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are photographs still photographs...
...or, more specifically, do today's photographs look like photographs to you? I just got the latest Hasselblad Photographer newsletter in email today. I notice that all the potential "Hasselblad Masters" are represented by images that look... well.... more or less the same stylistically. Upon closer observation, perhaps it is not the style, but the fact that, to my eyes, all that digital medium format stuff looks more like high end illustration than photography. Please believe that I am not, by any means, trying to resurrect that age old debate that will remain nameless here, but it dawned on me that many, perhaps most, of today's high profile photography looks a lot like it was done by a master with an airbrush, rather than a photographer with a camera. This is not a criticism, rather and observation. Whether work can be done with MF digital is not the point here.
I also noticed that the new H3DII-31 is available for about 13k....
We live in interesting times.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Today's photographs (whatever exactly that means) look like photographs to me.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
There are interesting "masters" (whatever that means), and less interesting ones. That's always been like that. Also, most are not interesting - that's also always been like that, it's just that time has thrown away those that don't need to be remembered, and now we get them all… No worries, they'll be forgotten again :)
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
I have been thinking the same thing. Photo-Illustration is what I call it. Some of this highly stylized "high-end" pro work has really become 80% photoshop and 20% camera. It's just so easy to push images beyond, not just reality, but what the average person sees as an acceptable photographic version of reality; after you cross that point we are forced to try and find a medium that this new version of super modified photography most closely resembles and that usually ends up being some form of illustration(digital or hand crafted). I see work that is considered photography that could also be easily pasted off as very good digital illustration.
I assume that you would not consider a pencil drawing that started as a simple tracing from a photograph still a photograph. When does a digitally manipulated photograph become digital illustration based on photograph? Is there a line? Is there even a need for a distinction?
I don't even think it really matters, ultimately it is about the art. If you like someones super processed photo-illustration medium format digital work, hire them or hang it in your house or collect it.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Well they don't look like daguerreotypes to me.
But what you are saying (I think) is that current style will be perceived as desirable and will proliferate, by those who define style.
The history of photography is usually seen as a progression, and will always seek new change. Whether the new style will mark a new move forward remains to be seen, but the old style will inevitablely be out dated, no matter how good you or I are at it or how much it suits our perception of photography.
So do they look like yesterday's photograph's? No
Will they look like tomorrow's photograph's? No
Regards
Bill
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
willwilson
Some of this highly stylized "high-end" pro work has really become 80% photoshop and 20% camera
How would you set the percentage for the relationship darkroom/camera?
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
If they weren't still photographs, they'd be movies! :rolleyes:
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
I think that todays photographs are more artistically creative than the photographs of yesterday. When additional means of expression are found than expression is expanded. That has been historically true...no matter the time. A truly wonderful thing from where I see it.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
I understand what the OP is saying. In fact, according to a recent New Yorker article*, most photographs in magazines are digitally enhanced, ie, in an issue of Vogue 144 images were digi-retouched, all by Pascal Dangin of Box Studios. Thirty celebrities keep him on retainer to retouch all photos reaching the media. Annie, Patrick and many, many more photographers work only with him.
If you look at a lot of Annie's recent work, there is a "look" to it, especially the story-oriented spreads.I don't think it's unappealing, but it seems to be so prevalent these days and has a sameness, but if there is one main guy everyone is going to that would explain it...
*http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...a_fact_collins
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
csant
How would you set the percentage for the relationship darkroom/camera?
I often wish I could go further in the darkroom, but this usually relates to damage correction (dust, scratches, the occasional content removal, etc).
In general, it depends on the negative. I would say on average for me personally: 30% Darkroom - 70% Camera. But with the darkroom there is a lower ceiling, with digital the ceiling is almost limitless.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
The old-timers said it best: - "Photo Illustration." When they would create heavily contrived or staged scenes followed by airbrushing and other altering techniques, they would proudly call the results, "Photo Illustration." It would be hard to find the definitive point in the continuum from untouched negative to heavily altered digital image, but at some point the result becomes a Photo Illustration, best understood by "feel" than by external metric.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
willwilson
I would say on average for me personally: 30% Darkroom - 70% Camera. But with the darkroom there is a lower ceiling, with digital the ceiling is almost limitless.
