It took me a while to realise that this new site allows comments on all pages. I was approving comments and then wondering where they had gone. Finally, I found them in the Gallery or Selected Articles.
Over the last few days a lively and tetchy string has formed itself around my Film and Lomography article. (I’ll leave aside Bjorn’s comment that I am a fanatic. Is it difficult for people called Bjorn to appreciate prose tone?) The occasion for this debate was a picture that appeared in several papers by Antony Spencer of fields of lavender. Denis Waugh says it was photoshopped to death, Spencer says it wasn’t. The poles of the debate are the manipulation of images in Photoshop against the anthenticity of images taken direct from film. Spencer makes this crucial point:
‘For heavens sake even choosing a film such as Velvia (arguably the most common film type for serious landscape photographers) is instant manipulation. You get much stronger saturated colours and more contrast before you’ve even started. Seriously that is a very naive statement.‘
He is right of course. Both my primary films - Fuji Velvia and Kodak Tri-X – are chemically rigged to produce certain effects – lush and landscapey, grainy and newsy. On the other hand, it is an extraordinarily abstract argument to say that because they are both ways of rigging an image, film chemistry and Photoshop are essentially the same. This would be like saying getting a ticket for illegal parking was the same as being hung for the same offence. Degree is always more important than abstract category.
The question is: what is the important difference, the true difference of degree, between a photoshopped picture and one printed straight for a negative? This is, you will realise, not just about photography. Let’s call it a metaphor.
I have just reread Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which, being published in 1977, had nothing whatsoever to say about digital but did have a great deal to say about the effect of photographic reality on the world. It is a flawed book and, in style, somewhat too much of its time, but she makes the important point that the photographic image is autonomous, whereas we tend to see it as dependent on the world. It is a new reality – this is obvious but easily forgotten. This post is a footnote to that thought.
The important difference between the digitally rigged and filmically rigged picture is not one of quality. This is the terms in which people talk of this – notably in terms of the extent in which digital can or cannot match the resolution of film or its special quality. Let us say that, one way or another it can, and leave that aside.
What matters is the quality of commitment. There are several levels to this. First, exposing a film changes the world, as represented by the emulsion, irrevocably. With digital you can instantly delete. Second, the photographer must commit to the production process by buying film and having it developed and/or scanned and printed. Third, he must make an (effectively) irreversible decision when he puts the film in the camera. If he chooses Velvia 50 to shoot a cocktail party, he will fail as surely as if he chooses Tri-X to shoot a field of lavender (actually, that might just work). I probably could think of more forms of commitment but they would all make the same point.
Now you could argue that all that matters is the image and my commitment or otherwise does not affect the image. You would, obviously, be wrong. I know when I shoot film that I am behaving, thinking and imagining differently from when I shoot digital. I also know that I am in an argument with the machinery and chemicals in such a way that, sometimes, they will get the upper hand and produce an entirely unexpected image. I like this. The only way you could argue against my state of mind having an effect on the image would be to say that I am irrelevant, that the camera takes the picture. This is a possible extension of Sontag but not a credible one.
The point about commitment is you have to think in the moment, you cannot snap away – spray and pray, they call it – and look to the future to fix your image. Photography is about the moment above all else. It invented the moment as the great contemporary fiction, our new knowledge of reality. Doubtless digitalists can do this but, for me, film does it better and always will. Technology adds but it always subtracts.
There seems to be a general interest in the, let us say, moral differences between analogue and digital (for want of a more precise formulation).
I posted on the topic here: http://gawragbag.blogspot.com/2010/06/what-digital-cant-contain.html
It struck me afterwards how this argument echoes those of Ruskin and Morris in their advocacy of the virtues of craft over manufacturing.
I loved the piece you wrote on lomography but I couldn’t comment. I have next to no ability as a photographer mainly due to my inability to stand in a crowd and snap people (but I take great photos of street lamps)… I also Photoshop daily in one form or another and the argument I see between analogue and digital is the very same I see between digital artists and those using traditional materials.
I’ve recently started to cartoon on paper because that’s how great cartoonists do it but I’m more comfortable with a graphic tablet. I don’t see either as a problem. Yet drawing by hand does change the way I work. I find it harder to commit my ideas to paper. It takes infinitely more skill and it’s easier to go wrong. I don’t enjoy it as much but it does improve my technique and this is key: I think more carefully about the process. The very same is said to be true about writing by hand and using a computer.
The moment you select your aperture over your shutter speed, you’re altering reality by choosing a certain depth of field. The same is true when you choose to photograph black and white over colour. And again, when you choose to crop the photo a certain way and I recollect from my basic photography course I took years ago that when you’re developing prints by hand you can rub certain parts of the print to lighten it as it develops. The whole process from beginning to end is about manipulation.
But isn’t that what art is about? It is the deliberate choices we make to turn nature into a constructed artifice which says something about existence. Postmodernity is so caught up with notions of the real that we’ve forgotten that the first step of all great art is craft.
