I have been thinking- the photography/art continuum Pt I: from film to digital
March 1st, 2010. Filed under: Thinking about Photography and Art.
Out There
I have begun following a new line of enquiry.
I have been thinking (already I can hear the intakes of breath, the hisses of concern, sense brows beginning to furrow, and hear the sounds of hooves disappearing over the horizon). But there is some thinking I need to share with you, a discussion I would like to open, one in which hopefully you will all participate. If it engenders discussion, debate and especially disagreement, then all well and good, because I believe that all of us need at some point in our photographic journey, to look at what we are doing and consider it in a wider context. In doing so we may well find the threads of a new path, one which is uniquely our own. I very much doubt that I will be able to get through all of this in a single post, and I expect these musings may require several essays on the subject.
So, without further ado, let me launch. Realise, however, that this is the beginning of a journey and my opinions may change at any time…it is a work in progress, but I sense a need to share.
For the last couple of months my personal circumstances have precluded me from both thinking about photography and from thinking about my own photographic direction. However, as things have begun to settle into place, the Bridge brain has started fermenting (or should that be fomenting?). Having only made one piece of work since Christmas which I feel happy about, I feel the need to get back in the saddle, to return to my picture making. But where to go? What do I want my work to be? It is a question of directions. To do this, I began thinking, and then began journaling. The pivot for this thinking is the image” spirituality” which I showed in a recent post. I was explaining the thinking behind this image to a class I have just finished teaching, and how that led to the process I employed to make the work. The student in question happily pushed my buttons and woke me up. It forced me to make a response which I had not thought about before, to begin to reflect upon my own practice (again), and the direction it appeared to be taking. Whenever I do this I often take an image which instinctively I know is a mile-marker, one which I considered significant. Inwardly I drive a drawing pin through it, wind a piece of intellectual string around it, then rather like Theseus, I follow it into the maze in search of a philosophical Minotaur. I trace the thread back into the past, exploring my own photographic archaeology. I suppose I have reached a point where I am happy to do this unguided, to have faith in my own ability to read the compass of my particular artistic journey. Occasionally, as I sense myself reaching a crossroads, I wander off and test my ideas on any of my contemporaries willing to listen, and use that commentary to further trace my own path. Then, when I think I have reached a point which appears to me to be a reasonable beginning point in that particular journey, I will drive in another artistic/aesthetic drawing pin, tie the thread firmly off, then retrace my steps, noting key points along the way until I return to the beginning. This re-vision and re-flection will allow me to re-member artistically, to create a potential path forward.
As I said, I have been thinking.
media overlap
And the thinking has arisen from or led to a number of questions (all things are circular).
- Why does photography as a medium appear to be in a kind of stasis? Why are so many photographs that I see so similar? Why is it that photography seems to be circulating in a kind of whirlpool, looking for a way out and the way forward? Is it being constrained by the need to acknowledge its own traditions and archaeology? Is that necessary? Is it even desirable?
- Where are the outer limits of the medium’s tradition? Is photography past its use-by date?
- Is photography art? In what ways and to what extent does it fit within Art as a whole? Is the question worth asking?
- At what point do the various visual media overlap? Where are the outer edges of photography, the diaphanous interface between that and the other media? Does the way forward involve an active consideration of them and incorporation of their particular aesthetic into what we do?
- To what extent does the camera influence our practice? Does it constrain us to a particular form of practice? Does it hinder further exploration or encourage it? Is the camera an object in its own right or merely a device to help us with our photography? Does the mechanical structure of the camera with its own intrinsic design aesthetic affect our practice? Does it force us to remain within a particular tradition?
- Are we overly influenced by the community in which we find ourselves? Does a group mentality emerge, a collective aesthetic which influences our own creativity, which imposes a series of mores upon it? And, if we choose to chart our own path, do we excommunicate ourselves from those groups?
All these are questions which weigh heavily on both my own photographic practice and upon my wish to share what I have learned with those willing to learn. If I am to be of service to the people who come to me, then it stands to reason that I need to have myself in place, to have thought these things through for myself so I can better share them.
