QUOTE=Andy K]Oh please! It's a computer and an image editing computer program. It is NOT a darkroom.
Digital users need to start being honest and stop trying to pretend what they do is the same as film photography. It is a totally different medium. They should celebrate that fact and stop trying to disguise what they are doing as film photography.
Btw, a photoshop is a place you go to to buy film, chemicals and paper.[/QUOTE]
I almost religiously stay clear of film vs. digital arguments because they very rarely lead to anything constructive. But, Andy, some historical perspective is in order here...
Near the turn of the 20th century, when photography was in its infancy, many artists, museums, etc. argued that photography could not be considered an art form because, they said, the photograph was made by a machine and chemistry. Both the camera-machine and the chemistry were villified in a sense. They were inhuman, un-aesthetic, cold, products of industry, etc.. This was the nonsense of 1905, for example, as echoed now in the nonsense of 2005.
Photography (chemical based or digital) is a medium for drawing which, in the case of both mediums, is made possible through applied science. There is nothing sacred about emulsions bound in plastic (or on glass, paper, etc.) exposed in a machine and made visible through chemical reactions. In the strictest sense, photographs are not handmade objects. They are objects created by machines which are guided by human beings. What are these machines? film cameras, digital cameras, processing tanks, JOBO processors, enlargers, print washers, computers, graphics tablets, dry mount presses, etc.. None of these machines is sacred. It's true that digital photography is dependent on electricity, but conventional photography depends on chemistry. Either way, it's a harnessing of applied science. There is nothing inherently romantic or noble about either electricity or chemistry. As photographers we have an absolute dependence on science. We need science and its discoveries for our mediums. The physical process of photography is emphatically not the same as a caveman scratching on one rock with another to make his drawings. That is to say, the medium is not the same, the caveman did not need science. But the result is the same, in the end - a picture.
From the late 19th century onwards, serious photographers ignored the naysayers and made strong visual art with then new photographic tools: Talbot, Cameron, Atget, Strand, etc., etc. They bent the machines and the chemistry to their wills. In the same way now, digital photographers are bending pixels and computers to their wills. The creative spirit that guides this harnessing of science remains the same. The change in the specific products of science being used don't change the fundamental task: people are using tools to make pictures.
So if someone wants to describe electronic picture processing as being analogous to chemical processing, so be it. The term "digital darkroom" is apt. That term doesn't "disguise" the process, it's just one way of describing it. Phrases like: "Digital users need to start being honest...etc., etc." don't have a sound basis. First of all we're not "users" (an ugly term that seems to have drifted over from computer science), we're photographers. Second of all, there is nothing dishonest about naming new processes via analogies with existing processes. The term photography itself is based on an analogy with drawing.
I'm amazed sometimes by the animosity some seem to have towards digital photography which is often accompanied by a strong romanticizing of chemical photography. It sometimes makes me wonder how many of these folks spent years in the darkroom breathing developer and stop bath and fixer. For me, it was twenty years, sometimes 8 hours a day, and so I don't romanticize chemistry at all. I have to imagine that the anger expressed towards digital photography comes in part from frustration with the increasing disappearance of films, enlarging papers, etc.. *That* frustration I can understand and I hope that these materials remain available. The best way to make that happen is not to rail against digital photography but instead to go out and buy lots of film and paper. I was sad to see Agfa in trouble because they donated the materials I needed for a large documentary project in Ireland years ago. But they have to run a business and if they can't sell enough product, it's curtains. People should be free to buy and not buy what they want...and they should be free to use whatever photographic or other medium they want.
Cheers,
Sean