I see what you mean - personally, I prefer work done in camera, rather than in darkroom. But truth is that in the darkroom you can go at least as far as Photoshop - and photographers have done so. Photoshop is just the digital version of a darkroom. It's "easier" to use; as in - anybody can click those buttons…
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
PViapiano
most photographs in magazines are digitally enhanced, ie, in an issue of Vogue 144 images were digi-retouched, all by Pascal Dangin of Box Studios. Thirty celebrities keep him on retainer to retouch all photos reaching the media.
This is nothing new, and retouching was standard practice in portrait photography. Until they invented lenses that made it easier to hide those blemishes on the skin…
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
I noticed this phenomenon as early as 5 years ago when friends who had sold out to the all digital path were beginning to get to their ultimate distination and were triumphantly showing me photographs that looked more like a Pixar animation than a photograph. Whether apparent at the time I have realized in the mean time that this phenomenon is precisely why I've gone down the 8X10 and larger soft focus path.
Please note that I haven't said any "look" is either good or bad, only that I've chosen a road less traveled. Also noteworthy, theirs sells, mine does not. Not this month any way. Look down the road 25 years. Will we get to a day where someone picks up one of my photographs (I'll be dead of course) and gasps, this is real, look at the dirt in the corners. This was done in a wet darkroom. OK, probably not.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
csant
This is nothing new, and retouching was standard practice in portrait photography. Until they invented lenses that made it easier to hide those blemishes on the skin…
Comparing mechanical retouching to the armentarium of digital tools available now is like comparing a pencil to a laser printer. It is no longer a good analogy.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
My gosh, they're altering photographs? Why can't we just have real, honest photography, like William Mortenson and Jerry Uelsmann used to do... :rolleyes:
This is a current popular style, and it does catch the eye, until we see too much and become jaded, then we move on. I'm just wondering if it's too openly glitzy and commercial to catch on in the fine art galleries...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mark Sawyer
I'm just wondering if it's too openly glitzy and commercial to catch on in the fine art galleries...
You've made the false assumption that folk with coin who walk into galleries have some amount of taste / class...........
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jim Galli
Will we get to a day where someone picks up one of my photographs (I'll be dead of course) and gasps, this is real, look at the dirt in the corners. This was done in a wet darkroom. OK, probably not.
More likely, we'll get to the day when there's a pull-down menu on Photoshop CS9 where you can select whether the image from a 20-gig cell-phone cam should look like it was taken with an Artar, a Dagor, a Petzval, a Verito, a Struss, and Imagon, a Pinkham & Smith...
For better or worse, we're getting there...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Toyon
Comparing mechanical retouching to the armentarium of digital tools available now is like comparing a pencil to a laser printer. It is no longer a good analogy.
Why wouldn't it be? In the end, both produce some signs on some support material - and in this case we are still talking about a photograph in both cases. The digital darkroom offers many things the "real" darkroom couldn't offer - does it make it less of a production space for photographs?
FWIW, I do agree with the stance Jim just expressed so nicely - personally I have chosen the way of film, of large format, of the darkroom, and now am even discovering soft focus. I don't care if this sells or not (at least not now…), I look for something that allows me to express what I have to say. And that something is definetly not where digital photography is.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
cobalt
...or, more specifically, do today's photographs look like photographs to you? I just got the latest Hasselblad Photographer newsletter in email today. I notice that all the potential "Hasselblad Masters" are represented by images that look... well.... more or less the same stylistically. Upon closer observation, perhaps it is not the style, but the fact that, to my eyes, all that digital medium format stuff looks more like high end illustration than photography. Please believe that I am not, by any means, trying to resurrect that age old debate that will remain nameless here, but it dawned on me that many, perhaps most, of today's high profile photography looks a lot like it was done by a master with an airbrush, rather than a photographer with a camera. This is not a criticism, rather and observation. Whether work can be done with MF digital is not the point here.
I also noticed that the new H3DII-31 is available for about 13k....
We live in interesting times.
I think that what you are seeing is more a natural progression than a consequence of digital. After all, Hasselblad's been cultivating a certain "look" and showcasing photographers who get it long before they merged with Imacon and if you look at Hasselblad USA site, you can see for yourself in at least two places:
1. User Showcase
2. The Masters Archive
My favorites are Steve McCurry (User Showcase) and Hans Strand (both links), both have been around long before digital and both are now shooting H3DII-39.
