Digital Platinum?

[Doug Howk]

I don't think digital photography can come into its own as an art-form until people embrace the newness of the media rather than attempt to make it into something from photography's "past".

Why bother creating new terms when you can just abscond the existing. "Traditional Photography" equals minimally manipulated digital images. "Alternative processes" will include digitally printing on Tin (japanned metal). As with politics, if you can control the terminology, you've won the debate.

[Thebes]

The other point is "I don't think digital photography can come into its own as an art-form until people embrace the newness of the media rather than attempt to make it into something from photography's "past"". With digital photography widely exhibited in galleries, museums etc and widely collected by the same-this has really been a non issue for a long time except in small enclaves of pre-digital traditions like this forum. You may feel this way personally but the greater art/photography community has embraced digital at all levels. While there is wide respect for people working with traditional processes that is not the same thing as lack of acceptance of digital workers. That ship has long since sailed.

While very little of my personal work is "pure" digital work (ie digital capture>digital printing-4 images to date.) I have had no problem exhibiting or selling digital prints to knowledgeable collectors or museums. AAMOF both my volume of exhibits, print prices and volume of sales have increased with digital prints. Where is the not yet "come into its own"?

I think that maybe I have been less clear than I might have been. I never meant to imply that the art world has not accepted digital prints, digital photography, or even digital manipulations.
Rather I mean that digital fine art photography has not yet became, and won't become, what the medium is going to be known as / for until it stops being imitative in its forms.

If this seems absurd to you, consider this notion: photography in general didn't come into its own as an art form until Paul Strand sold his soft-focus lens.
Does that seem plausible?

What I mean, I think, is more akin to that than how you've taken my statement. Perhaps if I spent the effort to write a scholarly article I could communicate my thinking here more clearly, but I have better uses of my time and lack the patience.
Anyway, the closest things I think I've seen to what I think digital photography might eventually become are Gursky's Rhein II or some of John Paul Caponigro's works.
With digital fine art photography, I think that new kinds of manipulation are inherently a part of the medium, just as dodging and burning have generally been considered an inherent part of traditional photographic printing.

[sanking]

"If this seems absurd to you, consider this notion: photography in general didn't come into its own as an art form until Paul Strand sold his soft-focus lens.
Does that seem plausible? "

Depends on how you define photography as an art form. I understand your point of reference, but Strand's view is only one way of defining photography as an art form. Many before Paul Strand, including people like Peter Henry Emerson and Robert Demachy, defined it in different ways that are, in my opinion, as intrinsically valid as the modernist version promoted by Strand.

Sandy

[Kirk Gittings]

I agree with you Sandy and you got to that point sooner and clearer than I would have.

Thebes, I think you are confusing your personal standards and preferences and societal ones and setting up a straw standard. I could say I think automobile seat belts haven't come into their own because of some technical inovation I want. Yet clearly seat belts, like digital photography, is omnipresent in society and just as digital photography is overwhelmingly present in the arts. Their overwheling presence speaks to their validity. "Come into its own" is a personal perspective/judgement. DP is a medium that is more maleable than traditional photography but that doesn't mean that "straight" digital photography is some lesser use of the medium.

I think digital photography came into its own when it relegated traditional film photography to the status of an alternative process.......................

Which by the way, (IMO in the arts) is kind of a good thing as practitioners are now doing something exotic and out of the norm.

[RichardSperry]

http://www.kerik.com/new/

...Does digital platinum.

Beautiful prints, btw.

Love this video http://youtu.be/tdGV_XGgWCg

[paulr]

If this seems absurd to you, consider this notion: photography in general didn't come into its own as an art form until Paul Strand sold his soft-focus lens.
Does that seem plausible?

No. Photography has a vibrant art history starting almost from its beginning. The people who didn't accept it (or rather, didn't accept pictorialism, which was one of many branches of 19th Century photography) were just a group that had a contrary manifesto. They won—but only a battle that belonged to a particular historical moment, and that didn't have a huge reach beyond the United States. Consider that European early modern photographs don't usually look like f64 work ... they look like modern painting, especially constructivism, Dada, and Bauhaus.

Here's a more likely historical parallel: when photography took the burden of copying reality off of painters, the painters were free to do other things. This is when THEIR medium began to flower, or at least flower into modernism. I think we're at a similar point. Digital tools are more efficient at copying reality than traditional photographic materials. So the traditional tools are being prodded into proving their worth, and in new and exciting ways. A lot of artists are rising to this challenge. I'm seeing artists in places like New York and Denver doing work that is only borderline photographic, with traditional phtographic materials ... they're exploring the mysterious, indeterminate, and often spontaneous things that light-sensitive materials can do when pushed in unusual ways. I think this is an exciting time, and can't wait to see more of this stuff.

I also think it's true that we haven't seen even a fraction of the possibilities of digital photography. I suspect it's because most of the avant gardist energy is being directed into places with so little overlap with conventional phtoography that we're not seeing it. Most of what I see in shows like the perennial New Photography exhibits at MoMA are fairly conservative, with the exception of the purley concept-based stuff (Doug Riccard, etc.). In most cases it's not particularly relevent if the artist used film or pixels or both.