what isnt photography?

[Daniel Morgan]

I am sorry to see that what I have said has created such a bitter argument over semantics. I feel that the actual discussion I was trying to start, which had more to do with Humanity in the arts and the way computers change the way we interact with the world, has been completely lost so that people could argue about what the meaning of words are and what categories to place things instead.

We will all have our opinions on where to draw the line between digital and traditional photography, but these opinions don't really matter. Maybe Paul is right and "we're dealing with a continuum and not with two different universes." but that does not mean that those who love silver-gelatin photography should not be distressed and upset that it is being pushed out of the forefront and referred to as "traditional" photography.

Sure this has happened many times in the history of photography, and I am sure that those who saw the Daguerreotype fall out of fashion were greatly saddened by this and had much to say. But were they wrong for feeling such a way? Of course not, with the loss of the daguerrotype a certain aesthetic was lost, and much in the same way our aesthetic is being lost. Although some may accuse us of whining and not simply following suit with the change in times, is it not right for us, the people who are the closest to the processes, to be saddened and offended?

As traditional photography continues to shrink and students begin to move straight to digital without ever even thinking about film, or what temperature their chemicals are at, or shuffling through the pages of Kodak Technical Publications something will be lost. For society as a whole and much of the art world this may not be that important. But for those of us who love it we see something very dear to us being lost and we are going to react like any human does when they see the rest of the world forget about it and move on.

Digital will bring something new to the table and will have plenty of advantages. Whether or not there is something intrinsically wrong with digital photography is not what this is all about, what it is about is what traditional photography has meant to the people who practice it and having to see society say "well, thats swell and all but I still prefer digital."

I hope in the end we can all just agree that Art can be created using any medium as long as it is done with skill and invokes a response from the viewer that has some meaning. What you call the process doesn't matter. All that matters is what you learn using that process and what result it has on the work. I'm just sad that one that has such deep meaning for me has been beat back to the point where the companies who once supported us are now struggling to make a profit on the supplies we require. I am not mad at the companies, or at the digital photographers, or anyone for that matter. Just sad to see my love struggling to survive.

[Mark Sawyer]

Daniel, it can seem pointless to argue semantics, especially when everyone has their own take on what the terminology "really" means. But the arguement can spark or clarify thought, too. I think we may have gone past that point though, and what terminology to use for the technical process seems pretty minor...

Similarly, if one is truly "distressed and upset that it is being pushed out of the forefront and referred to as "traditional" photography," I think one is misplacing his priorities. But then, that's from someone who never partook in the struggle and competition to be at the "cutting edge" of art, or the "art for art's sake" movement.

Nor do I worry about the big companies not supporting us anymore. I don't mind supporting the little companies, and they're all jumping for joy that Kodak is getting out of b/w. And I like seeing the big universe from a little niche. It makes "traditional" large format photography feel special.

Someone else could disagree with all I just wrote with complete validity while still not making my points any less valid. As it should be.

[paulr]

I definitely feel what you're saying, Daniel. And I wasn't suggesting that people in the past were wrong to be upset that their old materials and knowledge were being shoved out of the mainstream. I was just pointing out that their early pronoucements of photography being dead were countered by the great work they ended up doing with the next process that took over. It is still sad, though, that these changes get foisted on us by history, economics, fashion, technology, or whatever other forces lie out there beyond our control.

It will be sad for me when the time comes (next week, maybe) when photography students think of darkrooms as something from the middle ages. But that doesn't have to change my work if I don't want it to. Think of Atget--he worked with processes that were decades obsolete at the time, but history has judged him as a revolutionary, not a throwback. It's the vision that counts .. and the right process to use is the one that serves it, whether that process was invented yesterday or a thousand years ago.

I think it's a beautiful thing that we have alternative processes. When silver printing finally gets considered an alternative process, it will represent a change in the photographic landscape, but not a change in silver printing. The individual papers and off-the-shelf formulas will come and go as they always have, and at least a few people will continue to love and to use the process for the same reasons they do today.

[bspeed]

a camera produces the finished image as a negative and a digi device produces numbers as it finished image

LOL, 3 year old thread

BTW, a film camera does not produce a finished image as a Negative. It produces a Latent image and chemicals are needed to convert it. Might even be Japaneese chemicals
But I'm sure you knew that.

[Rodney Polden]

I hope this contribution will not merely be seen by some as further semantic hair-splitting. That is not my intention.

My intention is to address one aspect of "photography" that to me is fundamental, and close to the heart of the whole discussion.