Saying that Photoshop makes "the look" is like saying that pianos make the music. I don't see anything there that old-style photographers wouldn't have done in the darkroom if only they could. In that sense, I see Photoshop and digital processing in general as a liberation, not a diversion.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mark Sawyer
More likely, we'll get to the day when there's a pull-down menu on Photoshop CS9 where you can select whether the image from a 20-gig cell-phone cam should look like it was taken with an Artar, a Dagor, a Petzval, a Verito, a Struss, and Imagon, a Pinkham & Smith...
For better or worse, we're getting there...
The iPhone, I am told, can already imitate Polaroids, Holgas and Lomos…
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jim Galli
You've made the false assumption that folk with coin who walk into galleries have some amount of taste / class...........
True. I'm just one of the folks without coin who peeps throgh the gallery's window when nobody's looking...
But I haven't seen the deliberately-obviously-heavily photoshopped photo-illustrations in a fine art gallery yet. I do still see a lot of analog and "straight" digital work there. But then, I'm usually a bit behind the times on such things...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Toyon
Comparing mechanical retouching to the armentarium of digital tools available now is like comparing a pencil to a laser printer. It is no longer a good analogy.
Or a cave to the modern house... I don't see why not, both still serve the same purpose, only with a different level of advancement and complexity. ;)
After all, photography is the act of capturing light projected through a lens onto a light-sensitive material for a brief moment of time. Everything else is just supporting technology. If anything, I would certainly hope this technology does change with the times!
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Marko
Or a cave to the modern house... I don't see why not, both still serve the same purpose, only with a different level of advancement and complexity. ;)
After all, photography is the act of capturing light projected through a lens onto a light-sensitive material for a brief moment of time. Everything else is just supporting technology. If anything, I would certainly hope this technology does change with the times!
The original photo retouchers, to create seamless work, endured long apprenticeships and used specialized tools and chemicals. Nevertheless their ability to change images was quite limited, unless it was designed to look intentional (e.g. Uelsmann). In photoshop wholesale alterations can be made in nanoseconds, leaving virtually none of the original structure of the image. Yes, both techniques alter original materials, but the scale and scope and effort involved in making the changes are so vastly disproportionate that the analogy is very weak.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Marko
Add Meyerowitz and Soth to the list of the converts...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
people have been altering photographs since they were able to take them.
masking, double printing, retouching, swapping heads, heavy handed manipulations,
digital technology just allows a different set of tools to do the same thing.
i don't really see much of a difference ...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
HDR stinks. I see another one made with a $13,000 Hassy or otherwise, I am going to barf on my desk. Shimmering skies and a sparkling ground should be saved for a glittery My Space page, and not photography. :mad: I guess I'm too old school now having learned color photography via RA-4 without the HDR. :o
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Some have asked, where is the line? For me, when non-photographic manipulations are made, they are either correcting a flaw in the photographic process, or producing something new to look at. When that something new is the point of the presentation, then it has crossed into photo illustration.
My definition of a photograph is simple: An image produced by projecting light onto a sensitized surface.
Many Photoshop techniques are purely photographic, even though they are executed digitally. Making something lighter or darker, or systematically changing the coloration, various algorithms used to combine photographic data within the image, or even cutting and pasting seem to me photographic. Grabbing the pen tool and drawing, or painting a selection area with a color selected from a palette--those are not photographic because they are not working from data resulting from light projected onto a sensitized surface.
But all that is just a matter of technique. I suspect the real issue is art.
I see a lot of current photographs as being quite faddish, despite the apparent religious worship of innovation rather than, say, beauty. Style is timeless, but fads are ephemeral. Many scoff at the style of Adams, or Strand, or Stieglitz, and in most cases their scoffing seems to stem from their worship of innovation, which consigns the work of past masters to the dustbin of cliche. History has a way of sorting that out in the long run. Many who think that past masters are cliche will be forgotten when those masters are still studied and appreciated. This is true in all art forms. Everyone is always looking for innovation as a means of defining their own voice or vision, and confuse fad with style.
The notion of realism in photography has always been a myth. I made a color photograph of a grave marker on a church on the high road between Santa Fe and Taos (maybe it was Chimayo--but I forget now). Later, I discovered that Adams had photographed the same marker half a century before, and that image was published in Photographs of the Southwest. In my color image, the wrought iron grave marker with wood inserts was dark--in the Zone II to III range. The sky was a brilliant, bright blue. In his image, he's used a red filter and the sky was very dark. The grave marker was bright with Zone IX highlights of the sun reflecting off the surface of the wood and wrought iron. My image, which was more realistic, had the opposite tonal values that his did. Yet both were purely photographic and superficially realistic.
