On this page you’ll find various articles, some published, some unpublished, speculating on the nature of photography. My present-day comments in gray font.

Is Photography Art?

The Corcoran Rag, ca. mid 80s.

The best thing about the question is that it doesn’t have to be asked any more. Photographers don’t care much whether it is art or not and since much neo-figurative painting rests on conceptual bedrock of photography maybe the question should be: is art photography?

One of the photography’s most endearing (and baffling) qualities is that it defies categories and ignores intent. Try to make art with it and it turns arty. Try to make a simple document (say for insurance purposes) and it presents you with an image so profound you are dumfounded: the image affects you the way the best art does.

Photography transgresses the boundaries of art all the time and it does so irrationally, effortlessly, and without apparent premeditation. Advertising photography can be as powerful as any statement on a museum wall and so too, for that matter, can the naive snapshot, or the portrait pressed onto your driver’s license. Painting sometimes longs to be populist; photography is already of the people and despite being admitted into museum collections shows no signs of becoming less egalitarian.

In some ways, photography functions like memory and in many ways it is more powerful than memory, or it is like a thousand memories distilled into one. As soon as we photograph a memory, the memory becomes that image. When people change in time they become their photographs: I don’t exist at the age of six except on a scrap of paper. If that were the case, it would seem more to the point to ask: is photography life? Or is it simply a very persuasive analogue of life? At any rate, it’s art and more than art, like life, or experience itself.

On the same subject, more or less…a brief aside on eclecticism in photography in a fragment written for the now defunct Museum and Arts magazine 1988

Virtually every critical and theoretical issue with which postmodernist art may be said to engage . . . can be located within photography. Issues having to do with authorship, subjectivity, and uniqueness are built into the very nature of the photographic process itself…

Abigail Solomon-Godeau.

Fine-art photography, in these heady postmodern days, assumes many guises - it can be fiction, autobiography, sculpture, painting, or theatre. It can be appropriated, that is to say, stolen, extended into a narrative, constructed into a stage-set, disguised as social history. Almost any device is pressed into service to make modern images: laser beams, computers, satellite cameras, 19th century antiques, bank security cameras, plastic toys.

Old genres and modes are infused with new meaning in our pluralist era of the recycled: tack a “neo” in front of any mode and you have contemporary photography: neoformalism, neosurrealism, neopictorialism; the new landscape; the new document, the new vernacular. Context is everything; meaning is determined less by the intent of its authors and more by its location: it means one thing in a museum, another on a postcard, and still another in a magazine. High art can masquerade as fashion photography but the opposite is just as easily true: we live in a slippery time and the chameleon is the reigning symbol of our age.

 

Rambling through the Quote File

Washington Center of Photography newsletter, 1988

In the course of meandering through people’s minds - observers of every species, among them artists, philosophers, critics - I’ve amassed a number of quotations mostly on the subject of photography which before very long seems to encompass almost every other topic under the sun, and a few beneath the moon, too. But before I share these with you, I apologise in advance for the rampant name-dropping that such an exercise invariably entails.

It is ridiculously easy to discover the famous and infamous saying what you want to hear in a way it would never occur to you to say it. The value of an opinion lies not so much in support as it does in illumination; it’s like a diamond in which brilliance counts as much as weight. A good quote uncovers a concept previously wrapped in murk; it’s the one felicitous phrase that takes the place of a thousand prolix ones, and this is one of the places where quotes and images coincide.

In fact, employing quotations is a practice very akin to photography itself as both are basically processes of substituting one context for another. We lift an author’s thoughts from his text and place it in ours; with photography we take facts from that matrix we call reality and stencil them onto a piece of light sensitive paper which we insist is a paradigm of reality. A radical change of context indeed as a photograph mimics reality instead of duplicating it. A photograph might feel like what we saw but it doesn’t look like what we saw.

Jean-Luc Godard: “Art is not a reflection of reality. it is the reality of a reflection.”

Or Abigail Solomon-Godeau “…Photography far from reflecting an external reality is profoundly instrumental in constructing it.”

