Digital BW, The Print

I hate to go back to Richard Kersteil - who I had for several courses at 
the MD Instutitute.  We were discussing creative control and how 
photography fits in to the larger world of art. What you say is true for 
most of the art world. The discussion centered around the art world in a 
larger society. The art world is very "fashionable." I seems to run in 
cycles were many people are in their "blue period" just because Picasso 
was.  There is a lot of copy cats out there - maybe good copycats but 
still lots. In photography how many "half domes" are there. Adams has 
already done that, why do we need it doen again unless there is 
something new to say by doing it.

The along comes a revolutionary - and the trend changes. He/she then 
become fashionable and many copy cats arise.  Kersteil commented that he 
hoped he was still active when the "digital revolution" hit and computer 
technology could be used to give the photographer more control of the 
process thus opening up new avenues for creative potential.  This was in 
the mid '70's.

It is only the "right wing" that demands that if you use anything that 
wasn't available to Adams then you are a heretic. I would expect Adams 
would have been one of the first to explore creative potential of 
digital photography if it were available in his prime.

Truman

Alan Zinn wrote:

>
>
> Rightly or not a photograph's authenticity is judged by how well it fits a
> formal prototype not how it came to be made. Why can't there be an 
> authentic
> style of digitally manipulated photographs (for the sake of argument, not
> montages which I consider a form of drawing) that will endure the same as
> traditional images? The highly manipulated style of A. Adams, Steichen, or
> Eugene Smith, for example, is unquestioned yet using a computer is thought
> to be somehow unfaithful to the craft.
>
> AZ

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., Truman Prevatt 
<tprevatt@m...> wrote:
<snipped>
> 
> It is only the "right wing" that demands that if you use anything 
that 
> wasn't available to Adams then you are a heretic. I would 
expect Adams 
> would have been one of the first to explore creative potential of 
> digital photography if it were available in his prime.

Possibly. On the other hand, Jerry Ulesmann, photography's 
living Mr. Experimental, has assorted digital tools at his disposal 
(and has for some time), yet he chooses the conventional 
darkroom for the majority of his work, presumably because that's 
the way he works best.  Choice is always good, whichever 
direction one chooses to go, which isn't always obvious.

 - Barrett

One of the things about photography that often catches people off-guard and
in fact frequently will give a photograph its power to evoke an emotion or
reaction is that a photograph is much more distanced from reality than the
common view would have it. It is more often somewhat a tenuous thread that
stretches from the photograph to reality.

Never mind the more abstract issues of the language (or lack of) and form of
photography, just think of the some of the basics:

It's two dimensional

It's often in black and white

Even if it's in colour - the colours usually aren't "real"

They are usually smaller than the "reality they attempt represent" - by a
huge degree in most cases.

They impose a frame around what it is trying to represent - how real is
that?

The lenses used either compress or expand the plane of the image, thus
distorting the reality compared to how we perceive it outside of
photography.

They capture perhaps 1/500th or 1/25th or at most a minute or two of time.
That's not, generally how we perceive something or how something really
exists.

The photograph always looks backwards - that is, it's a piece of history, of
the past - it looks to something that we can never see again and is in that
sense not real at all.

So, just a few for starters  :-)

So, how accurate a representation of reality is a photograph? - not very
accurate at all. As accurate as, say, one of Picasso's paintings of women.
(which of course may be a more true representation... but that's another
issue)

tim