Where the difference between film and digital does make a difference is at the moment of taking that photograph. Film makes you think about the process. It forces you to understand your medium. Digital will make a photographer more prolific but film will develop better skills in the craftsman.
Hmmn, a lot of what you are talking about strikes me as an attitude of mind that comes before a camera is picked up, whether it is a film or a digital camera.
Yes, digital encourages “spray and pray”. Modern zoom lenses discourage moving about and the process of zooming in and out can replace the purpose: choosing the moment. The results can be manipulated any which way in Photoshop or, often these days, in the camera itself. But none of these things has to be so. For example, one can use only prime lenses and sell off those zooms. One can keep a single prime lens on the camera all day and say, simply, that today is a 35mm lens day and I will take only the shots that present themselves to a 35mm lens. I won’t be “missing” any other shots because I won’t be trying to take them. Since they are shots I would never have taken, today, they do not exist anyway so how can I miss them.
One can shoot to raw and “develop” digitally. Of course this is not the same as using chemicals but there is no obligation to change everything with Photoshop. I rarely do. Exraneous bits in a picture are there because they are life and found images. Sharpening up an image with digital software can sometimes kill it. The quality of a lens’s blur or “bokeh” is often more important than its in-focus sharpness. Show me two lenses and I will choose the one with better bokeh.
I am not trying to equate film and digital since they are not the same. I’m just saying they do not have to be poles apart either. It’s all between the ears.
Whatever happened to the idea that carrying a camera around was solely for the purpose of recording the moment for posterity, birth..click, engagement..click, wedding..click, ooh look at that..click, divorce..click.
Oh for the days of wine and roses, life was so much simpler then,sweet, paced, serene even, life before technology.
If needs be Bryan, I shall email you some photies taken with no regard for the kit used. They were however shot using Kodachrome 25 on a Nikon F3 and an FM2 with 35-105, 80-200, 55 and 105mm lenses at mainly at F8 to F16 over a 25 year period, scanned with a Plustek scanner using Silverfast and processed in CS3 and bibble using Tiffin and colourefex plugins.
Malty, where can I buy this ISO 0.000001 film which allows a shutter speed of 25 years? Interesting effects in prospect! And clearly a winner for the Slow Photography movement.
Do I value my analogue lomo pictures more highly than any of my digital photos? Yep. The luck that came together to capture that image at that precise moment just makes them seem more exciting.
Still love my digital camera though. Although now thinking of also borrowing a lomo to take to Ibiza with me next month
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
The way you describe it is almost like the difference between painting in watercolours and oils. I like that thought though I wouldn’t say one is better than the other. Any way, Photography – before the art comes the science, regardless of whether it’s digital or chemical, pin-hole or the latest Nikon -
You have to know what you’re doing, that’s the first commitment. Secondly, you have to show you know what you’re doing. Thirdly, people have to believe it.
Then there’s the whole artistic side to consider. Unfortunately by this stage there’s a 99.97% failure rate across the whole range of photographers (when eventually we find the good 0.03% we’re too tired to care). Greater talents have thrown in the towel, and Donovan once remarked, if you’re not doing it for money, what’s the point?
I think you should be writing poetry instead.
Of course, there’s the further question about what you do with the photos once you’ve made them. Wall, web or book? (God, I bet there’s still a few around doing projector slideshows! Don’t, Mr. A, don’t).
“Any way, Photography – before the art comes the science, regardless of whether it’s digital or chemical, pin-hole or the latest Nikon – You have to know what you’re doing, that’s the first commitment. Secondly, you have to show you know what you’re doing. Thirdly, people have to believe it. ”
This is completely refuted by Lomography! the whole point of lomography is that you don’t comply to any of the conventions you state, and instead you rely on the camera to produce the magic for you. And it can make wonderful results.
Mark, the magic ingredient is bright sunlight, a commodity notably absent in the Scottish borders, as is employment.
I couldn’t agree with you more here Bryan, any photographer using film is going to have a completely different approach to their chosen subject. I definitely took more time when shooting film and there are many occasions where I really miss the discipline I once had. Most of all I miss the excitement from those few seconds before opening the post containing the developed images, nothing really compares to those moments now.
I don’t really know what exactly constitutes “photoshopped”. Is the gentle use of the saturation or contrast slider “photoshopping” or are we referring to heavy handed adjustments or the blending of different images to create a final image? Maybe its simply dust spot removal. I guess everyone has their own thoughts and feelings on this.
For me, photoshop has given the masses a chance to do what really was once only possible with laboratory equipment. I noticed you post on Ansel Adams, a superb photographer but some of the manipulation involved in the creation of some of his prints is absolutely astounding. Nothing at all wrong with that, it was of course simply his choice.
Ultimately photography is about expression, the use of any editing software or indeed laboratory adjustments doesn’t change that fact. I really find it a shame that this country in particular, as a whole find it very difficult to embrace photography as art. No production methods will ever change that for me. Another great topic would be why photography is valued so much more in the U.S and Australia for example. I often try to find reasons why this is the case but honestly have no idea?
I’d really love to know your thoughts,
Antony