In this essay, I wish to share some thoughts about digital and film photography, not in any particular order, because it seems to me that, while both are subsets of the same medium, each moves in a unique yet parallel path to the other. To see the digital process as a child of the film process is to make a fundamental and profound mistake. It (digital) did not follow on smoothly from the end of film. In the beginning it developed in parallel, then as time went by, usurped the dominant position held by the use of film. Similarly film photography developed in parallel to drawing/draughtsmanship and took over from it. However, unlike handing over of the baton from drawing to film, which was a complete rout, digital’s process was more circuitous. Film developed as a technological response to the inadequacies of the recording process employed by the European explorers as they travelled the world. It was a technology whose time had come, which promised a much better result than what had gone before. It promised to be quicker, easier and more accurate than spending hours in front of the drawing board, attempting to painstakingly documented what had been seen. And so, in the expert hands of photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Francis Frith and Carleton Watkins, it quickly supplanted drawing as a method of choice for documentation.
The digital process, on the other hand, it seems to me, developed in parallel, alongside photography. There is no question that in the minds of the early digital aficionados, it was superior to film, and in their minds would ultimately replace the use of film as a method of documentation, expression and interpretation. However, in its early days, it was clearly inferior to film as a process. It was also prohibitively expensive. The earliest digital cameras, boasting a massive one megapixel, cost in the vicinity of $NZ 45,000 and they could no way compete with the theoretical 20 megapixel resolution of a piece of 35mm film. That took time. Had there been no other external forces acting upon the push towards digital cameras, potentially digital might have died. There was little other reason for its existence, beyond the needs of camera manufacturers to create a new market to end-uses. Of course, without access to the minutes of board meetings and briefing papers at companies such as Kodak, I can only surmise their reasons for moving into digital photography as a technology. However, it seems to me there was another force at work, one which from its very beginning would ultimately sound the death knell to film photography. Adobe PhotoShop and Aldus PhotoStyler.
The printing industry went to digital. The days of the repro camera were numbered. The days of literally cutting and pasting layouts for magazines and printed media were altered forever by the development of the computer. Design and pre-print professionals were converting to the use of the computer as a method for laying out print. Adobe PageMaker now made it possible to do everything on-screen, rather than manually. In the beginning professional photographers shot everything on film, which was then scanned and converted to electronic form. Because the process of scanning physical media was labour-intensive and laborious, it made sense to create a capture device which was purely digital, which removed the middle step of scanning. Thus digital photography as a technology came about in response to the need to save time. In this sense its incarnation and evolution was similar to the way in which film supplanted the pencil. However, it rose to prominence, not as new way of doing things, but as a technology of convenience. It was only when the engineers at Adobe began to realise the power of PhotoShop, the functions which could be built into it, that a new paradigm was born. Thus the possibilities of digital photography, the new methodologies and processes born, occurred not through a radically-new capture technology, but in the intricacies and possibilities of post-production, through the new paradigms offered by PhotoShop.
Process continuum 1
What is even more interesting here is the way in which camera design has evolved. The earliest digital cameras took one of two forms; the DSLR (digital SLR, whose nomenclature clearly evoked its film roots), and the point-and-shoot digital camera, the money-maker which is always driven the economic engine of photography. The latter was, in the beginning, a digital capture device (read: sensor) shoehorned into a film compact, quite obviously replacing film, but clearly and smoothly continuing the same design philosophy. The DSLR took the same route. With the exception of the ubiquitous LCD on the back face of the camera, and a relatively simple rearrangement of the camera controls, to all intents and purposes it was a film camera which needed no film. The design philosophy, the design evolution of the SLR (film) continued into the digital age. There was no attempt (I believe) to sit back and radically rethink the nature of camera design. The earliest digital SLR’s were quite obviously Son of Film SLR. I can only surmise that it made economic sense to the new digital giants like Fujifilm and Kodak, who were porting their technology to Nikon and Canon film bodies, to continue the tradition of film photography, changing the garments, but keeping the same body. It would, I think, be fair to say that the discontinuation in equipment evolution had a profound effect upon photography’s practitioners, a subtle encouragement to continue with the photographic aesthetic which had been growing roots are over 150 years.
In the beginning digital photography, with the exception of a few radical and innovative artists, was generally seen in the light of business-as-usual. The technology changed, but the aesthetic had not. Photoshop supplanted the darkroom, removed the need to spend long hours in toxic conditions making prints. The inkjet printer gradually took away the need to spend hours under an enlarger. The King is dead. Long live the king.
The tradition has continued to this day and is, I believe, responsible for the malaise and ennui which is currently affecting photography, and leading to a sense of state of sameness in most of what is currently being produced. Photoshop and all the pretenders which surround it are, it seems to me, the gap between the rocks on the edge of the whirlpool, the way forward, and the way to follow the river to new destinations. For it is in the potential of postproduction, in the freedom offered us to manipulate a single pixel in ways never before possible, that we can begin to see digital photography as a new and unique medium, one with the possibility of evolving its own aesthetic, one which can speak with its own voice. I would go further and say that it is only just beginning to do this, only just leaving home and finding its own way in the world.
