Reality check: Old School photographer [Stanley Greene Interview]

[NB23]

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Ah, now there's a man after my own heart. A true master, too.

Hates photoshop, hates digital B&W, hates the cloning tool. Hates cropping.

 

This post might awake and make jump on my back the usual monkeys, but I still have to reaffirm what photography is, and what Leica photography is all about.

 

Great read, great reality check.

 

Stanley Greene’s Redemption and Revenge - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com

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[mgcd]

Ah, now there's a man after my own heart. A true master, too.

Hates photoshop, hates digital B&W, hates the cloning tool. Hates cropping.

 

This post might awake and make jump on my back the usual monkeys, but I still have to reaffirm what photography is, and what Leica photography is all about.

 

Great read, great reality check.

 

Stanley Greene’s Redemption and Revenge - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com

 

I too, was happy to read earlier this week what Stanley had to say.

 

Cheers,

[NB23]

Who else is tired from the modern digitally manipulated images, the frauds, the masqueraded mundane scenes transformed into "works of art", the falseness, the fakeness of it all? The regular portraits transformed into devil's portraits like it was the end of the world?

[yanidel]

Rarely did artists depict the reality over the history of humankind. Why should photography do so ?

 

I think the words of Greene relate more to photojournalism. In this case, I think he has a point on not altering the reality for accurate information. I guess the journalism takes over the photography part.

 

But for other types of photography, I am all for post processing if it helps one in his creativity.

[greyelm]

Touching up photographs has been around since Fox Talbot. Touching up has been used both to enhance and falsify images. Modern techniques just make it easier to do.

 

Faked images from photojournalists or 'photoshopped' images of the rich and famous are down right dishonest. Having said all this I still believe that there is nothing wrong with 'photoshopping' pictures for the benefit of artistic presentation, it is not very different to dodging and burning.

[pop]

.... the masqueraded mundane scenes transformed into "works of art", the falseness, the fakeness of it all

 

I'm afraid I don't quite understand your point. Painters used to do exactly that before and after photography was invented. They used to transform mundane scenes into works of art. Some made it into true works of art, other are thankfully forgotten, I fancy.

[tdtaylor]

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Very interesting article- definitely provocative.

 

I for one would find it hard not to have the digital world, but I tend to keep my personal endeavors closer to the opposite side. While I don't partake in film, I once was heavily vested, and those thoughts stay with me.

 

Interestingly, both of my daughters are heavily into B&W film. Their High School has a four year class, never leaving B&W film. Learning photography the way it should be. My youngest is actually taking Photography AP classes (for those familiar with the US system). Easy to be a proud father....and yes, slightly jealous...

[lars_bergquist]

For most of my working life -- now past -- I have been using photographs, mostly other peoples' photographs, and artwork, and words, in order to bring over a message: This is how a jet engine works, this is what goes on inside a glacier, whatever. And I have no illusions whatsoever about truth.

 

Yes, the camera lies. It is just a consistent liar, one who is always telling the same kind of lies. And the photographer lies, and the subjects lie, and the photo editor and the art director lies, and not least the chap who writes the captions. And our eyes and the other senses lie, too. They tell evolved lies that have helped us to survive and reproduce in the woods and on the savannas and the tundras. They do not passively and faithfully record what's out there. What we see are reconstructions, models. Built out of qualia, like the false colour of scanned space imagery. Even our memories are reconstructions, done on the fly every time we remember. Dreams of the past.

 

There's something out there that we may call truth. It exists independently of us, but we cannot access it directly. We can only approach it by successive approximations -- if we feel that urge, or if our lives depend on it. But truth is not something we have, or own. It is a process some of us are crazy enough to subject ourselves to. And it will never stop as long as we remain human.

 

Stalin ordered Trotsky to be painted out of the photograph of Lenin speaking. He did not need Photoshop to do that. He needed only a photographically naive public -- one that believed that the camera does not lie -- and bad intentions. Intentions make a difference. And Gene Smith's image of the mother bathing her paralysed daughter, was true.

 

Film will soon go away. Nostalgia won't help us. What can we do? Shoot in-camera JPEGs?

 

The old Tri-X man with an epistemological itch

[StS]

Good morning Lars,

 

I agree on almost everything, apart on one thing, about film soon going away. The CD was invented almost thirty years ago, mp3 became popular more than a decade ago, however, one can still buy newly pressed vinyl LPs.

 

Cheers

 

Stefan

[tobey bilek]

I saw a painting of the Graue Mill on Salt Creek in Hinsdale , Illinois, at my dentists office today. Beautifull painting of the mill in winter with lots of snow and ice.

 

But I have been going there 50 years and I know there is no place I can stand and get that that picture. Trees are added and subtracted, rocks are moved, the winter covers over the windows are not there. So the painter changes reality and if he can, why can I not use a bit of photoshop?