One interpretation of PHOTO-GRAPHY is "light-drawing". If I spoke here of "chimps-drawing", or "children-drawing", it would be quite clear whom I was crediting with doing the drawing, yet somehow we seem reluctant in our discussion to credit LIGHT with doing the "drawing". And surely when the lenscap is removed with a swift and practiced motion, the light that pours through my lens and onto the film surface in my view camera is causing a subtle but irreversible change within those grains of sensitive emulsion.

If a drop of acid falls upon a plant leaf, the leaf is not "recording" the acid - it is the acid that changes the leaf. When a photographer "makes" an exposure, in reality s/he is no more than permitting a change to happen: a change that is solely the work of the light that strikes the sensitized material.

Imagine please for a moment a set-up where I arrange a battery of hundreds of colour temperature spot-meters, and beside each one an accompanying exposure spot-meter, in such a way that a pictorial scene can be carefully measured for colour and luminance (square by adjacent square over the entire scene) by all of the spot-meters. Imagine further that I then painstakingly record with a stub of pencil on the back of several large napkins all those hundreds of numerical readings: 2604 degrees Kelvin & 7.195; 1071 degrees K & 6.908.... on and on (probably takes me most of the afternoon). Then I head back to the house with all of my numbers, and I set to work cutting out all these little one-inch squares of coloured paper in just the right shades and just the right colours that I have carefully spray-painted till I got them perfect and accurate to the nth degree. I glue them down piece by piece with something sticky, each one in the correct order, onto a big chunk of cardboard, so that when completed I have a finished effect that is vaguely, well, chunky or clunky it might be called, or possibly "pixel-like" for want of a better term.

It is however, let us hope (having put that much time and energy into it), sufficiently accurate to the meter readings that I took of the original scene, that I can just-about discern the rudiments of a picture of that original scene. I somehow doubt however, that any participant in our present discussion here is going to insist that this creation is a photograph, within the range of meanings that we would usually assign to "photograph".

Yet is it not true that every step I have just taken, is the exact-or-close-enough step taken by my DSLR in the sequence it employs to lead me to an ink-jet print? The light falling on the sensor in the digital camera never "irreversibly changes" the surface on which it falls. The opposite is true, inasmuch as it is the surface that simply meters the light falling upon it. It passes along a message of colour and intensity that is then jotted down with the stubby pencil-and-napkin routine, and later it persuades a grumbling ink-jet spray nozzle to squirt something similar onto paper, entirely based on that set of instructions that are being yelled down the wire to it by an e-foreman.

OK, I lied, nobody cut it into one-inch squares and glued it down, but was that function not also approximated by the chap who told the sprayers when to stop and start squirting? Yet we have taken to referring to any set of instructions pumped down a wire to printer heads, spray-nozzles or whatever, as a photograph based entirely on other considerations (whether it "looks" like reality, whether it was made with a "camera", whether it is "unmanipulated", and so on).

To me, there is a certain significance to a piece of light sensitive material being present when the light rays flood in to that little dark room that is a camera... (camera obscura - the chamber of obscurity). Those rays (or particles...) flew 93 million heartbeats to get here from the depths of the sun, and at long last, they arrived. They sank themselves (after whipping through that chunk of glass like it didn't even exist) deep into the swampy Sargasso of gelatin and silver-salts and expired with a sigh by tipping some spinster-biddy-like chunk of sensitive material into an orgasm of instant change, a change from which she will never recover, never retreat. She will have been exposed for evermore, and along with millions of her neighbours will be now treated to the ritual of having her darkslide swung around from virginal silver to irredeemable black

All because some Lothario in a photon suit came zipping over to transform her. This stuff is not about metering dammit, this is about transformation! This business is about magic, it's about mojo, about being changed and impacted and rendered into a state that never was before. What I do with my Pentax spotmeter is more like what I do with a DSLR, down at that basic level, down where facts are facts and opinions don't dare show their noses. That's why there's a 'delete' button on the DSLR - everything is reversible, everything is free, there's no risk, no commitment, no final irrefutable this-is-it quality, in the way that there is when 80 square inches of Tri-X gasps and snap-freezes into the one and only way that it will henceforth be, all from those glancing, dancing beams of sunlight that came to visit.

The issues that other contributors have raised regarding similarities or differences between "that which is a photograph" and "that which any sane person can surely tell is not a photograph" are very interesting no doubt, and consequently create innumerable other categories into which we can sort all the possible media: photogravure, palladium, monitor image...on and on. This has a lens, that has a lens, this has a .....on and on. Thank you for those contributions - they have provided interesting food for thought. To me however, they all seem to be about other parts of the process - like the neighbouring rooms in the motel, beside the suite where MarlonBrandoLightbeam actually meets MarilynMonroeSilvergrain for the key instant of the whole movie.

