optical illusion in modern photography” the images are from one incredible collection and one of the best collections of photographs I’ve seen.

Here goes :

The current digital era has ushered in a profound skepticism that pervades our visual experience.  With our willingness to be seduced by the illusory world of motion pictures and the hyperrealism of video games, the optically complicated still photograph may not seize our attention as it once did.  By now, we are well aware that the collection of pixels that constitute a digital image can readily be manipulated to greater or lesser degrees of sophistication with image editing tools built into cameras and computers, or offered as convenience within the marketplace of consumers goods and services.  We take for granted that photographs captured digitally are engineered to be effortlessly reproduced, altered, combined and distributed.  For many viewers, especially those born of the computer age, the ubiquity of these extraordinary capabilities has forced quaint assumptions of photographic integrity past a tipping pint.  Having tasted the fruit from the tree of knowledge, we must shed our naiveté.  As a society, we finally understand what photographers and picture editors have known all along: photographs can obfuscate and mislead as much as they reveal.  Our jaded eyes increasingly view photographs as yet another piece of information to be processed, a shift that is symptomatic of our present reality.  We now realize that the world, which we previously believed fathomable, is much more complicated than we once understood it to be.

Allen Chasanoff   (Doc note: he is the collector. ) appreciated this when he identified and embraced the double edged nature of photographic representation.  It is no wonder then that in the mid 1980’s, in parallel with his fascination with and assessment of the veracious and perceptual boundaries of traditional photography, Chasanof began to explore the postmodern possibilities of the digital image in his own artistic endeavors. A decade later having established the existence of a crisis in the representation in the photographic document, he stopped collecting photograph altogether.
In his written statement of position within this catalogue, Allan Chasanof reflects on a time in his life when confusion was a catalyst for inquiry rather than a premise for understanding the world.  The photographs assembled here form another kind of statement, one that compels us to stop for a moment and question, to distrust what our eyes would have us believe.
To first, doubt.

End quote

You really need to see the quality and breadth of the images in the book to fully appreciate the gravity of a decision to stop collecting photographs like as this!  The book is full of pictures by the likes of Freidlander and Misrach and Klein etc and also more importantly relatively unknown artists.  There is so much more to conversations on the issues in your last email.  Issues that that may be perhaps of little concern to amateur photographers, but issues nevertheless that will influence them at some point. The real issue is the losses not the gains bought on by technology.

Doc