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Is Digital The End of "Photography?"


leicaphilia

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Sorry, but to my mind this is confusing the tools with the process.

What does it matter that the possibilities have multiplied? Never before have we had this choice of media from (yes, they are still being made!) Daguerrotype through film through digital to iPhone, everybody can choose the tool that suits.

Photographic life has never been so good :).

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Digital is the end of photography as we know it, but it's not the end of photography. It's very much a continuation of photography.

 

"As a result of this image explosion and the technological advances making it possible, photography is no longer a specialist language." That ship sailed a long time ago. Photography hasn't been a specialist language since the 19th century. It became a common language about the time of the birth of roll film. The Kodak Brownie was introduced in 1900 and initially cost $1. Millions were sold.

 

"Digital technologies outsource our creative tasks to automated technology." I don't agree. Digital is full of creative tasks. The tools may be different, but the tasks are in many ways the same. Good photography is still about crafting a photo to express what you want it to. With digital that involves some different tools because you're pushing pixels instead of chemicals. But it's still crafting a photo, with much the same concerns and deliberations about composition, lighting, point of view, timing, exposure, contrast, color, tone, dodging, burning, cropping, etc., etc.

 

When I look at my digital tools, I'm struck by how much they are modeled on all of the chemical & darkroom tools that pre-existed them. Photoshop and Lightroom may be digital, but so much of what they do grows out of things that we already did in analog photography. To use that language analogy: digital and analog are like different languages — different words that can be used to tell the same stories.

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I think the problem with that essay is that it defines "Photography as we know it" as it never really was.

 

Consider the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. Sponsored by Kodak because it sold a tremendous volume of film. In the peak (film) year of 1999, it is estimated that in one week, in one place, 25 MILLION photographs were taken.

 

Consider one-hour minilabs, which in their heyday really could get you 36 color prints from your film in an hour. I worked at a newspaper where our in-house Noritsu went down one day - and we still made deadline by taking the film around the corner to the one-hour lab. ;)

 

If you wanted a picture even faster than that, you shot a Polaroid.

 

One ancient editor I know recounts covering Pres. Kennedy visiting a city 100 miles away. At 9 a.m. for a noon deadline. They sent a photographer with the newly-released Polacolor film, and an AP analog transmitting machine (read, fancy fax machine). He took one snap of JFK on the airplane steps, gave it the two-minute process, and then transmitted the print 3 times (with red, green, and blue filters sequentially placed over the scanning lens) to the newspaper office. Color photo for the newspaper's front page, in 30 minutes, in 1963.

 

Go back a bit further, and you find the "street photographers" who would snap you and the family in front of some famous place, and process the tintype or ambrotype INSIDE their camera, while you waited.

 

Kodak called their simplest film cameras "Instamatics" for a reason - it appealed to the public's desire for instant pictures (even though they weren't close to "instant" by Polaroid standards.)

 

Eventually Kodak created their own nearly instant process, as did Fuji (and what's Fuji's hottest-selling film camera today? Their Instax line.)

 

Remember Ansel Adams scrambling to grab the "Moonrise over Hernandez" in a couple of minutes before the light vanished - not a lot of "rumination" involved in making perhaps the best (and certainly best-known) single landscape photograph of the 20th century.

 

(Admittedly, Adams probably put a lot of time and rumination into printing that photograph afterwards - but I put a lot of time and rumination into processing my digital raw files. You do what it takes).

 

Robert Capa spent less than 10 minutes on the beach at Normandy before "self-evacuating" on the next available landing craft. Went through a couple of rolls in that time - sadly, as we know, with only 8 frames surviving.

 

In short, the vast majority of film photography, especially in the 70 years or so that anyone here would "know" as a practitioner, a) was done as fast as possible, B) was done by or for the masses in large numbers, and c) was technically and visually unsophisticated, at least as far as the skills and time of the picture-taker were concerned. Not really any better or different than the average cell-phone snap today.

