Ending Film camera sales + print fading challenge

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

is an image created by focusing the light reflected from a subject onto a surface for viewing or capturing.

So how do you focus a pinhole? Sorry, but "all practical purposes" does not cut it. I am sure you would like it to be for your argument, but that does not make it so. This is exactly the problem, when it suits you, the language is always changing. Sorry, not always and not in optic physics. A lens has a very clear definition no matter how much you wish it didnt.

[paulr]

Jorge, I'll restate, word for word, the original passage where "lens-based image" was described:

"The idea of photography being defined as "lens-based images" is a casual, working definition being used by quite a few curators. Others use the even more vague qualification of "optically derrived images." Their general goal is understanding what qualities make something photographic, not trying create a rigid, narrow, or exclusive definition that is bound to become obsolete with the next discovery or artistic innovation."

If you read this for the purpose of understanding it rather than just arguing with it, you'll see that it's about describing a concept, not about strict physics

And yes, pinhole doesn't actually focus an image. Technically, contact printing doesn't focus an image either, but for practical purposes of discussion within the context of photography, it does. Perhaps "render" an image would have been a better choice of words, because an image obviously doesn't have to be focussed to be photographic.

Look guys, I'm not dumb enough to think I'm going to change your minds about this (or anything). I'd just like to point out that your quarrel is not with me or with Tim or with a handful of fauxtographer frauds who are in desperate need of your condescension lest they somehow destroy the world.

Your quarrel is with the larger institutions that name the categories and write the histories and working definitions. If you don't want to speak their language, that's great. No one's making you. But you get nowhere by repeatedly insulting those that choose to. I'm not that attached to what my medium is called, but when it comes to decide, who do you think I'm going to listen to--some guys on the net or Peter Galassi?

In the end none of this has anything to do with the worth of your work or mine. If there's one the curators do that i think we all could learn from, it's to worry about whether the work is good/meaningful/significant first, and to worry about what to call it later.

[RichSBV]

paulr, you're right about not being able to change my mind in this regard. And Jorge is right about your creative use of definitions. But that's how we all create an "arguement" (in the discussion sense).

Unfortunately in some areas, deffinitions do count for a lot. It is this creative use of deffinitions by the digi people that has created all the problems around here. As Jorge points out, when someone dumps an ink squirt print and publicly calls it a "Carbon Print" to sell it, it's fraud not creative marketing. Gilcee is more creative marketing than fraud and at least used a non-photographic term. I have no problem with 'gilcee' except forgetting how to spell or pronounce it ;-)

All change is brought about by a single person. It either catches on or not. Here we have many people upset about the hijacking of photography by digi poeple. Far too many people are apatheic about the issue. Curators and galleries have their own reasons. It takes time and money to create a new category for something. It's MUCH less work to simply dump inkjet prints in with photographs. Galleries do it to make money, same as the fauxtographers. The very term "fauxtographer" was created by digi users to differentiate their work from photography and it did have quite a bit of popularity years ago. But galleries couldn't sell the work. So fauxtographs were dump for 'photographs' and prices went back up...

So should real photographers be happy that their work is being dumped in the same category as digi stuff? Water color artists are having a similar problem now as certain digi people have discovered that they can produce digi 'water color' prints. If people don't stand up and force the issue, it will only get worse.

You say trhat you'll just go along with whatever the gallery or curator says... But why not simply make a mention to that curator "but it's a digi print, not a photograph". No need for an arguement. But if enough people take the effort, it will eventually force the digi products into their own category where they belong and then eveyone will be happy. Or yuou can stay apathetic and let other people do the work for you...

Spliiting hairs over lens-lensless is absurd. A pinhole camera is a camera by deffinition. A copy machine is a copy maching by deffinition. To argue otherwise would be for the sake of arguement alone.

As for deffinitions:

pho·to·graph (f½“t…-gr²f”) n. Abbr. photog. 1. An image, especially a positive print, recorded by a camera and reproduced on a photosensitive surface

cam·er·a (k²m“…r-…, k²m“r…) n. 1. An apparatus for taking photographs, generally consisting of a lightproof enclosure having an aperture with a shuttered lens through which the image of an object is focused and recorded on a photosensitive film or plate. 2. The part of a television transmitting apparatus that receives the primary image on a light-sensitive cathode tube and transforms it into electrical impulses. 3. Camera obscura.

I'm not going to sit around, and I mean 'around', and split hairs over deffinitons. The fact is that no digi print can be a PHOTOgraph simply because it uses NO light. It's time for digi to stand on it's own or fail. If digi users are so afraid of their own work, then they should perhaps either move into photography or leave it alltogether...