Rick "adding a few random comments" Denney
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
QT Luong
Add Meyerowitz and Soth to the list of the converts...
Looking through these various hassy artist work, most of it looks traditional to me, and could have just as easily been captured with a point and shoot at the sizes presented on the computer :D
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Toyon
The original photo retouchers, to create seamless work, endured long apprenticeships and used specialized tools and chemicals. Nevertheless their ability to change images was quite limited, unless it was designed to look intentional (e.g. Uelsmann). In photoshop wholesale alterations can be made in nanoseconds, leaving virtually none of the original structure of the image. Yes, both techniques alter original materials, but the scale and scope and effort involved in making the changes are so vastly disproportionate that the analogy is very weak.
I don't see why is the analogy with the cave/modern house weak?
It is the result that matters, not the level of effort. If anything, reducing the level and complexity of effort needed to accomplish one's goal is what progress is all about.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
rdenney
My definition of a photograph is simple: An image produced by projecting light onto a sensitized surface.
In essence I feel this way. To me using a digital devise to record images is imaging; what I do with film and paper is photography. Photography is literally writing with light. I know "photographers" that have never printed a single image, they've all gone on the web. To me that's imaging and they are imagers. They capture, manipulate and display an image on a screen.
Just my dos centavos...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
bvstaples
In essence I feel this way. To me using a digital devise to record images is imaging; what I do with film and paper is photography. Photography is literally writing with light. I know "photographers" that have never printed a single image, they've all gone on the web. To me that's imaging and they are imagers. They capture, manipulate and display an image on a screen.
Just my dos centavos...
I basically don't care if the sensitized surface is made from silver or CMOS.
An image made digitally and displayed on the web is still a photograph. What else would it be? A painting? It's a question of how much of the image is drawn versus photographed, and I think that hinges on whether the drawn part becomes the point of the image.
Rick "thinking that 'imaging' is an ambiguous term that could apply to nearly any visual art" Denney
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Hasselblad is wooing the advertising and fashion photographers who have a need and a budget for their cameras. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the currently-popular heavily-retouched fashion work makes its way into their glossy materials.
Forget retouching portraits and all that pictorialist fuzzy wuzzy nonsense. If you want to see the real forerunner of today's fashion shoots you need to look at machine tool illustration, particularly from the 30s and 40s. I always get the giggles when I see that perfect plastic skin look on the covers of magazines. Somewhere out there is a lathe fetishist in permanent rapture.
See here for examples of the look that was once standard in literally hundreds of thousands of catalogues, manuals and textbooks:http://www.lathes.co.uk/myford/page12.html
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
"Imagers" and "Print-makers" are both just subsets of the large set of "Photographers". Another sub-set of photographers would be "Transparency-makers" -- those whose final products are transparencies. But one must be careful about drawing boundaries, as most people are hybrids and such labels can be as mis-leading as they are helpful.
In the sub-set of "Print-makers", there are further subsets of digital printers, wet/darkroom printers (further divided into traditional processes and alternative processes printers), and custom printers (people who have other people printing for them, or print for others).
But, IMO, all are photographers -- all use light to somehow "draw".
Vaughn
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Vaughn
"Imagers" and "Print-makers" are both just subsets of the large set of "Photographers". Another sub-set of photographers would be "Transparency-makers" -- those whose final products are transparencies. But one must be careful about drawing boundaries, as most people are hybrids and such labels can be as mis-leading as they are helpful.
In the sub-set of "Print-makers", there are further subsets of digital printers, wet/darkroom printers (further divided into traditional processes and alternative processes printers), and custom printers (people who have other people printing for them, or print for others).
But, IMO, all are photographers -- all use light to somehow "draw".
Vaughn
Very eloquently put.
I draw a distinction with the print itself however. There is to me an intrinsic difference between a wet print that is the actual artifact of chemicals responding to light vs a inkjet print which is a reproduction of a somewhat analogous process happening on chip. One is actual, the other derived from. That makes the print itself qualitatively different.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Toyon
Very eloquently put.
I draw a distinction with the print itself however. There is to me an intrinsic difference between a wet print that is the actual artifact of chemicals responding to light vs a inkjet print which is a reproduction of a somewhat analogous process happening on chip. One is actual, the other derived from. That makes the print itself qualitatively different.