Leon Wittgenstein: “The exact meaning of words become known only in context of each new statement”

Or the Wittgenstein of the visual world, Frederick Sommer: “..You can never photograph a thing. What you’re essentially photographing is how it’s related to a great many other things.”

 

Frederick Sommer, Arizona, 1945

The relationship of one thing to another in a photograph often seems arbitrary, proscribed by an unknown force, not unlike that which earlier cultures might have called fate. Reason and logic and the emotions seem to play little part in the juxtaposition of facts in a photograph, unless their relationship is deliberately manipulated by the photographer, and even then what Vilem Flusser calls a “mysterious irrationality” often persists.

Says Joachim Weiner: “Reality seen through a photographic lens makes events and objects ‘undifferent’ and indeed ‘indifferent’…”

Photographs make us uneasy because they assert that appearance is enough to decipher or understand meaning, or deeper yet, appearance is meaning; as George Kubler observes, “What a thing means is not more important than what it is..”

Photographs seem to dismiss acquired experience or another way of putting it is that photographs reward only acquired experience about imagery, not life. Wright Morris: “The camera is the first obstruction between us and experience.”

Experiencing phenomena though only one sense, sight, is akin to being blind: without smelling, feeling, and hearing; experience becomes vicarious as movie violence; all sound and no adrenaline; excitement without fear.

Simply experiencing through sight results in a world, that as Vilem Flusser, expatriate philosopher of the visible and invisible, says, “becomes image-like: a context of scenes and situations,” which in turn gives rise to a “new kind of imagination: the capacity to transcode concepts from texts into images..” and he goes on to characterise our time: “Nothing can withstand the centrifugal attraction of images: [there is] no daily common action that does not wish to be photographed, filmed or videotaped. Everything desires to flow into this eternal memory and to become eternally reproducible there.”

Martin Heidegger once wrote: “There is something stony in a work of architecture, wooden in a carving, coloured in a painting, spoken in a linguistic work, sonorous in a musical composition.”

Would Heidigger have used Flusser’s phrase, the “mysteriously irrational” to characterise photography? Or would he consider the way photographs render time as light to be their salient aspect? Or the persistence of the present tense even when showing us events clearly in the past?

 

Alexander Gardner’s Lincoln and his generals wear the clothing of their time; not costumes and the time is clearly 1862. Nevertheless, the men are suspended in an envelope of present time no less tenacious than that which envelops us.

As Weston LeBarre says, “The real mystery isn’t religion but what religion purports to be about.”

We know what photography is, or the many things it is, but we’re still groping for the meaning of what it’s about and how it’s altered our perceptions of time, history, and society.

Roland Barthes: “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds.” Instead of memories, we substitute images: a gain and a loss like memory itself.

 

Maybe we collect quotes to drive thoughts into our minds. We walk around with the words of others like spikes in our heads.

 

That which is Seen is Simultaneously Imagined

Excerpts from a letter to Peter Anastas, 1966

I met Peter Anastas at Bowdoin College in 1955. Peter is a writer and over the years we’ve kept up a lifelong friendship. In the 70s we collaborated on two books in which Peter did the writing and I contributed the photography. They were Glooskap’s Children, an account of the Penobscot Indians of Maine and Gloucester, Peter’s home town on Boston’s North Shore.

…Evidently imagination must find a voice. In my own creative life, imagination has found many voices: fiction writing, photography, and when the visual or literary imagination wasn’t enough words and images together. For me, fictional imagination has seemed an imperfect and increasingly sterile instrument for understanding that mystery we call art. And in a parallel way, painting and most of the other visual arts has seemed increasingly barren. On the other hand, photography, however tainted it has become by postmodern strictures, still is analogous to that mystery which is the core of time…because the photographic image is about time whatever the ostensible subject, and the ostensible subject is the imaginative part of photography; when we point that camera we are imagining (and imaging!) while we are seeing and the paradox is that the object seen, experienced, is also the object imagined, dreamed!

