Worth it????

[Sumarongi]

Classic photography (involving chemistry) is just a tiny branch of all possible arts; so, why not grant the new art without chemistry a new wording?

However, photography in general encompasses lots of different processes, skills, materials and actions, which is why when taken as a whole, the two are very different and, I think, need different names.

Hm... what about

Photo-graphy versus Photo-cybernetics?

I'd propose *photocyby* (pronounced like: scifi) as abbreviation

 

[Axel]

...

And if you disagree, then you must also agree that the 3D modeller in my analogy is a potter, which really is nonsense.

Why shouldn´t a 3D modeller called potter as long as he uses similar materials and creates something similar like his fathers?

Don´t know why such terms come up in a thread with a clear theme.

 

[jsrockit]

Your analogy is too narrow which is why you're missing the point. If you take one small part of digital photography and film photography - let's say, composition within a viewfinder - then of course both processes are almost identical. However, photography in general encompasses lots of different processes, skills, materials and.....

Content and composition are generally the most important parts though. Without you don’t have much to work with. Luckily museums and galleries accept digital for what it is... photography.

 

[creenus]

I love Leica M film cameras. There are times the 35mm format is just too tiny, so I go to a Bronica ETRSi.

The Leica M cameras have taught me to concentrate on the essentials of an image, and that having lots of different focal length lenses does not matter to me as much as expressing my vision/version of reality on film in monochrome - also in infrared. I enjoy the limitations, mostly, of just using an M6 or M2 and just one lens. It helps one concentrate on the image, IMO. I also use a tripod with the M film cameras - not always, but for those times when I need certain degrees of sharpness and depth of field.

I'm the black-and-white darkroom tech at a local junior college. My boss, Tony Bennett, is a well-known (at least around northwest New Mexico) retired commercial photographer who teaches one B&W film class and four digital classes, so I am learning a lot about studio lighting and the digital process. Also about framing large prints and setting up student photography shows, as well as covering/teaching his classes when he can't be there. It's a good gig. I also am a writing tutor at the college's Writing Center. I'm technically retired but I've never been busier in my life!

I have the run of the darkroom and can develop/print whenever I want for free. My recent printing this semester has helped me better hone in on what I'm trying to do. Also fine tuning my exposures to the density I want.

I will audit one of his digital classes this Fall. I bought a used Nikon D5600 and a cheap zoom lens to play around with. I have used some of Tony's digital Canon gear for small product shoots for him. I enjoy the convenience of it but cannot say I'm sold on digital completely. There's so much digital post-production to the process. I still love film.

I hope to take a short night shooting/star formation seminar at the nearby Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado in June. It's all digital, so I will be there with my little Nikon and Leitz Tiltall tripod. It's put on by the National Park Service and Tamron, so I'll get to play around with their digital lenses. Should be fun. I will also shoot some slide film on my M6 when I'm there - what the hey - why not?

I believe there is so much to learn about both formats. Not to mention learning about life itself through photography. =)

 

[mich rassena]

Utter rubbish. Talk about flogging a dead horse...!

Digital and analogue cameras create images by exactly the same basic process: an image is focused on a light-sensitive surface, exciting electrons to create a related pattern. This pattern is latent and cannot be seen, and so is converted to a visible image. This image can then be printed (optional). The printing process can be the same for both digital and analogue: for example, Lightjet C-type printing on traditional silver paper using light (laser).

Different kinds of processes have been used throughout the history of photography - daguerreotype, tintype, ambrotype, Autochrome, Kodachrome... on metal, glass, celluloid, plastic, paper... And today, silicon wafers - including digital cameras that work like traditional Polaroid cameras: you take a photo and a paper print comes out.

As you’re being pedantic, which of the above do you consider “photography”?

If it’s the use of light that concerns you throughout the entire process (notwithstanding that light creates the latent undeveloped image in both digital and analogue cameras, and can be used to create silver prints from both types of image), we can build a camera that uses a digital sensor and places the latent image onto traditional film: of course, that would be ridiculous, but it could be done - would that be a photograph according to your rules, since you then have a “traditional” negative that needs to be developed chemically using light?

Short summary: a photograph is any image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface. End of.