In the next essay I want to talk more about the camera, about the way in which both hinders us and the way in which it has the enormous potential to offer us a completely new way of picture-making.
March 1st, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I’m going to differ here, and suggest that from a creative point of view the enabling tool for the digital photo revolution was the scanner/computer/inkjet printer combination. That gave us the ability to do our post-processing of b&w prints without all those evil bleaches and toners, and also get as much control over colour prints as we had over b&w. For me, the greatest benefit of the digital workflow was not having to insult an image by printing it through the RA4 process. That was the revelation in about 1998 – printing on coated art papers.
Purely from the creative/aesthetic viewpoint, I think the digital camera has been much less important, despite its much greater convenience. It’s hard to see how any difference in camera design is going to affect how we use it – it’s only a tool for capturing what we see, and until we can pop a micro-SD card in each eyball to shoot 3D directly, how else can we do the job?
On photographic malaise and sameness – well now, you often recommend packages of effects plugins – what are these but prepackaged sameness for all the people who never change the defaults. Whenever I try these things out, I wonder wny anybody would bother with them. They may have uses for some high-volume commercial work, an area where I’m thankfully ignorant.
The Internet and its grooming circles like flickr and deviantart are also good places for developing me-too trends, more intensely than the camera club model.
High-end gallery fine art is also in a samey state, but it’s not digital – the 10×8 snapshot aesthetic rules there.
Maybe what the digital revolution has brought us is more people making and showing photographs without a corresponding increase in the proportion of people with the vision to benefit from the improved craft. The good stuff being buried by the not-so-good. Where are you not seeing creative new work that you think you should be seeing it? Are you looking in the right places?
Colin
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:28 am
Colin:
)
Many thanks for your comments. I am very grateful for the quality and length of your response. it is obvious that, like me, you have come through from film ( not many people these days remember RA-4
Curiously, i am not sure we differ at all, or very much.
You raise an interesting point and you are correct. Before the digital camera there was the scanner/computer combination, although the inkjet came later, about the same time as the digicam, when HP developed the technology, the giclee process/ concept went mainstream and Epson made it available to the masses (us). see FLAAR.
The”10×8 snapshot aesthetic ” is not the only work being done in fine art. There are practitioners (few) out there, working in different spaces. One should not confuse the large format American, Son-of-Ansel-with-a-P45 ethic with Fine Art. That is pure representation in fancy dress.
As for the way in which plugins force us in the same directions, I agree.. that is a result of the way in which they are engineered (note: i do not use the word ‘designed”). and it is easy to remain with the defaults and use them to fabricate narrative which tell a confusing story. Witness the recent crop of”exemplars” propounded as the state of the art in the current NZIPP Print Judging Touring Exhibition. Or rather, don’t. With the exception of Paul Gummer, whose work is driven by his personal belief, most exhibit the ” coool tool” aesthetic, if you could call it an aesthetic.
So you see, we are in accord!
March 2nd, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Tony, did you hear about the guy who analyzed his relationships so much they always ended as a result.
The question of whether photography is art is dead and buried and should stay that way! If there is any doubt just look in any public art gallery in the world, including the CPAG which is full of the stuff right now!
The reason so many photographs look the same now, is because technology simply doesn’t allow people to make mistakes, the great accidental photographic masterpiece is virtually a thing of the past, as is sadly the Continuum of works that would normally follow them.
Digital technologies allow us all to do more and more than we ever could in the past photographically, and as a result we can now, just as with painting, paint a picture until it is dead and gone and never actually recognize the point it was at its best. The remote control on the TV was a great bit of technology, but we got fat and lazy as a result because we never left the Sofa! the same danger exists with advancing technologies in photography.
Photography is simple, it always has been, and despite every plug in that will ever be made to confuse you, it will always be simple. just like the Camera, as Colin says, doesn’t decide what we photograph, nor should technology be allowed to confuse us.
With every person born the world will eventually be blessed (or not) with another few (or more) thousand images internetted twittered or whatever else’d upon us. the virtual world is digital photography’s own prime social aesthetic!
The choice one has now is to twitter in the virtual world, or speak in the two dimensional world, if one chooses the latter he will be judged alongside all mediums, as your diagram shows, using their combined aesthetics, that may be tougher but the pond is smaller more inviting and much more rewarding.
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:49 pm
She’s a changing world Sonny.