After that sentence came out I suddenly realised I have been trying to express that truth for some years now. It’s astonishing how all my previous attempts to explain what photography means to me, in statements about my work, in the classroom, in countless critiques over twenty five years of teaching, were all apparently rehearsals for the sentence above. Apparently they were archaeological excavations, peeling away layers until I arrived at the revelation that in photography, the seen object is simultaneously the imagined object.
I understand even more than before that comprehension is partly dependent upon a fortuitous matrix of circumstances, in this case, thinking about fiction, thinking further how that relates to photography, then suddenly, insight at the end of the path, whereas many other paths of more deliberate conjecture led only to more paths ( somewhat like the maddening Internet with its hyperlinks!).

In painting, on the other hand, the object is seen, but then later transmuted through the mind of the artist so that its relationship to the actual object becomes distant, remote and often totally disconnected (action painting); like fiction, it is all imagination.
In photography, time is the companion of the imagination: the object is seen, seized and imagined, all in a fraction of a second, and although there can be a considerable time gap between the captured object and its final representation as a picture, looking at a photographic print gives one the illusion that the object itself exists in the present moment although one’s senses tell one it is actually lodged sometime in the past.

As a photograph ages it straddles a land somewhere between the present and the past: take the famous Cartier-Bresson photograph of a 1938 picnic on the banks of the Marne, for example. It might be a surprise to come across that scene today, or if we did, the people might be dressed differently, yet how immediate are the details as if they are happening in the moment:  plates and newspapers in the grass, a glass of wine in mid-pour. But in the imitative painting all that is elided, and the result is a poor homage indeed as everything important in the photograph, that is to say the so-called unimportant details, have been erased by a failure of the imagination.

 

 

 

..

 

Re-imagining the image: Digital Photography

 

This article was written in 2004 and for various reasons remains unpublished although Photo Review has had it on the shelf for a few years now. I recently revisited the article to update it but with the exceptions of a few minor changes, decided it still described the state of the art as it exists today in 2008 . 

 

Few people have the imagination for reality. Goethe.

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An increased commitment to digital photography has me pondering on many aspects of this revolution. In fact I have been in a state of ponder ever since it became obvious the computer was going to profoundly impact photography since the rough beast first slouched out from MIT or Berkeley or wherever it was born some thirty years or more ago. For every tentative answer, a thousand questions rear their Medusa heads.

 I wrote my first article on the upcoming digital revolution in 1987 when it seemed apparent that transforming the grain of film into fluid zeros and ones - going from a solid to a liquid, one might say  would have a major effect upon the veracity of a photography, its unique relationship with reality. First, it was evident that digitalization was going to turn the photograph into a tabula rasa; and the photographer would be able to reshape reality according to whatever fantasy was uppermost in mind, something you can’t consciously do even in dreams except with the greatest difficulty. A tabula rasa is a blank slate upon which you can write anything but what we call reality is anything but blank; it is a slate crammed with all the bits and pieces that make up our universe; and to make it more difficult those bits and pieces are moving in time and the photographer has the Herculean task  of freezing of only a few of the myriad elements of reality swarming in front of him. Every memorable photograph is a bravura act of imagination, especially those bearing witness to the real world and one of the points of inquiry is to look at how the digital revolution is possibly changing the photographic imagination.

One definition of the photographic imagination is that it is the act of re-assembling the visible universe with an optical machine so it represents an artist’s vision. For the most part, photographic vision relies on an illusion of reality: that what you see is what is actually out there and not simply tones and shapes on a piece of paper. In literature, the suspension of disbelief is the ally of the imagination; characters and places come alive and you ignore the fact they are really little black marks on a piece of paper.

The imagination of painters began to diverge after the invention of photography. Painters increasingly relied upon an internal reality in which the visible world played a lesser role, until finally, with the arrival of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism the materials of art and art itself often became the focus and the artist dwelt in an internal world which didn’t require us to suspend disbelief. So even if Francis Bacon used a real-life model to paint the anguished pope enclosed in a vitrine we know that this image came not from what Bacon saw but what he imagined, or according to some critics, what he imagined after seeing a Caravaggio painting of Pope Paul V. 

