Beating the drum again-on Photography and Art

There are days when the technique of an aimless stroll-without timetable or destination-works like a charm, flushing out pictures from the non-stop urban spectacle.

-Robert Doisneau

Last night, at dinner, the conversation turned to a discussion on photography, and photography as art, more significantly the uneasy relationship that seems to have developed between traditional photography on the one hand and the increasing use of digital techniques to move an image to a new place. While I may appear to be beating an old drum again, nevertheless I think it’s important for each of us who uses a camera to give some thought to it, and decide where we stand.

It seems to me that photography is at a crossroads. On the one hand it approaches the future with its eyes firmly fixed on the past. On the other it is attempting to cut the cords which bind it to the tradition of the medium, a tradition nearly 200 years old. Perhaps the child is ready to leave home and make its own way in the world. So where is the devil in the machine?

I would venture to suggest that it lies in the technology, and the perception that the medium is the technology. To my mind this is where the confusion and the disconnect occurs. To explain:

Photography stands apart from the other art media by virtue of the fact that it is a developed technology. Unlike painting, or sculpture or even printmaking, photography is based upon science and scientific principles (physics/optics, chemistry/materials and mathematics/the digital process). Photography came into being as a way to short-circuit the glorious nature of pen and ink draughtsmanship. It came into being as a way to document the world. Its potential as an expressive medium would not be realised for nearly half a century. Even then, while the intent may have shifted, the fundamental technological basis of the medium has always held sway. Cameras and film developed (pun intended) based on a scientific principles. The F-stop, the bête noire of many a beginning photographer and its sidekick, depth-of-field, are based on the laws of optics. F2 .8 expresses a scientific/optical relationship between focal length and the diameter of the front element of the lens. It is not an arcane, mystical invention designed to confound new photographers. It is the expression of a scientific and mathematical relationship. Nothing more.

In the nearly 200 years of its development, the technology has more or less followed the same path. Wet plates gave way to acetate-based emulsions, to emulsions based later on polyester, and then the quantum leap to a recording medium based on silicon. There is nothing mystical or magical about any of this. The camera has also followed a parallel case of development. The formula used to calculate the design of a lens, while it may appear to be cutting edge and state-of-the-art, is more often based on a design developed in the late 19th century and refined since then. A science-based technology that has continued to evolve. The camera of today, with its digital sensor and clever electronics is really the great great-grandson of the early plate cameras used by the likes of Roger Fenton. As the camera has developed, so it continues to reference its earliest beginnings, to build upon this rather than taking any sort of quantum/intuitive leap in a different direction. A top-of-the-line Nikon has 19th century DNA. It still does the same job it’s great-great-grandfather did, and in its design, encourages us to remember that tradition.

So whenever we go out on the street with our D3X, intent on observing life, on taking a microscopic slice of time and freezing it, we are participating in a ritual nearly 200 years old. We are using the same technology as ,say ,Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Doisneau. We prowl the streets, looking for those juxtapositions of Space and Time which will give us some sort of insight into life, the universe, and everything. We seek to capture the eternal in the temporal. And perhaps be able to make a broader statement than: I stood there, I photographed that. We are practising photography, moving in a dance as old as the medium itself. We are employing the strengths of a technology which has evolved over 200 years, and which can carry out this sort of task like no other. We are photographers. If this is what we like doing, then let us celebrate it, let us call it what we do photography, and ourselves photographers. Let us delve into the traditions of the medium, let us study the road which has gone before, and use it to inform our own photographic practice.

However, a certain dis-ease has crept in. And the culprit is PhotoShop. I wonder if the engineers who developed the program back in the early ’90s could have imagined the impact this piece of software would have upon both the technology and the medium itself. I wonder if they could have foreseen the enormous impact their software would have upon a 200-year-old technological tradition and the aesthetics with which it has clothed itself.

The effect has been profound.

