Digital BW, The Print

>
> Thank you, well said.  It's so easy to get caught up in the numbers
> and think that's all that counts.  There's a whole 'nother world of
> perception out there that often defies explanation, especially when it
> comes to art.  
>
> Take, for example, the recent work of Sally Mann, who is one of
> today's most acclaimed photographic artists
>
> "Mann has won numerous awards, including Guggenheim and National
> Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her photographs are in the
> permanent collections of many museums, including The Museum of Modern
> Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the
> Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C."
>
> Her current Deep South photos are bringing wide acclaim, yet they are
> the very antithesis of everything we attribute to AA and the western
> landscape school:  often underexposed, out of focus, extreme
> vignetting, corner softness, light leak streaks, or any combination of
> these.  Yet, they convey a powerful emotional intensity.  Here's a
> quote of her answering a question about her equipment:
>
> "Well, you know I told you that none of my equipment has ever been any
> good, I certainly could go out and buy a good, tack-sharp lens that
> would take the perfect picture that's in focus from end to end. But
> instead, I spend an awful lot of time at that antique mall looking
> around for these lenses with just the right amount of decrepitude. The
> glue has to be peeling off of the lens elements, it's great if its
> mildewed and out of whack\ufffda lens is made up of several different
> pieces of glass which are supposed to stay glued in the right
> relationship with each other\ufffdbut my most prized lens has one of the
> pieces of glass askew, so when the light comes in it it's refulgent.
> It just bounces all around and does this great sort of luminescent
> thing on the glass. You can tell a good ruined lens right from the
> get-go....they are the ones you find in the trash cans of old photo
> studios, in some ghost town in Iowa. I mean, that's the kind of lens
> I'm looking for."
>
> Some incredibly beautiful landscapes are grainy, soft focus and low
> dmax (often platinum).  There is more to this than numbers.
>
> Regards,
> Clayton
>
>
> Info on black and white digital printing at    
> http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm
>
>
>   


A very good point, Clayton. I have often said that Cartier-Bresson, who 
was known as Mr. Leica, could as well have been using a Brownie Hawkeye. 
And in that world, in the context of those incredibly compelling 
photographs, Photoshop is virtually meaningless. The power of the images 
transcended the technique. Which, I think, leads to a very important 
question that all of us who pursue fine art photography should ask: at 
what point do we become trapped by the technology.

Cheers,

Rem