For that reason, yes, I would agree with the post that commented that a film transparency is the "closest" or "truest" result, for it endures no further generations before it discloses itself to the viewer. A negative is true (but inverse, conversely) but a print is a step back (or a step on maybe).

A digital RAW capture is one kind of set of instructions, but let us remember that those instructions cannot be seen as pictorial or photographic in any sense - they are a stream of numbers, after all - that only become remotely photographic at the point that we decide that, well, after this many numbered squares, we'll drop down a row and start all over again from the left hand side with reading out instructions for the colour and luminance of another set of little boxes. Just because all that part of the process that is performed by the camera software was never invented by you and me, doesn't actually mean that it all organised itself somehow - it is an arbitrary-yet-specific artificial construct of mathematical design, human intentionality.

To me that makes it of a different order than the droplets of water that turn the sunlight upside down to make thousands of tiny sunlets. Different than even the sifting and settling of tiny grains of chemical that finally lay down and dry in their gelatin sandwich, all nestled in close side by side in their own sandstorm kinds of patterns.

Perhaps in the end, the part of me that has been a photographer since the evening when my dad made photograms and contact prints with me for the first time in the family bathroom, nearly fifty years ago, is the part that says "somehow, to me, photography is not born in squares". It's not born through metering. It's not born in grids. It's not born in squares, shut off in pix-cells, each one told "no variation, no if's and but's, this whole square is only allowed to be one colour and that's it". "Sit down and be quiet, we're going to turn you all into numbers now"

It's born in circular lenses and cone-shaped rays of resolving light, drifts and shadings of tiny subtle differentiations beyond metering and measure within a million million miniscule crystals with silver in their veins. Its "recording" is the latent change BY silver or one of her friends when light comes to play. I just happen to be nearby, acting as match-maker. For me, it's the magic of THAT, that makes photography.

Thanks for your indulgence, and patience.

[mikerz]

Rodney, I think you are in love with a very limited view!

It could similarly be said that writing a paper involves WRITING the paper - using an instrument to write into a piece of paper and leave behind some substance which allows us to interpret the marks as letters. But in writing a paper, it's about what you wrote and not where.

I would contain the same holds true in photography. The magic of film is certainly wonderful -- but I think the magic of computers is quite similar 0's and 1's don't define a computer -- they define our interpretation of what a computer is doing. In reality, a constant stream of electricity is passing through the computer, flowing down little channels of circuitry. Each circuit has its own internal logic built in. Each one represents one step of a thought. Depending on what you tell a given circuit, it will give you a True/False statement back. Yes, you are asking millions of circuits questions and they are all answering.

[Rodney Polden]

Each circuit has its own internal logic built in. Each one represents one step of a thought. Depending on what you tell a given circuit, it will give you a True/False statement back. Yes, you are asking millions of circuits questions and they are all answering.

Well, I guess that here we are back to one of the issues that I was discussing in my previous post - namely, the difference between the abstract and the concrete. The abstract is the map, or the idea, or the set of instructions - some form of abstraction that guides us from the beginnings to a later visible form, whether that visible form is an ink-jet print, an image on the monitor or whatever else. It is a final visible form precisely because few of us would be satisfied if our photographs remained forever an abstraction: apart from anything else, it's hard to brag about a picture that only the photographer him/herself can see and then only in the mind's eye.

Along the way, those instructions and maps can be interpreted, read upside-down, mis-remembered, and a million other manipulations and inaccuracies and distortions can be either intentionally or accidentally imposed upon the original stream of "instructions". With each imposition of non-original elements and manipulations, the instructions become more like a sketch, or an approximation, or a variation upon the original quasi-true data that was obtained in the "metering/capture" process by the sensor and its software.

Whether those impositions and approximations occur by the intentional action of the photographer, or by an accident, or by the nature of the technology, doesn't really change the fact that this is all a process, an extraneous series of events that are separate from, and additions to, the original photon-strikes-surface event.

Perhaps a new technology will soon emerge (maybe it already exists ......) in which a laser scans backwards and forwards over a scene, and provides a data-stream modulated by the colour and reflectivity of each spot it strikes in the scene. The data-stream is fed to an ink-jet printer, and a print of the scene results. No camera, no lens, no film, no photographer. Is this still "photography"?

A little while ago, I bought a very lovely colour print produced by an artist in my neighbourhood who works with foliage and flowers on the platen of a high-end colour photocopier. He doesn't call the prints photographs - he has chosen to use a different term. But by the definitions of some of the preceding posts in this thread, this too seems to be photography now, according to some of us.

Perhaps it is worth asking: why are we not able to simply come up with accurate and descriptive new names for the artifacts of new technologies when they emerge?
Why do we erode and confuse the existing previously-unambiguous terms that we used? Why cannot a photograph continue to be .... a photograph? It's not like no-one is still continuing to make what Edward Weston or Bill Brandt would have understood as a "photgraph". It's not a dead, obsolete, unused word.