This form of hair splitting was invented as a method to exclude digital photography from the historic category of photographic processes. People who believe it are quite dogmatic about it even though it is a false distinction. I think they're just insecure about the future of film-based photography and want to defend their territory.

 

[xayraa33]

This form of hair splitting was invented as a method to exclude digital photography from the historic category of photographic processes. People who believe it are quite dogmatic about it even though it is a false distinction. I think they're just insecure about the future of film-based photography and want to defend their territory.

I don't see it in that manner, photographic technology moves on and there is room for all to indulge their hobby or even their profession.

It is all good, what ever floats your boat, anachronistic photography or the latest digital doodad photography, it is all photography. The hard part is mastering your craft and not what tools you choose to use to accomplish your goal.

It is like daguerreotypists knocking the wet plate collodion guys or the collodion guys putting down the lazy dry plates fanatics etc.

Or the miniature camera aficionados (35mm film ) of the 1930s being berated by the 5x7 Graflex dudes and so on.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Content and composition are generally the most important parts though. Without you don’t have much to work with. Luckily museums and galleries accept digital for what it is... photography.

That's it, full stop. The people who keep howling at the moon and stamping their feet like children because they don't accept that digital photography isn't photography are basically saying: "The world's museum curators, art historians, art dealers, patrons, and collectors are all too stupid to know the truth, but I have outsmarted them all. I know the truth!"

Seventeen years ago, I was forced by serious chemical allergies to stop using the darkroom to print. I bought a film scanner and an inkjet printer, and since then ALL of my photographs have been printed digitally. I later bought my first digital camera; have owned several over the years, and sold many prints from them.

Not once in all of that time has any museum curator, gallery director, art dealer, or collector anywhere in the world ever told me that my prints were not real photographs. The only people to ever spout such nonsense where amateur photographers. If I listened to them, I'd have had to stop doing photography nearly 20 years ago because of the health problems that have plagued me since childhood.

 

[jsrockit]

The only people to ever spout such nonsense where amateur photographers. If I listened to them, I'd have had to stop doing photography nearly 20 years ago because of the health problems that have plagued me since childhood.

This is the key... only listen to those who you respect and whose work you respect. AND do what is right for you and your photography.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Chris - I agree. But if you read my posts again you'll see that I'm doing nothing but arguing it should have a different name to acknowledge how different it is from analogue photography. I'm not saying it shouldn't be valued, used, bought, exhibited etc.

Museums, galleries, dealers and collectors all value collage, but they don't mix it up with sculpture, painting, drawing or print making. When something has a name, it helps everyone understand the processes and materials used to create the end result.

And if we are now living in a world where nothing matters but the final print, then a lot of computer-generated art should also be called 'photography', because there is practically no way to distinguish it from a 'real' photograph.

I've read them, but you're still wrong. Curators, historians, artists, dealers, galleries, museums, publications, university art programs all disagree with you. Are they all frauds and liars, conspiring to destroy 'real' photography while you alone know the 'truth'?

As for computer art, if its made from different photographs combined to make a new, conceptualized scene, then it is photography. This is not new to digital work; people like Jerry Uelsmann have been doing such work in the darkroom for decades. No one has ever suggested that Uelsmann is not a photographer, or that his work is not photography. Quite the opposite; he is regarded as one of the greatest photographers in history, yet virtually none of his work is 'straight' unmanipulated work.

Here's a great article from the Smithsonian about it.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

As I have asked without an answer, what makes you think that you know better than all of those curators, historians, universities, museums, galleries, and collectors? Are they all frauds? Liars? Dishonest *******s? Satan's minions?

There is such a thing as right and wrong in language. Words have meanings because the majority of those who use those words agree on their meanings. You don't get to change them. I'm a retired English teacher. Imagine if each individual got to assign his own meanings to words? It would be impossible to teach literature, reading, or writing. More importantly, communication between people would be impossible.

Whether you like it or not, digital is a form of photography. That is not up for debate; its a settled fact. "Photography" is French for "Drawing with Light." The definition has no qualifiers for process or equipment choice. If you wanted to limit it to the processes used when photography was invented 190 years ago, then virtually no photography has been done for the last 150 of those years!

To me, it's nothing to do with calling people out for being wrong, or being angry at anyone - it's simply about proper categorisation so viewers understand what they're seeing.