So who’s going to predict where we’re all heading with this image making business. I’ve been going to seminars and training courses for years and been told constantly by one geezer that the print is dead, Young people are happy to have an image on their iPod. Cool, I’ll be able to do a photo shoot with my cellphone.
Seriously, we have to reinvent ourselves. Maybe get back to basics and somehow bring some mystery and magic back to photo images. The magic isn’t in the post process, it’s in the creation. There is so much visual diarrhoea presented to us daily now that we are dumbed down to nice imagery, we don’t even know what is real any more. HDR and blah, blah, blah seem to be normal photography now. Tony’s statement on the NZIPP exhibition sums it up. I don’t even want to be there. Can’t anyone make images anymore that make you think “well that’s clever, wonder how that was lit” instead of ” Is that a Kubota or a Nik plug in”.
Nice writing Tony, interested to see where you’re heading with this.
Andrew
March 4th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Interesting topic you’re discussingTony. Hasn’t evolving technology always resulted in the ability of talented people to create new ways of seeing the world? And fashion, always changing, dictates what is popular at any given time. Comes back to why we bother to pick up a paintbrush, charcoal stick or camera in the first place (aside from record taking).
As an aside, look at http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_alogorithm for a possible technical innovation that could lead to a new and simple gizmo to interpret the world with.
Look forward to the next part of your current journey….
Henry
March 5th, 2010 at 5:55 am
Hi Henzel:
I couldn’t ‘t agree more and that is what I am leading up to. It is precisely that. This is a new technology wearing the clothes and thoughts of the old. The child is desperately trying to mimic its parent. Sooner or later it will become a teenager, turn rebellious, suggest to its parents that they depart and reproduce elsewhere, then make its own journey in the world.
More about this to follow…
March 5th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Tony, the thing that interests me the most in discussions like this is, is the DSLR, the computer, the printer and the software’s physical influence on photography the greatest? or is it the philosophical influences of all the above that has the greatest effect on photography now?
Considering that so much of what is now the history of photography (and therefore has influenced many new ideas in the medium) has come about as a result of a mistake, either technical time or chemical, is there a chance that photography will homogenize without analogues vagueness and randomness?
Consider Man Ray (or more precisely Lee Miller) and solarization, an accepted accident that had a huge influence on photography, and still does to this day, is there potential in the digital age for such discoveries? Working with film I still make discoveries this way that influence my work, however I would never have the time or inclination to search in the infinate world of photoshop for these interventions.
I think digital photography has, to use your terminology, left home already and is happily on it’s journey. Digitography’s greatest feats and developments wont in my mind be realized until the now young digitographers who have known nothing else grow up (artistically speaking) with minds free of the influences of analogue ways, and take the new medium to places we can barely imagine now. Analogue photography will never die but will perhaps be further separated from digitography and then referred to much the way analogue photographers refer to painting and other mediums.
You ask “Are we overly influenced by the community in which we find ourselves? Does a group mentality emerge, a collective aesthetic which influences our own creativity, which imposes a series of mores upon it” I think there is clearly a collective aesthetic that has influense for both analogue and digital practitioners, just analogue has a long history to fall back on, the digital collective is still small which would account for the sameness you refer to, as it as yet has very few pure models to work from.
“And, if we choose to chart our own path, do we excommunicate ourselves from those groups” only if we choose to!
At this point one can happily stand with one foot in each camp, but over time the gap will possibly become too great to do so.
March 5th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
I feel that the shear amount of photography that is going on in the word today , or more to the point the amount of photographs that are available for viewing via the internet is what is causing this delema about photography / art / inderviduality. We are all inderviduals and have our own way of seeing things and for those who have a clear pathway from the view to the camera to the print, then the process is irrelevent. As has been pointed out that everyone who picks up a modern camera is almost instantly technically proficent and are posting images on the web and entering competitions in greater and greater numbers. So this middle field of photography is getting very muddy with a great deal of ordinary to good images being shown so that for anything to be viewed as great has to be quite exceptional or very out of the ordinary. This can be either by the digital technologicaly engineered way or by the silver gelitan way,
The final image doesn not have a history to the viewer in the gallery, it only has a presence.
March 6th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Graham, you are right when you point out the expanding middle field of photography that has been bought about by more intelligent cameras and software and the issues that this creates.
However I would have to disagree with you that the final image does not have a history to the viewer when it’s on the gallery wall. In fact I would go as far as to say that part of the issue with the sameness in much photography that has been pointed out here is partly, or perhaps even greatly, due to those photographers lack of knowledge of the history of photography. The history a photograph takes to the gallery wall is the history carried by the photographer, and nothing better arms a photographer to achieve exceptional or out of the ordinary photographs than an understanding of the great photographs and the philosophies of their makers over the history of the medium.