 

Not to say that there were not also slow, contemplative photographers in the pre-digital era. But then, as now, they were always the microscopic minority. And not necessarily the ones who will, or have, made it onto history's list of those to be remembered.

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"You simply see more when you slow down, and photography is dependent on refined seeing."

 

AND

 

"I suspect, when everything shakes out, that the photography/imaging divide will walk the line of communication versus creative expression, the immediacy of digital communication versus the handicraft of individual expression embodied by traditional analogue photographic processes. The dedicated “photographer” will have to tolerate being irredeemably at odds with a world of ever “smarter” photographic instruments operated by ever less capable “Imagists.”"

 

Brilliant.

 

I actually read it there before I saw the link in here. It's a pretty great blog.

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Adan, I agree with your take completely. I do, however, want to add that the development of digital was in fact the obvious end, for the moment, of a chain of developments building on each other out of the desire to have photos taken faster with the results returned instantly. Technology has, as others have pointed out, moved faster than the evolution of our species. And to some extent the desire to use film among many, though not ever again the mass use of les than 20 years ago, is saying enough. It is time to slow down, enjoy pre digital technologies before losing them to history. There are no people around today who can make the same red glass in a renaissance stained glass window. I think it is rally that simple. And when I look at my scanned film vs my m9 I prefer the character of the film and do little if any pp. My age perhaps, perhaps something else.

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There are no people around today who can make the same red glass in a renaissance stained glass window.

 

I'm not sure you have a realistic interpretation of technology and where we are. Given the massive explosion in science that happened since the 1850's then early photography pro rata is not that much different from the technologies and artistic advances seen from the Renaissance till now. But you can go out right now and buy an entire darkroom devoted to making wet collodion images to a profesional level, a technology lost and 'out of date' for many many decades.

 

Far from digital taking over entirely I was in a camera shop only this morning and another customer was buying a Fuji Instax camera as a Christmas present, and when he'd gone I asked my Leica dealer how many they sell, and they are flooding out the door. We are in another Renaissance for photography where if you look closely everything is once again possible, nothing is obsolete, pretty well all the photography materials and techniques of the past are still with us, you just need to use them.

 

Steve

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Where should I send my Kodachromes for processing? :)

 

Jeff

 

Ho, ho ho, to use a phrase of the season, but I did of course carefully say 'pretty well all'.

 

But you can buy state of the art brand new equipment to do wet collodion and many other processes. So if you can't see the significance of the principle then I happily accept all you are interested in are technologies where you send your film away for somebody else to do the important processes for you. ;)

 

Steve

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But you can buy state of the art brand new equipment to do wet collodion and many other processes. So if you can't see the significance of the principle then I happily accept all you are interested in are technologies where you send your film away for somebody else to do the important processes for you. ;)

 

I closed down my Kodachome factory just before Dwayne's….about the same time I decided not to build my 5th b/w darkroom. ;)

 

Jeff

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When I used 35mm film, I shot and shot and shot.... hoping to get something good. Now with instant review, I can work more leisurely, studying the image and refining it until I get something I'm satisfied with.

Respectfully may I suggest that maybe you should have concentrated on learning to know what you had when shooting 35mm film, thereby not missing the next shot while 'chimping' your instant review on the LCD.

 

When shooting digital, I do a lot, I still rely mainly (not solely) on my practiced instinct gained from years of shooting and 'knowing' film, which I still shoot. In fact I am about to go now and shoot some FP4+ in my M6. Before I even get to the location, I know what I will have. :D

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It's certainly not the end of photography as I know it, so I disagree with your title except as a literary trope.

 

And I am not happy with a redefinition of photography to something narrower than what I think is a commonly understood and broad definition that covers the production of images of the real world (allowing for post-capture modification) using lenses (and pinholes) and light-sensitive materials. I see too many redefinitions of photography and photographers that always include the definer, but exclude others who do things differently or less competently - I don't think that was your intention, but I am sensitive to redefinitions!