I get what you're saying about photo-manipulation being as old as photography itself, but people like Jerry Uelsmann took pieces of analogue photographs and created other analogue photographs from them. His images have never been near a computer. They are all hand-crafted photographic collages.

What I'm referring to are 'photographs' like this of Heath Ledger:

Labelling this as 'photography' in an exhibit would mis-inform the viewer. Whoever created this has skills beyond my wildest dreams, should be applauded and sell their work for a high price, but they never sat in front of Heath Ledger and took a photo of him. They sat in front of a computer for weeks. Which is why it's called something other than photography, despite the end result being almost indistinguishable from a 'real' photograph.

Now, I'm not saying digital photography is as different to analogue photography as this extreme, but I believe it's far enough away to deserve it's own name that should be used instead of the generic 'photography'.

 

[RichC]

...if we are now living in a world where nothing matters but the final print, then a lot of computer-generated art should also be called 'photography', because there is practically no way to distinguish it from a 'real' photograph.

You say “should” as if this isn’t already the case. Over time, it has become accepted that a photograph is simply an image created by a camera - how or what happens to it is of no consequence.

Accepted by whom you may ask. Most people: Chris C lists a few. When the meaning of something is established (acknowledging that meaning evolves over time), it’s sensible to accept this. If I decide my own definitions, communication fails! Surely you’d agree that refusing the modern meaning of, say, “meat” would be foolish: originally it meant food in general, not flesh.

Returning to photography and adding another example photographer, consider Gursky. Gursky is well known for digitally manipulating images taken with a camera, often changing their appearance dramatically and creating one image from several. Yet he’s considered one of the most important living photographers and his photographs are owned by major museums such as MoMA in the US and The Tate in the UK, and I’ve just seen a massive exhibition in London’s prestigious Hayward Gallery of this “acclaimed German photographer” (as the gallery labels him).

In fact, Gursky’s photographs are considered so important to contemporary art that one became the most expensive ever sold at $4.5 million. That was “Rhine II” where all distracting objects such as buildings were Photoshopped out, to give a deliberate bland, banal appearance:

So, we need to go with the flow: photography today includes digital images and their manipulation, as well as film images. What folk are grumbling at is your attempt to define photography for everyone.

How you personally make photographs is a different matter. If you only use film and make darkroom prints, and have no interest in digital photography, that’s fine. I use both film and digital, and my line in the sand is that I refuse to alter reality by adding or removing a feature that would be impossible in real life, so I’ll tidy up by cloning out, say, an annoying piece of trash that I couldn’t reach, but I won’t change a sky, delete a tree or move a lamp post.

The Heath Ledger image you posted involves far too much digital manipulation to interest me in working similarly and has moved too far from reality for my taste - but it is still photography, and I have absolutely no problem thinking of it as a photograph even though it’s an entirely new image collaged out of other photographs. As we all know, photographs are all fictions anyway and never depict the truth, with photographers showing you only what they want you to see...

 

[Dogman]

Tedious.

After the discussion on what is real photography, we'll gather to discuss if photography is art.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

When people display photographs created using process X, they almost always say so, in large letters: An Exhibition of Tintypes by Joe Bloggs.

Why the reluctance when it comes to digital photos?

An Exhibition of Digital Photography by Joe Bloggs...

...is something I never see, but would be informative in helping people understand the work within the broader sphere of photography.

I have never been to a museum or gallery that put the specific process in an exhibition's title. I lived a couple years in Santa Fe, a major center for fine art photography. Never saw that in any of Santa Fe's many art galleries, including those that specialized in photography.

The plain hard truth is that no one in the art world gives a **** what process or camera type a photographer used. Only photographers obsess about that stuff. When I was getting started 20 yrs ago, a museum curator, when I started telling him about my process, stopped me and told me that no one cares how I made the photo; they care about the image and my intellectual reasons for making it. Nothing else. He told me that those who insist on broadcasting to the world that they used a certain process were compensating for lack of creativity; quality in art does not depend on materials or process. He warned me not to do that or it would make me look like an amateur.

