Digital BW, The Print

"Tim Atherton" <tim@...> writes:

> > You missed the point.  It's a fact that a LOT of photography is about
> > accurate reproduction of a scene.  What you took a picture of, is what you
> > took a picture of, plain and simple, in and of the image it self.  What it
> > represents is something possibly different, but it's at least accurate to
> > what the eye saw.  We're not talking about crime scene photography here,
> > which is not related, in my opinion, to this discussion.
> 
> Austin,
> 
> the point is that photography can never accurately reproduce a scene (at the
> most banal level, all photographs arrest the flow of time, extracting a
> fraction of a second - a fraction far to short for the eye to register - and
> so the instant the photograph is taken, it becomes unreal and inaccurate - a
> construct). The photograph you produce is merely an attempt to represent
> what you, the photographer, saw. To insist it is (or can be) an accurate (or
> true) reproduction is simplistic at best and certainly inaccurate.

This is both completely true and completely false.  

I'll certainly grant all the obvious ways in which a photo is an
abstraction from reality, and not the reality itself.  Frozen moment,
chosen angle, in B&W loss of color, and so forth.  These are the
senses in which it is completely true.  

Nevertheless, one of the big reasons photography is important *in some
kinds of art* is because the image produced is directly and
mechanically mapped from reality.  It's still a map, and the map is
still not the territory.  But a photograph differs from a painting in
this key way, and this distinction affects the *reactions of people*
viewing the works of art. 

Meanwhile, bird books are very often illustrated with paintings rather
than photographs because the paintings give a better representation of
the *real* animals.  Life is strange.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@...  /  http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
 John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net
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