 

Photography as you know it, as others point out, was only occasionally a slow contemplative process. Just look at the contact sheet you insert in the essay - not much contemplative stuff there as far as I can see.

 

Slow photography, and slow processing, are not necessarily good things: when I think back to the periods of my most rapid development in photographic skills, they were:

(a) when I lived and worked in the Far East in the late 70s, and could take several rolls a day and get prints back that evening for next to no cost: I could remember how I had taken each shot and make corrections the next day.

(B) when I got my first digital camera, and found I could take any number of images and review the results as soon as I could get to my PC, again for next to no marginal cost.

If it hadn't been for fast photography, both film and digital, I would be a far worse photographer than I am.

 

So, I'm sorry, I fundamentally disagree with your arguments, but at least you have started a discussion!

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LocalHero 1953, I empathise with your comments. I feel that slow and fast can exist, nay, do exist, side by side, even in the same process. Most of my working life, let's say 50+ years, I learned to work rapidly with Hasselblads, Nikons and latterly Leicas. Not to say I never did contemplative, stuff because I did. But after the 'fast' stuff I might spend hours or even days finishing the image in the darkroom. One occasion, I spent 3 months printing an image until I was happy with it. Regrettably, I sold it and have never replicated it.

 

There is a time and place for slow and fast, film and digital and I would be the poorer for the loss of any of it. Each one teaches a discipline that can be brought to the other. How rich is that!

 

Here endeth the lesson, but not photography!! ;)

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[...] When I look at my digital tools, I'm struck by how much they are modeled on all of the chemical & darkroom tools that pre-existed them. Photoshop and Lightroom may be digital, but so much of what they do grows out of things that we already did in analog photography.

 

That is the way new technology is very often used, but not necessarily how it should be used.

 

To use that language analogy: digital and analog are like different languages — different words that can be used to tell the same stories.

 

Language shapes knowledge. There are new stories to tell and new technology to reshape knowledge, for better and worse.

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Photography as you know it, as others point out, was only occasionally a slow contemplative process. Just look at the contact sheet you insert in the essay - not much contemplative stuff there as far as I can see.

 

I agree. By the way, the contact sheet is by Garry Winogrand and was photographed at El Morocco in 1955. Watch Winogrand at work (on Youtube) and it is evident he shot quite a lot, very quickly & instinctively. That contact sheet reminds me of what I see when I review a wedding or party in Photo Mechanic's contact sheet view or in Lightroom's library/grid view. I don't claim to be as good as Winogrand! I'm just saying that in terms of what makes a good composition and what it takes to achieve it, the change from film to digital is pretty trivial. So now there's different "stuff" inside the camera. But what you do with the camera is nearly the same. (With certain cameras, the lenses can even be the same as in 1955.) One even views a "contact sheet" later, albeit on a screen rather than on paper.

 

Digital is just a continuation of photography, just another way to capture light. The fact that you can see the image much sooner is a difference, but it's not the biggest difference. The bigger differences are 1) that the medium has virtually no per exposure cost (i.e. sort of like having "free film"), 2) the processing is much more flexible & controllable, and 3) the showing & sharing is far, far easier. The photography itself can still be slow and contemplative if one wants that. But it can also be as speedy as it was for Winogrand.

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Where should I send my Kodachromes for processing? :)

 

Jeff

Yes, but the technology is not lost. It is just that nobody has figured out (or taken the trouble) to figure out a way to make the process environmentally acceptable in an economically feasible manner.
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'chromes' were dead socially long before the technology was finally pulled. There was nothing left to sell because the slide show of the family holiday had been superseded and nobody bothered to re-invigorate marketing or re-formulate the brand because nobody saw digital as a threat until it was too late. Kodachrome isn't even a word in my spell checker such was it's cultural significance when Windows 7 was written. So it's really a story of people sitting on their hands and doing nothing, at the same time as Fuji came along and made the choice of which film to use even easier with their warm and reassuring Velvia.

 

Steve

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