Over the years, I have always thought of that when I encounter people in photo forums trying to claim that digital photographs are not 'real' photos.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I don’t know better than anyone else, but my opinions are as valid as any art critic or gallery owner, and I have the same right to express them. Having said that, I’m sure a lot of the categorisation of photography by people involved with museums and galleries is driven more by commercial decisions than a desire to inform the public about how their works are created.

And I’m no English scholar, but isn’t Photography derived from the Greek?

Its French. Remember that photography was invented there. The French root words of Photography probably are ultimately derived from Latin and/or Greek, as many words in Romance Languages (Eg. French, Spanish, Italian) are.

 

[pgk]

Photography is actually derived from Ancient Greek: photo = light, graphé = drawing. I'm not sure that we know who first thought it up but if you look up in wiki (with the usual caveats) there are some suggestions. I see no reason for digital camera images not to come under the meaning of the word, so they should most accurately be described as photographs. However, digital images manipulated on a computer would seem to drift outside it and should perhaps, if we want to be as accurate as possible, be referred to as 'photographically derived digital art'. Many images are ambiguous.

Getting back to the thread's topic. If a photographer who was used to using a 1950's Leica M3 picked up a current digital M, it would seem to be a modern variant of the M3 and be familiar in many respects. If the 'capture device' looks like a film camera then it may well be used for taking photographs. And on the topic of being 'worth it', well we've never really had such excellent cameras and in terms of the number of images they are capable of they are cheaper than film cameras ever were overall.

 

[creenus]

Well, your opinions may be valid to you, but not to me. Dismissing an entire world of photography and people who like these images because they happen to be digital and you don't care for them is silly, IMO. But sure, you're entitled to your opinion. It just does not make it valid to me.

Chris is absolutely correct. No one save photography enthusiasts give a rip how the image was produced.

I have spent hours on black and white darkroom prints by varying the contrast, exposure and toning or hand coloring. Does that make it manipulated? Sure it does.

No one cares, except purists on photo blogs. And that is my opinion, which does connote validity.

Just sayin' ...

I don’t know better than anyone else, but my opinions are as valid as any art critic or gallery owner, and I have the same right to express them. Having said that, I’m sure a lot of the categorisation of photography by people involved with museums and galleries is driven more by commercial decisions than a desire to inform the public about how their works are created.

And I’m no English scholar, but isn’t Photography derived from the Greek?

 

[pgk]

As far as I'm aware (and correct me if I'm wrong) no digital camera is capable of actually producing an image that the human eye can see.

Well, given that no camera can produce an image as the eye sees it (fortunately, the eye is a very dodgy optic and your perceived images are based on experience and massive infilling by the brain. The eye/brain system is extremely complex and only the central area of the eye sees colour and or any degree of sharp image) this isn't really any sort of argument about any sort of camera, digital or analogue.

From your statements it would seem that the only real photographs are transparencies as any other system requires some sort of intermediate stage. Mind you I always preferred to shoot slide film in my film Leicas.

 

[Deleted member 65559]

"And on the topic of being 'worth it', well we've never really had such excellent cameras and in terms of the number of images they are capable of they are cheaper than film cameras ever were overall. (digital M)."
That's a bit of a stretch, since you can still use a 1954 M3. In 50 years will an M10 be more than a paperweight? How long does it take to amortize the $7k US....& subsequent service?

 

[jsrockit]

You shouldn't listen or respect the opinions of people who have views different to your own? That would make for......oh......the world we live in!

I think you twisted my words... I was speaking of photography. Why would I care what someone thinks if they don't know what they are talking about when it comes to photography? In that way, I think it is best to choose who you let influence you.

 

[jsrockit]

When people display photographs created using process X, they almost always say so, in large letters: An Exhibition of Tintypes by Joe Bloggs.

I believe this is when the process is an archaic process which means as much to the work as the content. They wouldn't have said this when tintypes were the mainstream process.

Why the reluctance when it comes to digital photos?

An Exhibition of Digital Photography by Joe Bloggs...

Because digital is the norm...just as C-prints and silver gelatin prints were the norm. It would be so redundant to mention it all of the time. That said... every museum states how an image was printed on every single title card next to the image... silver-gelatin print, c-print, inkjet, etc. Most color work seems to be digital printed now when I go to galleries... even if the original capture medium was film. It's just more archival.