"Photography does not exist anymore!" New manifesto!

I think Mr. Puts should take up gardening. It unfortunately his workcomes under the heading of "If I can think it, it must be true" school of philosophy. I wonder if writers worry over the paradigm shift from writing on paper to typewriters to word processors?
 
So who is it who wants to eradicate film? The Iluminati? Majestic? The NSA? Must be a world wide conspiracy. I'm pretty sure the government is involved, too. With all the environmental laws which make it harder and harder to use certain chemicals like Selenium or the banning of lead in printed circuits which lead to the X-Pans demise.

I think, every digital camera is equipped with a special chip which edits out things we shouldn't see.
 
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Phillip and Mango - eloquent crticism and I agree totally. Phillip - if your note had been attached to an undergraduate essay might it also have had "could do better" included as a comment.

My question - had photography ever existed as a thing in it's own right?

Are there agonised debates in authors forums about "writing"? Ever since I read Camera Lucida as a student I've believed you will not have a productive discussion unless you are more specific.

Incidentally, I do recall quite a bit of debate in the UK when the Amstrad word processor first became popular in the 80's about how it was destryong writng and critics claiming they could discern which documents were written using a computer.

A purely personal view here - the standard of news photography is in terrible decline in the UK. I do wonder if this is to do with valuing speed of execution and distribution via electronic media over all else?

With all due respect to those whose lives have been uprooted by the recent flooding, really great pictures that tell the story of the devastation and distress are just not appearing. See the collection here (In Pictures):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6914876.stm

Robert Capa, Don McCullin where are you?
 
I wanted to make a point and I made and you discussed it, yes I might have made it differently I might have used other source but makes no difference, childing or not I play cards 😀
 
I suspect film manufacturing will hang around for some time.

One or two medium-sized BW manufacturers, with a host of small coaters.

That film until now was produced only in huge batches doesn't mean much: it had to, because the demand was huge and so gigantic plants were the only economical way to do it. It is very possible that manufacturing technology can be adjusted to micro-production levels.
 
Film manufacture has been around along time. Most of the mysteries have been solved. You certainly can scale back film production and keep quality high.
 
Very nice essay, which I agree with in full.

The medium is the message. Digital is immediate - let's see what just happened two seconds ago. Film - let's open up grandma's photo album and see what was goin' 50 years ago.

I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt that anyone - anyone's kids will be viewing "old jpegs" their dad took. People (general public) don't print digital images very often - it's a different medium, a different message...

immediacey vs. timelessness.

Part of the reason I went back to film after think "ain't digital grand" for a couple years is this very reason. Film forces me to make prints.

Again - in terms of emotional impact, I point to TV. Even though it's much, much cheaper to shoot digital, and the results are certainly acceptable, dramatic television is almost entirely shot on film even though it is easier and would cost far less to shoot digitally. Digital is left to cheap reality TV shows and sitcoms or as a way to view a scene that was shot on film - immediately. It is also often transfered to digital for special effects - digital manipulation and matte shots, then back to film it goes.

Filmmakers know, "the media is the message". Film = emotional impact, beauty , dream-like, it "tells a story", expensive but worth it. Digital = immediate, fast, easily manipulated, cheap.

I school, where I post student pics, I get this all the time. One recent comment, "I forgot how good film looks". One guy asked me for a recommendation on a digital point and shoot (I recommended a mid-range Panasonic). He didn't like it. He saw the images I made with the Zorki and Summar (which cost 1/2 as much as the Panasonic) and said he wanted his pics to "look like the ones I take". He's looking at Zorkis, GSNs, C35's. Another employee came in with her baby, she made a bee-line to my office and asked if I could take pictures with my film camera because "they look so much better than the digitals, and she doesn't have many prints". Shot a roll - super fast, with ambient light with my GSN - no flash needed, she absolutely loved them. One student - an engineering student, was walking around with a broken Sony DSLR. I happened to have taken an 8x10 portrait of him in class. He shook his head, and said he never got a pic that looked "like that" out of his broken $1500 Sony DSLR. No flash, no whirrling auto focus motors, no "pre-flashes", no giant zoom lens. Natural light, and a near silent "click", no asking people to "hold a pose". He asked (and several others) if they could have their portraits. Last weekend my wife overheard a debate with a couple relative who were floored I was shooting with a folder camera (Iskra)... they shoot digital point and shoots and a Nikon D70. When they refused to believe that a medium format film "blows away" their little point and shoot, I knew I was arguing with... (I'll be kind). My wife overheard the conversation and said my pics are 1000 times "better" than when I shot digital and there's "no comparison" between digital and film.

She's not a photographer, nor am I. I'm a rank amatuer. Nor are those who want the prints I make at the school where I work, or want to know what kind of camera I use. I don't "sell" film photography to these people. They're regular consumers who see the difference and wonder why they never get that "cool blurred background" and "almost 3D look" from their digicams.

The media is the message.
 
