Looks like we are asking "What is a photograph?" again...

[Darin Boville]

There is nothing about a digital image that makes it a photograph. To me, a photograph is still a physical object written onto with light. Digital images are images just the same and there is nothing worse about them than photographic images, but they are not photographs. If digital images can count as photographs because they can superficially resemble them, then photographs can count as paintings.

The fact that digital images are called photographs wouldn't bother me if it was just a matter of semantics, however, it's evidence that society did not and does not recognize what a radical innovation digital images are, and that is a sad thing.

If a digitally printed image is not a photograph then a Tesla is not a car.

--Darin

[Stephen Willard]

It hasn't been that simple in the last 150 years! The questions these curators are asking have been confounded by work that goes back at least that far.

Absolutely paulr, but as noted a camera can be anything that records a real world image using light. I had a friend in college who pulled her pants down for me and sat on a copier and then tripped the copy button. For me that qualifies as a real photograph, and I believe I still have that image. If I can find it, I will post it. It is quite lovely, although many would find it pornographic.

I remember reading about a doctor who bought one of those big 18 wheeler tractor tailors and drilled a small hole in the back door and hung a gigantic piece of photographic paper on the opposing wall. It was a giant mobile camera obscura. To my simple mind, that fits the definition of a photograph.

Anyway, I am just trying to have some simple fun with a question that is not that important.

[paulr]

For me that qualifies as a real photograph...

Sounds like an awesome photograph.

Re: the word "indexical," it comes from semiotics, and describes one of the three basic ways a sign can point to the thing it signifies. An indexical sign is one that has a causal relationship with its referent. A photograph, unlike a painting, has in some sense been caused by the thing it describes.

Another example of an index is a fingerprint.

People debate how important indexicality is to photography. I see it as one of the only significant things that distinguishes it from other media.

When we debate if something is a photograph (like, after it's been painted on or photoshopped), I think terms of degree. How much of it is still photographic? I look at how much of the image still bears an indexical connection to its source. Manipulations that change color or tone, or that crop, distort, sharpen, or blur, don't seem to break this link. Airbrushing in a celebrity, or removing a political enemy ... different story.

A lot of the new work being done today pokes pretty hard at these limits. With this work, I don't think the question "is it a photograph" is the most interesting one. It matters to institutions who need to decide what budget pays for it, but I think these questions of taxonomy generally sort themselves out.

[paulr]

Some of the questions in that article apply to work that goes back a long way. I'm thinking of Steichen's multi-layered, hand-colored landscapes, Man Ray's photograms (the scanner work in questions sounds like part collage, part photogram), and all the elaborately constructed and retouched studio work from the 19th century.

Some of the most interesting work in question uses traditional photographic materials in non-photographic ways (as opposed to what we're most used to ... modern materials used in traditionally photographic ways).

[Rollinhofuji]

I fear this might be putting me in trouble again (as happened some years ago on APUG), but two friends of mine and I have "defined" (or rather occupied) the term "genuine photograph" several years ago.
It might not have been a good choice of the name. But we set up some kind of manifesto (yeah, really) and described what we think photography is about.
We did not say what photography is - we instead defined what we had called "Genuine Photography". The main reason for us was to be able to let the viewer distinguish between a photograph (let´s say as described by Stephen) and a photorealistic image.

I´d rather not go into the details, but in short, hell broke loose when we published our "manifesto"...
The main point for us was: Decisive moment vs. post-exposure alteration of the image "content" and so on.
Because we thought( and I still do) that it MAKES a difference whether the image is produced in a camera (either analog or digital) by opening a shutter, capturing light, and then processing the captured light somehow, or whether it is being created ina computer/darkroom/whatever by removing, adding, resizing, ... different PARTS of the original image.

Example: Gursky´s work mostly wouldn´t be a "genuine photograph" in our definition. Some of Man Ray´s work also. Definitely Cartier-Bresson´s work would be genuine photography.

Since we all are German, we noticed too late that the term "genuine" implied that everything else is not genuine, i.e. fake. OK, let´s face it, I think it IS. But anyway, we lost the battle ;-)

Perhaps Ulrich reads this, he probaly can explain it better than me...

[BetterSense]

If a digitally printed image is not a photograph then a Tesla is not a car.

--Darin

Thank you. I could not have asked for a better illustration of my point that society does not recognize that digital images represent a radical novelty and that digital imaging is not analogous to photography except that both can be a source of recognizable images. That you respond with an analogy is telling; analogies are destructive for understanding radical novelties, as the OP's article, and the fact that this photography/digital art confusion continues to drag on are evidence of this type of thought confusion.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/t...xx/EWD924.html

[Stephen Willard]

When we debate if something is a photograph (like, after it's been painted on or photoshopped), I think terms of degree. How much of it is still photographic? I look at how much of the image still bears an indexical connection to its source. Manipulations that change color or tone, or that crop, distort, sharpen, or blur, don't seem to break this link. Airbrushing in a celebrity, or removing a political enemy ... different story.

I would agree with this viewpoint, but I would be somewhat more restrictive allowing only light contrast or color contrast manipulations. To me it is no longer a photograph, but rather a computer fabrication once you add, subtract, or alter the form of any element in the original scene.

Personally I have nothing against digital imagery, but I am also a purist. I would love the definition of photography to be restricted solely to the craft of film and what happens in a darkroom. Everything else is either computer imagery or computer fabrications depending on the degree of computer manipulations applied. If you are afraid of the word "computer", then call it digital imagery or digital fabrications.

I leave you with one thought. It would be very doable to engineer a robotic machine to actually paint canvas. You could load it with paint brushes and a bunch of tubes of paint, and you would drive it with some software similar to photoshop that would allow you to draw, color, and control the brush strokes applied. With this type of technology you could replicate an infinite number of digitally derived paintings that are exactly the same. Should the resulting product be considered a painting in the traditional sense? Would the curators that accept digital imagery as photographs accept these digital paintings as real paintings? On a more primitive note, how about paint by numbers? Should they be considered real paintings? We could also make this argument just as easily with sculpturing as well.

For me it is very simple. Digitally derived art should have its own place and title. It is a very different media altogether....

[Drew Wiley]

Some of these flatlanders need to get a life.

[Drew Wiley]

I don't really care HOW it is done, one tool set versus another. I do care about the actual quality. And I also primarily identify photography with actually discovering something visually and somehow translating that specific moment in personal experience and time into a tangible record. Lardassography, the inevitable temptation in our digital age, is something I equate more to cheap painting by people too lazy to even mix pigments. But the damn gear doesn't know the difference, either way. I like the relatively seamless look of darkroom workflow, but have no prejudice against the alternative techniques, including hybrid. What I tend to mock is the gotta-have materialistic mentality of consumer electronics, which does such a good job of convincing people that creativity is synonymous with gadgetry, and the art academics that substance is synomymous with mere novelty. But nothing new there - that kind of mentality has plagued the art scene at least as long as I've been alive.

[jnantz]

There is nothing about a digital image that makes it a photograph. To me, a photograph is still a physical object written onto with light. Digital images are images just the same and there is nothing worse about them than photographic images, but they are not photographs. If digital images can count as photographs because they can superficially resemble them, then photographs can count as paintings.

The fact that digital images are called photographs wouldn't bother me if it was just a matter of semantics, however, it's evidence that society did not and does not recognize what a radical innovation digital images are, and that is a sad thing.

so, what are they not the same again ?
because one needs an electronic intermediary step to translate it to a physical object
and the other needs chemistry to do the same thing ?