Kia ora tatou:

Doc has weighed in on this argument so, rather than leave his comment buried in other posts, and because I consider it significant, I have brought it to the surface, so it can bask in the sun.

Hi Tony, as much as I avidly avoid posting my thoughts on people’s blogs given that I usually say the wrong thing, I will comment now.

I use film because as you say I have grown up with it and have developed an understanding of it. However primarily I still use film because I want to be able to make both analogue and digital prints. Despite the advances in digital printing and photoshop technology, digital prints still cant look like, and I emphasize ‘look like’ an analogue print. This has nothing to do with one being better than the other, it is simply, believe it or not, that there are photographs that cant be successfully made digitally.
Also, among many others both collectors of photography and photographers, I like and value the uniqueness randomness and rareness of a hand printed photograph. All this however is simply the artists personal choice and aesthetic, and when creating art it doesn’t matter what you do, it is the resulting artwork that matters. The success or otherwise of which will be determined by things greater than whether it is a digital image, an analogue photograph, or a painting or whatever!

The big issue for me with digital photography, is unidentified manipulation!

Society has used photography since its inception as a means of recording our geographical and social history, the inherent ability of photography to record things accurately was why it superceded painting for this purpose. We know that when we look back at old photographs of say Deadwood town (great TV series) that everything wasn’t B&W and we know that the perspective of the cameras recorded things slightly different than we would have seen it could we have stood there. But, we do know that the buildings were as they appeared and that every cart and bucket and person and pole and fence and piece of shit on the ground was actually there!

My concern is, will people in another hundred years or so be able to look at a collection of pictures of our time now and know for sure what they are looking at ever actually existed! or be aware of how much of what they’re looking at is representative of actual places or events?

Art really needs to be separated from documentary in a discussion such as this, because even though the tools are the same, the ethics are radically different.

Doc, I  agree with you, particularly the last paragraph.

That is what I have been trying to say, only you said it better.