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rxmd said:
Well, well, I'm afraid that's the usual mix of:
  • cultural pessimism, the notion that things used to be better and are continually and inevitably getting worse ("Photography does not exist anymore", "[Leica] is forgetting its heritage of great silver halide photography")
  • elitism - photography is a craft that is endangered if the masses are enabled to practice it, as opposed to a few enlightened individuals ("Everybody can create technologically perfect images at this moment: the powerful post processing software will take care of all technical hurdles that the film-based photograph had to master." - OK. I actually don't mind that everybody can do that. It means that technological perfection isn't enough anymore, but that if you want your images to say something you now have to make more of an effort. Where's the problem with that?)
  • diffuse talk about aspects of photography that are insinuated (but not said) not to be present when the image is recorded on a sensor; the supposed difference isn't concretised, because it is only a subjective fixed idea and hence impossible to concretise ("Photography is writing with light, and fixing the shadows. Human interaction and manipulation are minimized and reduced to the location, viewpoint and moment of exposure by the photographer." - What's that got to do with film again?)
  • intellectual habitus, here the usage of French without translation. The reader gets the impression that photography apparently isn't for everyone, particularly not for the non-French-speaking unwashed masses, but only for intellectuals capable of understanding the finer subtleties of culture.
  • half-directed criticism without offering alternatives ("digital photography (a huge misnomer)" - OK, what do you suggest?)
  • seemingly-philosophical statements of the obvious ("This attitude is not only widespread it is the conventional wisdom worldwide. Being universally accepted does not make it true. If that were the case, we would still believe that the world is flat or that the world has been created six thousand years ago.")
There probably are a number of intelligent things to be said about digital photography and how it changes the way photographers depict the world. Unfortunately Erwin Puts doesn't say them. At least not in this piece, which is one of his weakest IMHO.
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A most intelligent and articulate reply to Puts's drivel. I wholeheartedly agree.

That article is so full of half-truths, sophisms, pure bad faith, and dishonesty that I can't see why he even bothered to write it in the first place. It's just pure wanking.
 
Filmmakers know film is "better"? I wonder what George Lucas would have to say about that?

Digital is about instant gratification? Polariod film.

Film has better tonality (and people care). The bad prints that photofinishers have been cranking out for generations for film photographers don't seem to support that.

Will grandkids be looking at granddads JPGs? I don't even know where my grandfathers photographs are? (Certainly you cannot assume that data formats WILL become unreadable just because it has happened in the past - there is more of an investment in it now. But then again, I have a hard time finding a place that can print my glass plates.)
 
I am sure that there will always be film material in production, simply because there will always be a market for it. Even if all photographers decided to shoot digital only, there would still be a market. Keep in mind that B/W film is also getting used in areas outside "fine art photography", such as traffic control. Many manufacturers already make most of their money in these specialized areas.
 
Erwin and Ken Rockwell should have a duo lens chart exhibit sometime 😀

As far as chemicals are concerned, I'm not worried at all since so many recepies are available and we can always mix our own.
Film and paper can become a bit of an issue to get, but as of now all of the investigative photography has to be done on film, so hopefully at least those guys and us will keep some players in the game. Plus, I'm quiet confident that fine-art folks will want to use film too.
The university close to where I live just started offering digital photography classes, but at the same time, their biggest investment this year has been on brand new stainless steel sinks, new enlargers and rotating doors for the new huge dark room. 😎
The digital photo students will have to share their plastic feelings with the graphic designers in a Mac lab.😛

On that note - FILM RULES, and the more we preach it and show our prints to others, the more chances it has of survival.

URRAAA!!!
 
Lordy, you guys do not like the guy.

Seriously for a minute there is the kernel of a point there. With film, there is always a negative and if you have fiddled with it it can be seen on inspection. No matter what stunts are pulled in the darkroom one can always go back to the negative. Philip Jones Griffiths has recently written along such lines when commenting on issues surrounding the use of digital imaging in photojournalism and the manipulation of images (some of which has got photojournalists into trouble recently). He fears for the veracity of photojournalism in the digital age. I do not think we can dismiss the views of such a man out of hand.

Is digital imaging photography? Without getting into a tedious semantic debate - I am going to side step that one. What is certain is that the way "digital" is developing as an image making operation is radically different from film. Digital capture is, or can be, just the first step in the image making process. What can be done with the file on the computer is quite impossible in the darkroom.

One could think of the raw file captured on the camera as like an artist's sketch for a piece he will later produce in his studio. When one looks at the output of the top end advertising photographers and the close working relationships they have with their retouchers/mac operators this would seem a fair analogy. Almost everything can be "fixed" in Photoshop and often is.

Perhaps the most extreme example is in car photography where cars are often not actually photographed at all any more. The only photography that goes on is to shoot some backgrounds. The rest is done in CGI using wire frame diagrams of the car etc. Compare that to the pre-digital situation with the photographer spending a day setting up the shoot, lighting it with the utmost care and then exposing some 10x8 transparency. I make no comment about which is "better". They are just very, very different.

Of course one can use a digital camera in a film like way. However, the point is that in many professional applications this is not happening. One could therefore argue that what is being done is digital imaging and not photography as one understands it from the film era.
 
Roma said:
As far as chemicals are concerned, I'm not worried at all since so many recepies are available and we can always mix our own.
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I actually meant chemicals used for film manufacture, not processing (those are fairly common and accessible). Photo grades of gelatine, proper triacetate base, sensibilizing agents etc. might become hard to allocate with time.
 
I don't follow. If we are so dead, why every half an hour another guy stands up to proclaim we are dead ?

Anyway, thanks for the free propaganda, enhancing RFF membership.

Cheers,
Ruben
 
Of course one can use a digital camera in a film like way. However, the point is that in many professional applications this is not happening. One could therefore argue that what is being done is digital imaging and not photography as one understands it from the film era.
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Well, commercial photography in the "film era" was just as much manipulated as digital photography is today. Nothing has really changed.

Natually, I have no idea what you mean by "using a digital camera in a film-like way"? Both my digital camera and film camera have a shutter button. Both require focusing and an exposure. I don't use them any differently.
 
greyhoundman said:
"a silver halide grain structure creates a final picture that can hardly be altered. "


What a can of tripe. He has obviuously never studied the work of Stalin's master darkroom people.

Can hardly be altered, yeah right.
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If I wanted my boss to believe a photograph was real, I used a Polaroid SLR680. He figured I could "probably not" do much to it.
 
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