The documentary nature of the medium has been challenged, shaken to its core. Anything is now officially possible, and the roots of this 200-year-old tradition are being attacked by the termites of doubt and self disbelief. If a photograph looks even slightly out of the ordinary, people will ask if it has been Photoshopped. The doubt has now grown so strong that even patently-documentary material used in the media is now questioned as to its veracity.

But is this such a bad thing? I would venture to suggest not.

It seems to me that the Demon Photoshop is blowing away the cobwebs of the medium, forcing us all to think about the truths and fiction contained within the medium. Perhaps it is getting us to question what we see, rather than blindly accepting it. Perhaps in its own way, the digital process with all its possibilities is making us take a fresh look at every aspect of the medium and form our own opinions.

And yes, I have one of my own.

It is time for a divorce. It is time the grand old lady went back to using her maiden name.

Let us call photography just that. Let us celebrate the rich tradition of photography as a technology and as a medium. Photography’s strength lies in the document and representation. Great photographers have an ability to interpret, to draw inferences from what they photograph. Look at the work of Magnum photographers, and you see the world’s photographic elite firmly aware of the horse they are riding and comfortable with it. Of course, from time to time, they may try a different ride, but inevitably they come back to the aesthetics of photography. And what is wrong with that?

But where our aim is pure expression, then let us celebrate that. If we see the act of capture as fundamentally the recording of data for later manipulation, then let us embrace that, then use all the tools at our disposal to create our vision and express what we see. Let us use plug-ins and techniques, layers and masking to express what we are trying to communicate. And let us celebrate that, rather than feeling uneasy or feeling in some way we are cheating upon our partner of 200 years.

More importantly, let us stop using the term digital photography, because it seems to me there is a redundancy here. We are either photographers, or we are not. There seems no point, there seems little need to say: I am a film photographer or: I am a digital photographer. Surely if we are photographers and happy to call ourselves such, the medium is irrelevant, because we are naming ourselves and our approach. By calling ourselves photographers, we are acknowledging that we are part of a 200-year-old tradition and happy to work within that aesthetic. Whether we photograph life on a Paris street, or make beautiful pictures of birds, whether we try to capture those fleeting moments at a wedding or the nuances of expression in a portrait, we are photographers. Not to digital, not film, just photographers.

And if what we are doing occurs largely in postproduction, then let us call ourselves something else, digital artists perhaps. There is yet another cinema of unease around the word artist, particularly where photographers are concerned. It seems to me that when this occurs, it is because the person in question is attempting to place one foot in the canoe marked photographer and the other in the canoe marked artist, and attempt to find a point of balance, while all the time the two canoes are drifting further and further apart.

This is not to say that we can’t hop from one to the other, that we can’t be a photographer today and a digital artist tomorrow. Professional life these days with the camera often demands an ability to do this. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But let us at least be clear which hat we are wearing.

And so to the picture at the head of the story.

Marthinus and I spent a happy Saturday travelling around the Western Cape in his small VW Golf. Near a town called it Velddrif, we stopped by a ploughed field, which contained one of those centre-pivot  irrigators so prevalent in New Zealand (they are relatively uncommon here). The strong South-West wind was picking up the light soil and blowing it away. As Marthinus put it, the farmers here say that the soil passes from one farm to the next, to the next, and to the next. Quite generous, really.

Marthinus and I made our own interpretations of the scene , and his picture holds much truer to the tradition than my own. I saw the lines ploughed on the ground and the power lines in the distance, obscured by the cloud of blowing soil. I made the image, knowing that it was merely about capturing the necessary data for later post-production. A feeling was forming about how the scene in some way represented my own journey, and a certain confusion about future direction. I captured the data, knowing that post-production would enable me to extract the meaning from it at a later time.

Working in post, and applying a series of techniques (around 10 separate layer adjustments), I was able to find the kernel of realisation the image contained. It reflected back upon me the real reason I had come to Africa. 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Was it photography? Of course not. While the device I used to capture the data bore a striking resemblance to the device I might have used to document it for a seed company, the intent was completely different.

I had made a decision, I had made a choice.

I had put both feet on the one canoe.

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Published on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009, under Thinking about Photography and Art