[tim atherton]

"Tim, I didn't say anything about 'price'. I said 'worth much less'. Minor difference, or major depending on the person's viewpoint ;-) "

fair enough - but my mother values the many photos my dad took of her father - and many of those were all done at the local 1hr lab "value" is pretty a pretty amorphous concept without any fixed indicator.

price is often (though not always) a good guide to the value of an object, and from the short list I gave, as far as I am aware, the work of all those photographers is valued - in broad terms - as highly (and perhaps some more highly) than the work of a contemporary who prints their own work - in the end, it's a non-issue as far as the value of a photographers work is concerned.

"would personally consider a 'photogram' a true photograph."

a view held by some institutions, but many institutions and histories consider photogram to be on a parallel sideline because they don't fit all the main criteria for being a photograph

[paulr]

"As Jorge points out, when someone dumps an ink squirt print and publicly calls it a "Carbon Print" to sell it, it's fraud not creative marketing. Gilcee is more creative marketing than fraud and at least used a non-photographic term. I have no problem with 'gilcee' except forgetting how to spell or pronounce it ;-)"

And I agree with this wholeheartedly.

"I'm not going to sit around, and I mean 'around', and split hairs over deffinitons. The fact is that no digi print can be a PHOTOgraph simply because it uses NO light."

Well, you're not splitting hairs over definitions; you're ignoring the definition that's in current use in the curatorial world. The dictionary definition you provided isn't even very well researched on what a camera is, considering that the camera predates photography by centuries, and the view camera in particular was used by artists hundreds of years before Daguerre and Fox Talbot. You haven't explained to me how a copy machine isn't a camera--and I don't mean by declaring so, or by stating what the manufacturer calls it--I mean by looking at what it fundamentally does and how it does it.

It's also not accurate that all digital printing processes work without light. Many of them print with light onto traditional photographic materials (Lamda and Lightget, for example). And this definition would logically lead you to point your ire at those working in dye transfer, photogravure, and bromoil--processes that have been considered photographic for a hundred years.

A final point I find strange is your tendency to place a hard line between "real photographers" and "digi heads" or whatever, when in fact they tend to be the same people. And when they, who actually have exprerience working with both kinds of tools, often don't find a fundamental difference in their work when using the two. I only recently started printing my work digitally. Even more recently I started using color for the first time. I can tell you, the move to color was a quantum shift for me. The move to digital black and white printing was more about details than anything fundamental.

You really should be aware that all these "THAT isn't photography" arguments almost exactly mimic historical arguments on why the following things aren't photography either: dry plates, film, roll film, 35mm, and color. Are we worse off or better off now that photography's definition expanded to included these things?

[tim atherton]

"Photography uses film.

A photograph comes from film."

So your definition of photography is the above?

If you make "film" the defining critea it becomes a convenient definition to bash digital with. But then of course it cuts out a lot of exisitng processes that have long been considered photography....

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

Well, you're not splitting hairs over definitions;

Sorry Paul, this is you, We know and have clear definitions. It is you the one who writes this kind of driblel.

The idea of photography being defined as "lens-based images" is a casual, working definition being used by quite a few curators.

Technically, contact printing doesn't focus an image either, but for practical purposes of discussion within the context of photography, it does

You will say anything to try and makes us believe you are correct. Why do you ignore the fact that there are clear definitions.? Why cant you for one say...yeah I made a mistake, a pinhole is not a lens?...This is the problems with arguing with people like you, in your quest to be right, you will say anything, and some of the things you say are just plain dumb....a contact print "focusing"...lol....

Your "for practical purposes" is just a distraction. Sorry Paul but in science we dont have "for all practical purposes".....

[Paddy Quinn]

Photography uses film.

A photograph comes from film.

Interesting. In which case, the first photographs ever made weren't photographs. Fox Talbot must have been making fauxtographs according to you?

[tim atherton]

"Your "for practical purposes" is just a distraction. Sorry Paul but in
science we dont have "for all practical purposes"....."

though photography is anything but a science - perhaps therein lies theproblem

[paulr]

Exactly, Jorge. We're not talking about science. We're talking about culturally based definitions, which in this case end up being consolidated by people with an art-historical, not a scientific perspective. Art historians and artists alike do indeed have a "practical perspectives" on how to name and think about things.

I don't care if you think I'm correct. Just pointing out tht it's a larger body of ideas out there that you're arguing against, not just me.

I'll repeat an earlier question that nobody responded to. When it comes time to decide how to categorize my work, who should I listen to-- Peter Galassi, or some guys on the net?