Came across this recently. Echos of the past but still with some interesting points...
What About Digital, essay
by Ron Wisner, published originally in View Camera Magazine
Digital, Digital, Digital. How many articles have you read about the
New Wave of the Future. This writer has some awareness of his own
partisan prospective regarding this issue. Like the Hawk in politics who
can make peace with the enemy, I believe I can, at arms length, make
peace with this camp and its child and provide a balanced and positive
affirmation of both media. I do acknowledge my own vested interest.
After all, I make cameras that are from the technological revolution of
the last century. But, like the patron seated at a restaurant with
friends, I eye with curiosity the dishes on other plates.
And why
shouldn't I? What a fuss has been made. It is the solution to our
problems, it makes our jobs easier in publishing and reproduction and
manipulation.
Until last year, all of my own suppositions were
strictly theoretical. Have you taken the plunge yet? Buy the big
computer with all the memory, get into the windows based software, buy
the scanner.
Until last year I had the purity and authority of a
teetotaler promulgating prohibition. During the past few years, I have
been asked my opinion about digital imaging, and doubtless my the
interrogators were expecting partisan intransigence.
My argument
must be one of historical perspective. Looking backward to each
proceeding invention, style or medium, whether it be lithography,
etching, woodcuts or the like will give good grist for this argument.
Consider,
for instance, the turn of the century, a time when Alfred Stieglitz
debated and defended photography as an art: "Photography as a fad is
well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.
Those seriously interested in its advancement do not look upon this
state of affairs as a misfortune, but as a disguised blessing, inasmuch
as photography had been classed as a sport by nearly all of those who
deserted its ranks and fled to the present idol, the bicycle. The only
persons who seem to look upon this turn of affairs as entirely unwelcome
are those engaged in manufacturing as selling photographic goods."
(Alfred Stieglitz, 1897, The Hand Camera- Its Present Importance)
Substitute
"computer" for "bicycle". Remember, that in this arena of the photo
magazine, we regard the computer as an alternative imaging system, but
to the general population it is, like the bicycle of one hundred years
ago, a commodity which competes for attention, hobby time, disposable
dollars, and more than the bicycle, a capital investment for businesses.
Stieglitz
was not just describing a new medium and its fancy with the general
public. He was a proponent of photography as an art form. It is the art
form, at that time feared by him lost to the public as sport, which has
been the center of debate for over one hundred years now.
Stieglitz's
argument has a peculiarly familiar ring today. As the society
progresses inexorably toward the ever more sanitized photographic
process, the public has lost its ability to take a light reading, to set
an aperture, to focus a lens and even to load the film or hold the
camera still (as in the case of the video medium), all skills taken for
granted by the photographing public of one hundred years ago.
And
of course, the public has been trained by the ever spiraling process of
miniaturization to accept ever worsening quality. Remember the
horrible, grainy prints which spewed forth from the disc camera? It
seems that even the masterminds of the monolithic corporate purveyors
failed to anticipate the public's unwillingness to sink to such abyssal
depths of quality.
I may sound strident, but honestly, I am not.
None of the forgoing is relevant to photography as art, because clearly
snapshots of Aunt Matilda by the public are not nor are they intended to
be art. If John Q Public calls himself an artist, intends to make art
of Aunt Matilda, and hangs the image in a gallery (virtual or
otherwise), then maybe it is art, but that is another philosophical
discussion.
It must be obvious that the debate surrounding the
legitimate place of digital verses traditional photography must lie in
the dilemma which started the debate so long ago. Does photography not
have its practical, utilitarian manifestations? Does this fact negate
the use of photography, as art, to express the human soul?
To
photograph Aunt Matilda, or to record a news event, to photograph a
product or place, is a function as practical as the painted portrait of
the last and proceeding centuries. So too was the making of a
lithograph, an etching or woodcut of the last century. The artisans of
those media would not usually have been referred to as artists, but as
master-craftsmen whose skills might mimic art, and whose intentions are
were clearly exigent and subordinate to reproduction.*
Speaking
of functional, the concerns of today's photographers and their
resistance to the digital wave usually is expressed as an argument
pointing out all the functional difficencies of digital
state-of-the-art. Though they miss the point regarding the bigger
questions of art and expression, there are some real concerns which will
dictate the econimic viability of the two media. And we must indeed
remember that choose what one will, economics will determine which will
be available in the long run, and in what form.
The "old" analog
method comes with a simple array of equipment, and at a much lower cost,
initially. The camera and lens is simple enough, at least in the case
of large format photography, and film, at least for the user, is simple,
though it belies the century of physics and chemical engineering which
went into its develpement.
On the other hand, the desire to make
high quality images using the digital process is tantamount to commiting
to a significant bank loan. High resolution drum scanners, gigabytes of
memory, display screens sufficient to manipulate the image
charactoristics and see the real results, and then output devices such
as film or Iris printers are all a necessity. And once you have bought
said equipment, it is aready obsolete.
And speaking of equipment,
how many large format phtographers do you know who are obsessed by the
weight of thier equipment? To photograph with digital in the field means
more wieght and more "stuff": power supply, cable, storage device or a
computer with a hard drive, plus your camera and tripod and all the
other gear you would ordinarily bring.
As for other practical
concerns, time is money and it takes time to make a digital image. In
the studio it can take many minutes, and the flash equipment which most
pros have in thier arsenal is useless. Now one must go back to
Hurell-like hot lighting, or preferably special HMI daylight balanced
lights, since the scanners and ccd chips are balanced for daylight.