Roy Lichtenstein reminds us: Any painting is far from real. It is a symbol that reminds us of reality. Increasingly, that could be said of photography, too. In the recent past, in the pre-digital era, the photograph seemed to make a distinction between the imagination and reality while simultaneously encompassing both, and more importantly without diminishing the power of either one and that made it unique as an image system and as an art form. But now we have a process that allows us to reshape the myriad forms of ‘what is out there ‘to conform to an inner vision by manipulating visual facts with a piece of software, thus posing the question: will the digital revolution cause us to redefine photographic imagination? Is the British artist Damien Hirst on the right track when he says: There are so many images in the world. An artist doesn’t have to create anymore, nature is shrinking every day and the number of images growing so it makes more sense to look at images. With this philosophy which echoes the thoughts of many critics and theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Vilem Flusser, it is not surprising  that some of Hirst’s recent work consists of reworked photographic images. 

So now we have more questions: Is it a loss if paintings only consist of reworked photographs? Is it a loss if photography becomes just another way of making a painting without a paint brush? These two questions are closing in on one another and smothered between is the role of the suspension of disbelief. Or to put it another way, the illusion vanishes and instead the mirror with a memory what we see is what we get: paintings about painting; photographs about photography; a series of self-referential works which in a way commemorate the death of the photographic imagination.    

image manipulation is certainly not new; In the 19thth century and early 20th century when pictorial photography was king, a photograph was a pastiche of what the lens saw and what the photographer imagined and the result was a heavily worked over image that combined elements of painting, drawing, and photography and the picture was as much about process as it was about ‘what was out there’. The model to follow was the artist who put together elements from his or her imagination; painterly vision, not camera vision. The camera was an optical machine which would record whatever you pointed it at, assuming you had a certain level of craft, and the question was how could such an exercise in technical skill have anything to do with imagination? This bias survived for many decades and it is only comparatively recently that people have stopped asking  “is photography art? “ 

In the 20th century optical vision began to be appreciated and various purist movements arose such as the f64 school in the US and the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in Europe. Of course, there continued to be mavericks who who used the camera as a searchlight to reveal their inner fantasies. Often laboring on the outskirts of fashion, they include such diehard surrealists as Edmund Teske, Clarence John Laughlin, and  Jerry Uelsmann. 

Prior to the coming of digitization and Photoshop, image manipulation involved a high degree of craft. I once worked in an advertising photo studio in Manhattan and the elite among my fellow workers were the image retouchers whose task it was to prepare photographs for final advertising copy. They would swagger into work three or four hours later than everyone else  time clock punching was an alien concept to them  and expertly wielding Exacto blades, electronic erasers, retouching inks, and various pastes, they shaped photographic reality into the way the clients wished it would be, not the way it was. If the optical eye saw everything in its path,  the Exacto blade saw only what it wanted to see. The difficulty of such a craft can be gauged by the fact that all were required to undergo a year’s apprenticeship before being accepted as a full-fledged retoucher and by the fact that even the apprentices made twice what we mere photographers were paid. But to skip ahead two decades or so, with the advent of the computer, the scanner, the inkjet printer, the digital camera and the brilliant invention of PhotoShop and its cousins, these days, the elite corps of retouchers are undoubtedly sleeping rough if they weren’t perceptive enough to change occupations in time. 

So at first it seemed the digital revolution was to profoundly affect veracity, verisimilitude, and mimesis or in other words: truth and the ostensible appearance thereof in an image. Would we ever be able believe a photograph again? As Fred Ritchin observed: We may have to rely on the image-maker and not the image to convince us that what we see is truthful.

But just as image-manipulation is not new, neither are challenges to the veracity of a photograph. As mentioned previously there was pictorial photography with its aspiration to look like ‘real’ art, i.e. drawing and painting. Pictorial photographs were no more or less believable as a stencil of reality ( to borrow Susan Sontag’s famous phrase) than were the inventions of the Impressionists whose products the Pictorialists aped. Even the purist strictures of the f64 school or the Adams/White zone system which insisted on  the unmanipulated image so as not to interfere with “optical vision” ironically resulted in a craft that with its exaggerated tones  seemed an idealized version of what we experienced with our eyes.

