Digital BW, The Print

"Austin Franklin" <darkroom@...> writes:

> Keith,
> 
> > >>Fist, photography always has and always will be about artificiality and
> > >>manipulation (it's two dimensional for goodness sake - how real and
> > >>true is that...?).
> > >
> > >I certainly disagree with that.  A LOT of photography is about accurate
> > >reproduction of a scene.
> > >
> >
> > Not since I left Pleasantville have I seen a B&W image that actually
> > accurately depicts reality.
> >
> > B&W imagery is axiomatically an abstraction of reality..
> 
> That's not true...it is different from some people's vision of reality, but
> it IS reality, just an aspect of reality YOUR sensors don't see.  What's
> there, is in fact, there.  But none the less, it's only tonally "different".
> That doesn't make it an abstraction at all.

What does "abstraction" mean to you, then?  Presenting a simplified
(less information) version of something (with the simplification
chosen intelligently, not at random) is the essence of abstraction.
And a B&W photo is clearly one step more abstracted than a color
photo. 

> Is IR not reality?  Just because you can't see in that spectrum, doesn't
> make it not reality, or make it "an abstraction of reality".

If I beat my head on a photo of a wall (suspended by a string), I will
not hurt my head much.  If I beat my head on the real wall, I will.  I
claim that the photo of the wall *is* in fact an abstraction of
reality.  It's certainly not the real thing.
-- 
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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