You are also right when you say “This can be either by the digital technologically engineered way or by the silver gelatin way” and don’t forget the hybrid of both!
But It is the philosophical not the technical that creates great images, and as the numbers of images grow and ways to view them increase this becomes exponentially greater.
March 6th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Guys:
Many thanks for your comments and the discussion. I think it is invaluable.
I am now planning the next essay, which pretty much moves into the space you are discussing.
I still maintain, however, that the device ( read: camera) has a huge effect on our preconceptions of what the medium should be…and therein lies the crux of the problem….
March 6th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Wow! What an interesting lot of questions? This could take a whole year. I am not a professional photographer nor an expert photographer but I am an enthusiastic photographer. I am primarily an educator, my teaching subjects were English and Drama and now I work with teachers to improve their practice. So I come from a different perspective.
21st century learners dominates my landscape and elearning is my professional development goal into which I integrate my interest in photography. Everybody is constantly in the midst of turmoil and change at the moment – we used to write letters we now text etc. The world is full of choices – there are many paths.
A couple of years ago I studied photography part-time at MIT – this was a vocational course aimed at students wanting to become commercial photographers. I also did some papers for the visual arts diploma which leaned more towards a fine arts focus which is completely different from commercial. They both have their place.
Go to Paris and you can spend a whole week looking at photography exhibitions. It is not a dying art. The sameness you talk about is that the masses now have access to photography in the same way the priests in bygone eras were the only ones who knew how to write. So you make a choice as to which path to follow.
I currently participate in “The Daily Shoot” which I operate along with a blog on Flickr. This is improving my craft and practice enormously and this is what I need. What I would like to do is Fine Art photography but I need to understand the basics first. Fortunately hte course I did had 2 papers, one in black & white & darkroom, the other in digital technologies. So I know a bit of both.
The world we live and work in at the moment is full of digital images (getting back to the 21st century). It is important that teachers use digital technologies in the classroom to engage students and use their prior knowledge. But some of them will choose to delve deeper and go the visual arts or commercial/graphic arts direction. Artists work within the context of the culture they live in but at the same time stand back from it in order to communicate their own interpretations of the world. The commercial artist looks for the niche market. I am sure there is always going to be a niche market for handprinted black and white images (I hope so I have a darkroom). So the choice always is to remain cogniscent of directions and changes but at the same time find one’s own means of individual expression in the world (unless one is happy just to live each day etc)
March 6th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
hi Cheryl:
Many thanks for your comments. In a former life I was involved in e=Learning research as well…
In no way would I consider it a dying art. However, i still believe that it is an art in transition, much as we all are at the moment, whatever we might think/believe. I think this is reflected in the back to the future approach of the medium, with digital trying for the greater part to be son of film.
More about that in upcoming essays….
March 7th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Like Graham I suspect that a large part of the perceived problem is the sheer volume of images flooding our minds daily. Be it TV, magazines, email, internet, emails, etc. and with modern cameras it is nowhere near so hard to get an acceptable image on the “Auto” setting.
However, be that as it may, we all have access to similar tools (albeit somewhat limited by the amount we want to spend on clever cameras, software etc. ) yet some people still manage to create astounding works with surprisingly simple equipment. After all, centuries ago everyone with a bit of money had access to the same paints, paper, canvas etc. as Da Vinci, Van Gogh, yet only the gifted ones produced lasting works of art. Doc is also right though that a knowledge of the history of art/photography is important to enable one to work creatively with those basic tools.
To quote Ian Drury & the Blockheads…. “There ain’t half been some clever bastards”
Lucky bleeders ! Lucky bleeders !
March 8th, 2010 at 8:44 am
couldn’t agree more….
March 9th, 2010 at 10:20 am
This response is from a “used to be a photographer” who remains interested but no longer practices.
To paraphrase Joe McNally..
“The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.”
To dredge up frommy own photogarphic upbringing, the walls we see as obstacles to success or moving forward are really artifices that exist in our own minds.
Step aside from the maelstrom and observe what is going on and for goodness sake stop being dependant on the default settings and think like the guy up the mountain with the 10 x 8 camera and a few plateholders. Think the picture through, twiddle some of these dials and settings and who knows what may result.
March 10th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Hi OSG:
How wonderful to have you here.
I fully agree that it comes down to getting past the “artifices that exist in our own minds.”
signed
Colin of Collingwood