Nostalgia as a contemporary concept of history

All art, including photography is self-portraiture. Above all else, it shows what we notice, wat we are aware of. If what we notice, nostalgia, emulation, is what we already know from the past, then we are "asleep." I think Zen masters pointed this out many years ago... this is the dream from which we must awaken. The images that make a difference for each of us are the ones, that if we don't make them, no one else will ever get to see, our own unique personal vision.
 
tunalegs said:
We tend to love to misuse technology for nostalgia's sake. I remember the album Switched On Bach, which is wonderful. The interesting thing about it is IIRC the liner notes had a little interview with W. Carlos, and they expressed the advantage of being able to create completely new sounds with synthesizers that were not possible with traditional orchestral instruments. However from that point on it seems everybody was obsessed with making synthesizers sound as much like those instruments as possible, instead of using them to realize the full potential of the synthesizer to create new sounds.

Instagram + filters is simply using new technology to produce something that reminds us of old technology. Dare I say it - the Monochrom is basically the same idea, really just a use of new technology to approximate the look of an old technology. Funny eh?

Photography also went through Pictorialism, which is more or less the same thing. Using a new technology to approximate the looks/effects of older mediums.
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Not everybody: cf. Isao Tomita.

Good analogy in the last para!

Cheers,

R.
 
rhl-oregon said:
. . . a Family Album of Gaea. Steichen's 1955 Family of Man exhibit generated not only a vastly influential anthology of photographs (my childhood introduction to some of the greats, and I expect for some of you as well), but an ethos of bearing witness to human commonality that can show us how to look (and live) beyond race, class, gender, age, violence, or whatever other ills or evils you care to list.

My definition of nostalgia: the past without the pain. A weakness for sentimentalizing people, places, things, events, coupled with a willingness to overlook difficulties, contradictions, destructions. Some earn nostalgia by living through enough awfulness and disappointment to deserve quiet images of unviolated landscapes, animal peace, macro-daffodils; most are old enough to have outlived many if not most of their own pretensions as well. They deserve the Voltairean 'cultivate your garden' retreat, or the spectacle of Monet's water lilies apart from the lifelong discipline it took Monet to reach that apex of expressive serenity. I don't expect them to be artists, or to care for any form of photography that is not serene. (I don't expect them to care for instagrams either, even if they adore their kids or grandkids who produced these throwaway images.). . .
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Beautiful!

Cheers,

R.
 
Transport: walk, run, horseback, car.......
Food: hunter-gatherer, farmer, sunday roast for the family, TV dinners, eating on the hoof....
Reading: Cave paintings, first basic alphabets, illuminated manuscripts, printing press, libraries, CD books, Kindle....

The main changes down the years tend to be convenience (the desire to fulfil the customer's wants / needs / desires as quickly and efficiently as possible) and speed to market. Technology has provided all manner of new options - some may even be improvements on their predecessors (but far from always).

Digital is an example of a parallel technology that satifies a need for one photographer but not necessarily for another. Personally, I don't see why one should be regarded as better than the other when it comes to the end result. Digital can, to my mind, only claim the upper hand when i comes to convenience and the capability to reproduce hundreds of identical prints from one file - whereas with film-based prints there will always be slight variations.

I don't feel the need to be nostalgic about film as I use it 80-90% of the time and absolutely love it.
 
I don't think digital is "better" than film. Or inferior for that matter, where absolute quality is concerned. Vinyl albums had a warmth missing in most digital; but, the convenience of my iPod Touch with 1,000 of my favorite albums always with me trumps the warmth of vinyl every time. In most cases, digital photos are "superior" for me for the same reason.
 
Today one has the options to shoot images that will have a life or images that are disposable.

Images shot without any care or thought will not force the viewer to care or think about them, those are disposable images, and a vast majority of phone-shots and shots with cellphone aesthetic fall into that category.

Communication with other people requires thought and care. And anyone who expects that by carelessly pointing the cellphone at something and clicking and then sexing it up with Instagram will make them visual communicators are wasting their time.

Lets look at the main communication tool that we've, language. If someone sits there and carefully writes a story with genuine effort to communicate, that story has a life, because it makes sense, its meaningful and its "understandable". On the other hand, scribbling random nonsense on napkins, without any effort to say something meaningful makes those scribblings useless and disposable writing. Most cellphone shots are scribblings on a colorful (Instagram) napkin.

Instead of lamenting the end of photography with all the cellphone garbage and fearing the end of photography and what not, what photographers need to do is go back to the basics. Try to make articulate and meaningful images where you're trying to say something, just try to make images that are understood by a fellow human being.

And forget about the money part, we don't have to make money in everything that we do.
 
Exdsc, but we do have to make money from some things we do. And with technology reaching into every area of human endeavor, it will eventually take most of us out. Whether you have empathy for those of us who have made a decent living as photographers or not, or those who wish they could, you and your job are likely not beyond technology's reach.
 
Analogue photography often is compared with painting, as it hasn't disappeared either, but in fact it's more like copper etching.
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That's a very good comparison and in more ways than one. Around here, when anyone writes the word "photography", I'm sure that everyone thinks "portrait", "landscape" or whatever. But photography has been used, as has copper etching, just as much for industrial processes like printing, making circuit boards and creating integrated circuits.

So just as the two guys currently painting my house are well paid tradesmen, another person using the same tools and materials may be a starving, or less likely, a successful "artist".

It's not the tool, it's the relationship between the user and the audience which defines "art".
 
Sejanus.Aelianus said:
It's not the tool, it's the relationship between the user and the audience which defines "art".
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Forgive me if I haven't fully grasped the subject in hand but this point sums up quite well my feelings on my interpretation of some of what's being discussed.

I've read various posts by PKR here at RFF talking about some very good documentary work being captured on smart phones (as well as other digital alternatives) and one would expect nostalgia to be no part of this type of work.

It appears to me that technology provides an outlet for the masses, one that is taken up with relish by most, yet whatever medium or tool is used it is the 'artist' ( a term I'm using as a coverall) who determines the intent, content, ability and voice that their images provide.

In the same way some use social networks to share knowledge, news and information on what is happening in their sphere whilst others use the same technologies to share boozy pics of friends or banal comments on what they're eating for dinner that night.

...and Peter, I'm glad someone else thought the 'nostalgia isn't the same as it used to be' comment was worth a smile.
 
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