Despite these challenges, the notion or the illusion that what we see in a photograph is real remained central to photography’s role as a record; as a witness. But then along came the linguists and structuralists with their notions of signs and signifiers and iconography that apparently concealed a wealth of hidden meanings. Gradually these ideas which undermined the fabric of verisimilitude, filtered down into the consciousness of the public and it became apparent it wasn’t so much the digital revolution which undermined the faith in photography’s truth, it was a post-modern discovery ‘of the fictional heart of the photographic image. How could a two-dimensional representation of a multidimensional world of the senses be anything more than  an imperfect reflection of reality? Was Jean-Luc Godard right when he insisted a photograph wasn’t a reflection of reality, it was the reality of a reflection? The apparent objectivity of optical vision was revealed to be quite subjective if only given the fact the photographer had selected a single viewpoint from an infinite number of viewpoints.

So before the era of PhotoShop, the photograph had begun to seem like an instrument of internal imagination even when representing the external world. Conceptually, photographs were becoming more allied to the media of high art, paintings, installations, sculpture and when digital photography came along to hasten the synthesis of the visual arts, the ground had already been prepared by the post-modern druids of structuralism and linguistics. So we might say digital photography’s erosion of the believability of a photograph is a symptom rather than a cause.

The 70s and the decades after also saw a new pluralism, a synthesis of photography and painting, sculpture and literature and the resulting amalgamations stressed concept and imagination over ‘reality’; the mirror over the window. As a result , photographic prints shed their traditional modesty and now tended to be large-scale color objects typified by an aggressive physicality. The photograph had become sculptural and its physical presence was a significant part of the art. Not only was it physical; it was also fantastic, often theatrical and deliberately artificial. Photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Gregory Crewdson now re-enacted before the camera their internal visions using actors and even when recording actual events, some artists would re-enact these events using real-life people as props and actors. 

So by the time the digital image arrived there really wasn’t much left of photography’s illusion of reality in an era in which the fictional aspects of the photograph have more sway over people’s imagination than the depiction of the truth, however one defines it. In fact, in a strange way, due perhaps in part to the digitized image, and perhaps because of the pervasive influence of video and television in general, it seems that present-time reality is becoming more and more like a photograph, like an image. Critic Vicki Goldberg in a prescient piece in the New York Times, written four years before September 11, 2001, summed it up rather neatly:

 

… recently art photographers have developed a taste for performances that look like the unrehearsed course of life passing by, a newly popular form of trompe l’oeil. .Actually, the crucial issue may not be the camera but a gnawing sense that the world itself, knowable only through imprecise perceptions, is a tissue of uncertainties, ambiguities, fictions masquerading as facts and facts as tenuous as clouds. Life today resembles a fictional paradigm more and more and sometimes even outdoes the movie version. … Small wonder if photographers, who traditionally pay close attention to the world, are making story boards for an equivocal universe

 

  

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Ed Ruscha once said: I don’t like digital photographs they look like digital photographs, which begs the question what does a digital photograph look like?One aspect influencing the look of a digital image is its perfection.At one time to make a ‘perfect’ photograph, technically perfect that is, with all the tones in the right places, sharpness where you wanted it, the dust specks filled in or removed, was hard work. It took time and was part of the sweat of making art. Then came the digital miracle. It is the rare photographer who can resist touching up an image in software – removing the accidents that the eye in the viewfinder failed to see, strengthening highlights, taking a face out of the shadows into the light – and most prevalent of all, attempting to create the illusion of high resolution and sharpness by applying the sharpness feature of image correction software such as Photoshop. Then one presses a button and lo! A pristine print comes spooling out of the inkjet printer as if printed by a very skilful duotone craftsman on an expensive off-set press. The resulting perfection constitutes an erasure of  the apparent reality of a silver photograph which often reflects the world as a place of visual accidents ( however subliminal). In fact, despite all its depth of tones and wonderful colors, in its perfection one might say, a digital print resembles more a reproduction than an original. As Jean Baudrillard pointed out the source of a digital image is never clear: it seems complete without a referent to a previous event. Or to be more specific: perhaps that previous event exists only in the artist’s imagination.