To
further compicate things, disproportionateley bright objects such as
bare bulbs or specular highlights "burn-in" on scanners and leave
streaks all the way across the image. And forget about low level
lighting which is so often the subject of art phtographers. Want to take
an existing light, high resolution scan of a street scene at night?
Forget it. The old way is the only way.
To be sure, the digital
process has completely taken over the publishing industry. Want a giant
enlarger cheap? Go to your nearest printer and make an offer for his old
process camera. I got my 25x25 Robertson for $300. Virtually all but
the biggest offset-printed reproductions, including magazines, catalogs
ad infinitum, pass through the digital process before they go to press.
When I send an add to this magazine, I send a disk. I have even emailed
it! I have scanned the image (usually from a Polaroid), composed the add
in my computer and sent the whole thing ready to go on film.
On
the other hand, "if quick and dirty" digital images for use on the sreen
or the internet are your goal, then one of the low cost digital cameras
already on the market is a very practical tool, and will save alot of
time and film. Most of our readers and customers, however, are into the
craft of a fine, high resolution image, so both capabilities may exist
concurrently within thier repertior.*
Interesting, that we place
much emphasis today on the "craft" of photography. Nor does this
craftsmanship necessarily define photography as art any more than in the
above cited case [of old masters using old processes of painting or
etching for the purpose of reproduction.] Stieglitz would reject much of
today's photographic craft, as fine technically as it may be, as
"technically perfect, pictorially rotten."
There is a dilemma
here. The dilema is that of recognizing and valuing the thing verses the
expression. In the inexorable march toward the hands-off society in
which we have virtual art to go with virtual reality and virtual mail,
the product of human hands is more and more revered. The delineation
between the fine arts as a "roll up your sleeves and get your
fingernails dirty" and the "you push the button, we do the rest" is
coming to its "virtual", logical, ever more unbreachable and irrevocable
development. The photographic elite will be the craftsmen who know and
use the ancient materials. It has already started. Never before has
there been such interest among amateurs in large formats, forgotten
formulas and arcane processes, even as the numbers of large format
professionals dwindles every year. Witness the rebirth of platinum paper
as a commercial commodity.
Thus, the thing itself, to hold and
cherish is the art object, and this object has a value in its manifest
existence, independent of its artistic merit. A vintage print by a known
artist, as any gallery owner will tell you, is much more valuable as an
object than a print of far greater artistic merit by a contemporary
unknown. The vintage print, as an object, has value. The vintage print,
like the contemporary print, both share an essential quality. They were
both handled by the artist. With his own hands he made the object, and
then passed it on to other hands, and with it conveyed a singular
existence which can only beheld by one person at a time.
The
dilemma, then, keeps coming back, like it or not, to the perenial
question of art and the definition of art. Is the object a superb
(hopefully) embodiment of a superb artistic expression? Why can not any
medium be such an expression of an artistic thought? Why not digital?
To
further complicate this discussion one need only cite the intrinsic
part the medium itself plays in the expression. Although Ansel Adams
once said he would quit photography if it ceased to fulfill his
expression, he certainly chose photography for the unique way in which
it suited his expressive needs. If Marc Chegal executed his images in
pastels rather than his famous stained glass, would not this completely
change his expressive intent. What about the texture and appliqued
nature of Miro's paintings. Clearly "craft" embodied in the art object
is intertwined with art in both of these cases. Suppose he had decided
on the digital image as more suitable to his needs?
To understand
the digital, virtual creation as legitimate art I have considered my
own activities as a composer as an example. When I write music these
days, rather than use pencil and paper as I was originally trained, I am
using a computer. It looks like a sheet of music on the computer
screen, and I use the mouse to place the notes on the page. I can push a
button and it will play back instantly. I have a string quartet, or
even a full orchestra at my disposal at the click of a mouse. It doesn't
really sound like a string quartet but it's close enough. I do not
consider it the final realization of my music, which is concieved for
real string players. And there's the rub. Many composers revel in the
synthesized
sounds of the computer and those sounds are essential to their
expression. The sounds are as much a part of the composition as Mozart's
use of horns or strings or woodwinds.
Why wouldn't digital
images, conceived as floating, mass medium, synthesized objects, be just
as valid in their genesis as synthesized music? The synthesizer has
been with us for more than twenty years. The technology of the digital
image and the public's access to it is just a little slower in coming.
The
concept of art, therefore, may or may not be separable from the object
itself. Last year I attended a panel discussion at the photographic
convention in New York, hosted by Polaroid, on the state of Digital
imaging. I was fascinated to find that, while the panel was well aware
of the mass conveyability of their art, which, as they saw it, resulted
in the democratization of the art image, they did fail to recognized the
value of the object created by the artist. There was much discussion of
and against the object and the Museums where such objects reside, which
were maligned as "repositories for frozen egos."
If the
"revolution" of the computer results in a whole new medium, it does not
take anything away from the more traditional photographic process. It
may actually elevate, finally, once and for all, photography as a fine
art. It will certainly keep alive, and possibly muddle, the debate about
what real art is, and it may lend false credence to practitioners of
fine photographic craft as artists when it is not deserved, in the same
way in which anyone who picks up a brush and paints a painting may
pronounce himself an artist. Contrary to the protests of the sometimes
angry digital camp, who have sought refuge in digitally broadcast images
as a result of the lack of thier own personal recognition, the final
arbiter of this judgment about who is an artist and who is not is the
very winnowing process provided by those "elitist" museum repositories,
or even magazines such as this one, which put the image to the test and
review of one's piers. Digital imaging is just one more medium both for
self expression and as a tool for practical image making, and will take
its rightful place along side other media.