 

I never did a print where the sprocket holes show either. Another silly idea if carried to extreme.

[lct]

"And also, when you shoot digital, you can chimp; you can look at the image on the camera. Imagine Cartier-Bresson if he was trying to take a picture and all of a sudden he looked down. He would lose that next moment."

 

Could not agree more! Refreshing reading but burning and dodging have always been done.

[michali]

Great interview, really enjoyed reading it. I agree with a lot of what he says especially insofar as the manipulation of images that goes on today.

 

Lars I also concur with many of your points. As you say the lying and manipulation has always gone on for as long as humans have inhabited the planet. I think that it's really a question of the degree and scale by which "truth" and "reality" are manipulated today and the way these manipulated versions are then disseminated around the planet, instantly beamed into our lives and the receptive nature of this. Eventually someone else's version of reality becomes ours as well.

[michali]

"instantly beamed into our lives and the receptive nature of this."

 

I hate predictive text! Should read:

 

"instantly beamed into our lives and the repetitive nature of this."

[M'Ate]

"And also, when you shoot digital, you can chimp; you can look at the image on the camera. Imagine Cartier-Bresson if he was trying to take a picture and all of a sudden he looked down. He would lose that next moment."

 

That's exactly what he would be doing today as most of his successors at Magnum are. Many here choose forget that he was a Pro photographer and most of them are using dslr cameras today (like 99%).

 

Don't for a minute think he'd be trundling around with a Leica IIIg as if he's stuck in the 1950's. Nor, ignore the fact that he abandoned photography when he got to your age, as it wasn't as important to him as it is to you.

 

Wonder if he were around and still working today, whether he'd be a Nikon, or Canon, buyer ? Maybe an M9 for the weekends ?

 

As a poor printer, would he have settled for iPhoto and uploading images with his iPhone ?

 

Of course he'd be chimping !

[pgk]

I'm glad that the OP posted this - an intriguing and interesting article. But sadly, I'd say that it does typify the attitude of an "old school photographer".

 

The only certain thing in the world is change. Trying to suggest that change alters attitudes and even the truth is, to some extent, correct. But in order for this to be true we would need to define both accuracy and the truth as represented by photographic imagery, neither of which are easy to pin down. Film 'lied' in many different ways to digital: neither can do more than create a two dimensional, reduced dynamic range illustration of a scene. Viewpoint and composition have as much, if not considerably more, effect on the interpretation of an image as may adjustment of elements within it, and telling the 'truth' should start here. AFAIAK these two parameters remain the same.

 

Having been brought up with traditional photographic process I have a nostalgia for some aspects of it, but I couldn't go back. Chimping is not mandatory by the way:eek:!

[lct]

...Of course he'd be chimping !...

Poor HCB must be turning over in his grave. Hard to conciliate chimping and the decisive moment. During shootings at least.

[giordano]

one can still buy newly pressed vinyl LPs.

 

That's not the right analogy. One can still buy reel-to-reel recording tape from a few specialists, but is anyone still making studio-quality analog recording and mastering equipment? Studer seem to be all-digital now; Nagra's website doesn't even list a two-channel analog recorder.

[giordano]

Greene says

"I think that we have no choice but to go back to shooting film because we have to get back to some kind of integrity. I think we are losing the moral code. And I think that in the end with film — yes, you can manipulate it and yes, you can change some things — there is still a moral code."

 

That means not just going back to shooting film but also back to the wet darkroom and old ways of making blocks or plates for printing, so there is no digital stage where immoral manipulation is easy.

 

But even then it would often be possible to slip in a scan-manipulate-output stage between the original negative or tranny and the finished product. The lesson must surely be that (as Lars said) everything can lie - even processes such as daguerrotype, tintype and polaroid where the finished product is unique.

 

For that matter: it's possible in principle to use a modified laser printer to expose a digital image onto a daguerrotype plate. Has anyone done that yet?

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[250swb]

Greene says

"I think that we have no choice but to go back to shooting film because we have to get back to some kind of integrity. I think we are losing the moral code. And I think that in the end with film — yes, you can manipulate it and yes, you can change some things — there is still a moral code."

 

And yet with film you can still point the camera one way and get rolling fields of golden corn, or turn it the other to see somebody being shot. This psuedo intellectual garbage about film having integrity is just as dangerous as outright propaganda because it implants the idea that you can't lie with film, and we know you can. Its the average viewer who is taken in and buys the line 'trust me, I use film' . This guy is abusing his audience in suggesting he has a higher moral standard than other photographers.

 

Steve

[Nikkor AIS]

Great artical. The man has an opinion. For the most part Im on board. Agree or disagree, the length of time he spent in the field and the body of work gives it weight. Personally , it's kind of nice to know that not everyone is buying into the the Digital is golden and film is dead mantra.

 

 

Gregory