 To expand a bit on sharpness in a digital print: excessive use of that Photoshop feature does seem to plague many a digital  print. Without delving too deeply into a technical labyrinth ( certainly not one of my strong points) digital sharpness is different from optical ( lens) sharpness if only because it can be applied twice: once at the instant of exposure, as with optical sharpness, and afterwards on the image itself with the use of software such as Photoshop. A lens creates sharpness through the resolution of details at the moment of exposure whereas digital sharpness at the moment of exposure is both a matter of resolution and an enhancement of edge sharpness. It is surprising how many digital photographers don’t realize their digital camera automatically applies extra edge sharpness to an image unless this feature is disabled by the photographer. Then with edge enhancement already present, they often will increase that enhancement with software, perhaps not realizing that software such as Photoshop enhances the sharpness of edges, not the resolution of detail. More often than not, the result is an oversharpened photograph which gives the viewer the feeling the picture is made of glass – one movement too many and the brittle image might shatter into a million pieces.

 A few years ago, New Yorker critic David Denby made an interesting observation in his review of the Steven Soderbergh film, “Bubble” which pertains to these comments on sharpness:

 

… Digital imagery doesn’t breathe the way film imagery does: blocks of color feel a little congealed, the flesh tones almost too smooth. But it would be downright Ludditic to say that digital doesn’t possess special qualities of its own. The focus is not only sharp; it’s sharp deep into the shot, at distances of thirty feet or more from the camera, and under minimal light conditions. But there’s more at stake than technique. …. In the Russian silent movies, and in the American cinema of the thirties, depth of field—the amount of the frame that was in sharp focus—was generally shallow, and filmmakers used lighting and editing to direct our attention to the most significant part of the action; the rest was blurry, mere background. .. however such directors as Orson Welles and William Wyler, both working with the cinematographer Gregg Toland, greatly expanded depth of field—expanded it so much that the audience was suddenly free to direct its gaze to the foreground or the middle distance.

New Yorker, February 27, 2006

 

Many digital images exhibit this enhanced depth of field too, if only because the lenses used on digital cameras have a built-in increased depth of focus compared to their analog counterparts. As Denby points out, when everything is razor sharp, from foreground to background, it becomes more difficult to apprehend what the photographer is interested in, that is to say, what he is pointing his camera at and pointing is certainly one the primary gestural aspects of photography: I direct you to look at this by pointing my lens at it. But if everything is sharp that gesture is diluted – does the photographer want us to look at that woman’s face or is he or she interested in that fascinating texture in the wall behind the person which is just as sharp? Obviously that question is usually answered by composition: the photographer places a subject somewhere near the center so we know that’s of interest – but in wide-angle imagery with all the details equally sharp we often find ourselves fascinated by information which is far afield from the apparent subject-matter. This is not a criticism, simply an aspect of wide-angle deep focus photography and furthermore an aspect which is the creative force behind the images of photographers such as Garry Winogrand: in almost all of Winogrand’s deep-focus photographs we are given a wealth of fascinating details to look at, yet at no time are we in doubt as to what he’s pointing at. 

In fact,  Roland Barthes often preferred to contemplate so-called extraneous details in a photograph because they were outside the control of the photographer ( that is they were seen by the lens but not the photographer)  and hence to his mind these punctums as he called them, were often more suggestive than the ostensible subject matter of the image. Were Barthes alive today, I think he would be a sad man because one of the first things many digital photographers do – in the search of perfection -  is to excise these extraneous details.

 The great Ernst Gombrich once made the distinction between a tree in an image and a tree in the world: the latter was never meant to be seen as an image whereas the former transforms the tree into an image-object. He went on to observe that we learn to see trees by observing them in art, not in nature, which led to his famous dictum:  Art is born of art, not nature. Gombrich went on to say ( in a 1974 interview in Afterimage)::

 

 A man-made picture is a purified version of the kind of perception we have in everyday experience. The picture has two characteristics that make it different. It is purified and it has been created for the purpose of being seen. The world has not been made to be seen and an image has. The artist uses the perception and means of expression deliberately for the purpose of making visual statements.

