Re: [Digital BW] Digest Number 1004
2002-09-17 by Rick Colson
This thread is getting ludicrous and tedious and is unproductive. It would be best debated in some other forum. Can the moderator please put an end to it? Thanks, Rick Colson on 9/17/02 5:17 PM, DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com at DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com wrote:
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> Message: 4 > Date: 17 Sep 2002 14:01:39 -0500 > From: David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@...> > Subject: Re: Very cool B&W Lightjet prints > > "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.