We have accepted the idea of a "lander" arriving on the moon surface, or a "collector" providing us with photo-voltaic power - previously unheard-of applications of either of those terms. So obviously it is not beyond the powers of human invention to come up with a simple, pronounceable name that doesn't cause uncertainty and divisiveness amongst those who are involved in the field.

Where it all goes sideways is the point at which a new industry, looking to market the new products of an unfamiliar technology, decides to conflate the new product with a previous familiar item. In that way, we end up with something sold to the masses as a cell-phone (USA) or a mobile-phone (UK), when in reality it is actually a small handheld radio transmitter/receiver. Within a few years, the "phone" part of the name - which was there to make marketing persuasion easier by implying that the product is a new-version-of-what-you-already-own - that part of the name is dropped in common usage, and suddenly we have people around the world talking a blue streak into a cell, a mobile, or one of the hundreds of other non-descriptive names that are used in other languages. Is your "cell" a cell?

Regular telephones still exist in their millions all over the planet - why do we have to invent a new name for them, instead of inventing a new name for the new thing.
(and how is a "land-line" even remotely a good replacement word for telephone...?)

So what's wrong with calling a print made by a digital process by a separate and unambiguous name? Nothing, of course, it's a great idea.

Except that overwhelmingly, discerning buyers walk away from them and leave them on the racks, or the gallery walls. Hence giclee, and a slew of other names, all trying to cover the fact that no, sorry, this is not a handmade silver bromide print or equivalent. So the old word is grabbed and yanked sideways to pretend this new print is what it's not. All because those buyers who collect and study and involve themselves deeply with photography, by a huge majority want to purchase bromide prints, palladium prints, platinum prints, argyrotypes perhaps. The numbers of collectors who want more than a sunset view, or a landscape poster for behind the couch, seem to prefer to buy the types of photographs with a life-story that begins with a photon and a silver crystal.

Another artist whose prints I was viewing recently, labelled them as 'original hand-made giclee photographs'. If I was considering buying something labelled "hand made willow basket", and when I walked around the back of the building, I discovered a machine with a guy who pushed a button, out comes a print, he pushes a button, out comes a print....... well, I think I would be justified in saying "this is not honest - it may be willow, it may be a basket, but it just isn't hand-made."

In my view, the practice and the art and the recording functions for which we use photography are all made possible by that original near-instantaneous photon strike.

So now let's look at the actual, factual, concrete alternative to that set of instructions, namely the light/film interface that distinguishes photography (as it has been understood since the late 19th century) from the newer alternatives of computer-based pixelography/digital photography etc.

When we look at the relationship between the light (lets say an individual photon) that passes through the lens and lands in the emulsion, it is clear that we are considering something that is not an abstraction in any sense - it is an actual physical entity, a new chemical and energetic condition within the silver halide grain that did not exist prior to the arrival of the light.

If we just skip blithely over all the distinctions between physical and abstract, as if the physical realm of observable reproducible scientific actuality was nothing more than a thought, a whim, an opinion, then it makes the similar distinction between true and false as irrelevant as anything else. So it does matter that the reality I'm talking about actually exists - it's not just "it matters to me, because that's my opinion".

It's something else, it's part of the actual universe, not just another opinion on art, on how I like my grey-tones to look, on what the weather might do today. It's the difference between the forecast that told you to leave your umbrella at home, and the actual cold rain that runs down the back of your neck regardless of whether you hold the opinion that it "should" be doing so or not.

It is by being willing to hold clearly in our minds subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions between what-is and what-is-not, what is abstract and what is concrete, that we are able to create and use language and other abstractions that enable us to manipulate the concrete world. If we reduce it all to a matter of preference, then neither language nor photography will be reliable, functional or useful to us any longer.

[Maris Rusis]

I must confess I am of the same mind as Rodney Polden. His argument is logically and technically consistent in every particular.

His conceptual view even works if the reverse question is asked: What does it take for a picture NOT to be a photograph. Remember, all pictures EXCEPT photographs are made by a sensor/processor/mark maker cycle.

In the case of the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel ceiling the sensor is the artist's eye, the processor a human brain, and the mark maker is the paint brush. In the case of digital confections the sensor is a CCD (or CMOS, whatever...) array, the processor is a computer, and the mark maker is a printer. Electronically controlled picture making is, at its heart, a mechanisation of traditional painting or drawing.

Photography stands apart from all of this. Creating a photograph by having a physical sample of subject matter cause marks in a sensitive surface is not the same as using a machine to draw pictures.