 

But in an analogue photograph the tree retains some of its properties as a tree because it appears to be a reflection of a tree in the real world whereas a tree in a digital image increasingly seems to be a tree born in the photographer’s imagination.

Many digital workers  aspire to make a digital print look like the best silver print; even if pixels are visible ( and increasingly they are not unless under magnification), they argue, once matted and behind glass, no one can tell the difference between a silver print and an inkjet print. This is often the position of those who work by scanning conventional film negatives and transparencies ( or silver prints) and then printing them digitally. But countering this camouflage is the fact that increasingly the style of digital presentation is to abandon conventional framing and matting: often you see large-scale digital prints bare on a wall ; a piece of handsome etching paper hanging on a wall like a scroll, bereft of frame and glass. So increasingly people are taking pains that you know they are working digitally.

 But there is a difference between the two media even if it is an increasingly subtle one. For one thing, those who print digitally often use printmaking papers, which is a kind of throwback to the early days of hand-made light sensitive papers which were often matte in surface. Even with a digital image that successfully mimics a silver print a certain painterly quality creeps in. Sometimes the edges in a digital print might look slightly smudged, the colors are often otherworldly, sharpness and blur are more painterly than photographic and so even if its only a subliminal perception, there’s a suggestion that what we have here is an image that might have bloomed in the mind before it was selected by a camera lens.

 Color is certainly another characteristic quality of the digital image. Digital colors, at least my impression of them, are subtler, more lifelike and often more painterly compared to the color yielded up by silver halide film. But maybe even more germane  is the fact that it is so much easier to work in digital color. So it rare indeed to find the photographer who formerly worked in black and white not to be seduced by digital color, because technically, if for no other reason, it is easier and cheaper to work in digital color than analogue color; not for nothing do you find most exhibitions of conventional color photographs are printed by laboratories not by the photographer.       

 Then of course there is the instant access to the digital image; the amazing speed at which the image displaces reality. Long gone is that lengthy interval between the click of the shutter and having a print in hand. Now the mis-en-scene instantly becomes a picture, a two-dimensional image in the camera and almost as quickly the image can be viewed on a computer screen and in an ink-jet print. Yes, Polaroid cameras gave you a print minutes after the shutter is pressed but there is still a delay and seeing a picture as a print is not the same as seeing it in camera or on a computer where the image is almost as fluid and changeable as reality itself. It is almost as if what is in front of your eyes is dissolving into memory in real-time. This is Philip K. Dick land. The present becomes past in front of your eyes: it is a bit unnerving and dangerously close to the illusion that all life is a photograph!

                              

             -3-             

 

Getting involved with computers is getting involved with excess,

especially when you start changing drumbeats to make them perfect;

it’s so far away from honesty. Jack White, of the band White Stripes

 

  

    In  the book How You Look at It  the curator of that anthology, Thomas Weski has this to say:

  If … digital technology expands, classical photography will no longer be connected, as by an umbilical cord, with its referent. If analogue photography has to rely on “the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph,” then digital photography, like painting, can feign reality without having seen it… a new form of art photography is developing here, which combines real and fictitious components to form original images, whose autonomous character proves to be a cross between photography and painting. This new art photography, with the potential perfection of its partially synthetic product, stands in direct contradiction to the imperfect images of direct photography. The latter takes its images…and its quality from the examination of an imperfect world and continually confronts viewers with the instability of their own existence. And digital photography, the future of photography- it astounds viewers. Will it also touch them and give them pause for thought?         

Yes, that’s the question and the answer is probably already evident. It seems obvious the wizardry of pixel manipulation is no more a guarantee of quality than any other process. The analogue camera artists who moved us before are going likely to have the same effect upon us with their digital imagery (Andreas Gursky; Jeff Wall; Heroshi Sugimoto etc.).    

 One should also mention that the digital artist is often in a state of high anxiety. In the days of analogue photography equipment barely changed from decade to decade and if you had a good camera and good darkroom equipment they would likely last a lifetime. In the digital world, obsolescence reigns; computers have an average lifespan of about three years and cameras, scanners and printers are upgraded as often as twice a year. To keep up requires a constant outlay of cash. And that’s not the only cause of anxiety; archival considerations are another. Computer hard drives are notoriously fickle and CDs and other storage devices are not guaranteed much beyond five years. Digital print stability has supposedly improved with some paper/printer combinations claiming up to a hundred years before changes occur but who is going to be around to see if their claims are true?

 And finally there’s that lack of reference we mentioned earlier: what is the original of a digital image? Do you keep the raw files, that is to say images unmanipulated by the camera, as your ‘digital negative’? Or do you boldly discard the raw files once you have refined the image? In any case, you are going to run out of room on your computer, and then once again you worry about the files on storage medium which seems quite unarchival at the moment. I personally file my raw files now but what about all the images I had before the invention of the ‘raw’ file which is a fairly recent innovation? And whose to say the standard of the raw file might not any day be superseded, thus forcing a new costly revision of one’s archives.

Another source of anxiety for some is the  ubiquitiousness of a digital photograph. Because anyone can now make a technically perfect photograph, some feel this debases the potential of the medium. Of course this argument only holds up for a moment or two before it crumbles. Most people can write a sentence and even string them together into a book but despite a prodigious flood of books by amateur writers, the power of the literary imagination is as potent as ever. Good writing has managed to survive the ball-point pen, the electric typewriter, the Xerox copying machine, the word processor, the best-seller, and a dearth of literary editors so I suppose we needn’t worry about photography.

Maybe the digital revolution will be mainly one of convenience and quantity. With the ubiquity of the cheap inkjet printer, the advent of the phone-cam and the disposable digital camera, visual pollution threatens to become a mighty flood. Yet despite a Niagara of forgettable images, the number of good photographers also seems to have increased exponentially and we can’t lay that at the feet of the digital age. The proliferation of photography in the halls of academe might be a more likely cause.           

- 4 -

Finally, a more personal observation: working with digital images is an amazingly intimate operation, especially when dealing with an image-altering software program such as PhotoShop. After making a conventional photographic print, most photographers go through a process of smoothing: eliminating mechanical flaws, dust specks, hairs and so on, a process which in conventional photography is called spotting, if the alterations are minor. Sometimes one uses magnification in spotting, but then only a tiny part of the image in enlarged at any one time whereas with the digital image this is process is usually carried out by enlarging the entire image (although only a portion is worked on at any one time) which results in a very intimate knowledge of the facts in that image.

              

              Recently I rescued from of the mists of time a portrait of two old friends, a married couple.

 

 

Part of the rescue effort involved digitizing the image (a film negative)  with a scanner. In examining the digital image for flaws it was as if I had approached my friends and from a distance of inches scrutinized their entire figures from head to toe, a voyeuristic activity I would only dare attempt in the world of the digital photograph. Years ago, when I originally made the silver gelatin print correcting the flaws had not turned me into some kind of voyeur (that is, beyond the normal voyeuristic aspect of photography itself!) because when correcting flaws I was seeing film grain, not human beings.      

 The most poignant moment in this silent scrutiny came when I suddenly realized that on that late spring day in May of 1984 my friend John Christy was wearing brand new shoes. In the photograph his left shoe, - genus Hush Puppy I believe - stands out as if it is on display in a store window. There is unbearable pathos in that unexpected discovery years after the event, and the triviality of it makes the pathos even deeper. I know where the people are in this picture, where they are at this moment, I mean, but where is that shoe? Does it only exist now in a photograph? And those lawn chairs, sold in a yard sale in 1997, on whose lawn are they rusting now? Roland Barthes said: “…in the love stirred by certain photographs, another music is heard, its name oddly old fashioned: pity”.          

 Digital photography also reminds me of the words of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami who had a glimpse behind the veil as he contemplated his breakfast:        

What resembles meat is not. What resembles eggs is not. What resembles coffee only resembles coffee. Everything is made in the image of something.   

 With digital photography image has become the reality.