This is completely arbitrary and makes no sense.
Why is an inkjet print a reproduction of the process that happens on chip and why is wet print not a reproduction on what happens on film?
Why is chemical response to light more important than electrical response to light?
What is an inkjet of a scanned film? And what is a wet print of a digitally captured photograph?
These distinctions make even less sense as we go forward.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
All photographs are abstractions so all we are really talking about is a matter of degrees and everyone has their own line in the sand that separates "photography" and "illustration". My own tolerance for illustration is pretty low but that's just me. I do believe however that photos are really just tools that can be used for all sort of things.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Toyon, the definition of a photographic "print" becomes a tougher thing to define than "photographer" -- and the definition becomes more of a personal thing. Some might consider a transparency displayed lit from behind, as a print. Some say a print must be "hand-made", etc.
How to define the difference between the inkjet print and the Fuji Crystal Archive print (wet process) that was printed using a digital file? How many angels can dance of the head of a pin? LOL!
Everything else being equal, I prefer the hand-made print -- but that is just my bias, not an artistic standard.
Vaughn
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jim Galli
time to unsubscribe??
What? And lose a marketing tool? ;) Having a rough day down on the ranch, Jim?
Vaughn
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Here is a screed I wrote in another place some time ago. The philosophising is a bit technical but the sentiment may be relevant.
Philosophically speaking I doubt it is possible to manipulate a photograph without destroying its status as a photograph.
"Photograph" is a special name we apply to one particular kind of picture that distinguishes it from all other kinds of picture.
Other kinds of picture have names like "painting" or "drawing" or "ink-jet" and so on. All pictures, photographs, paintings, and the rest, at their most basic level consist of a bunch of marks on a flat surface. The names we give to these various pictures are based on how the marks get onto the surface. It is no surprise, for example, that a painted picture consists of paint. If one were to add details with, say, a pencil would that create a manipulated painting? No. It could rightly be referred to as a mixed medium picture and be viewed on its own merits. But because it no longer consists of paint it is not a painting any more. The same constraint applies to all pictures that are named according to the medium that is used to make them.
Well, what is it about photographs that make them distinguishable from every other kind of picture? I tend to fall back on the original idea of the guy (his idea not mine) who invented the word "photography" and what HE meant by it when he introduced it into the English language. And there is not the slightest ambiguity about it either. Sir John F.W. Herschel said "Photography or the application of the chemical rays of light to the purpose of pictorial representation".
Photographs are pictures made of a bunch of marks occasioned by chemical changes in a sensitive surface when that surface is penetrated by light. Imagine if the photograph is changed by adding marks that get there some other way. It might be a better picture or a worse one but because it is not even a photograph any more it can scarcely be a "manipulated photograph".
None of this is of any account if one is interested in just groovin' on pictures without any considerations about how they come into being. And it helps to ignore any relationship they may have to things in the real world. Under these circumstances manipulation is irrelevant. Its all diverting entertainment for the eye much as chewing gum is entertainment for the teeth.
But if one is serious about contemplating photographs, and only photographs, because of the special relationship they have to the world then "manipulation" breaks that relationship and renders the result not worth looking at.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Maris Rusis
But if one is serious about contemplating photographs, and only photographs, because of the special relationship they have to the world then "manipulation" breaks that relationship and renders the result not worth looking at.
Yawn.
Don Bryant
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Maris Rusis
Well, what is it about photographs that make them distinguishable from every other kind of picture?
A digital sensor has as much claim to the chemical connection as does bromides of silver. And the pigments placed on paper to make a print on an inkjet printer are as much chemicals as anything.
It seems to me that what makes a photograph uniquely photographic is that the light itself creates the image, rather than the hand of the artist. There is a lot of handwork required to make the latent image visible, but that handwork may or may not share elements and steps with other forms of art. Yet, those other art forms are not photographs solely because they were not created by the light itself.
For me, as long as that is true, it's a photograph. It could be nothing else, and anything created by the hand of the artist rather than by the light itself can't be a photograph.
Thousands of years ago, primitives wiped animal blood and vegetal dyes on walls, and that became "painting". More recently, another cave dweller splashed house paint on a board from leaky cans dancing on a string, and that is also called painting. What makes a painting uniquely a painting is that paint is applied to make the image. What makes a photograph is that light is applied to make the image.
I go back to my definition that a photograph is a picture made by projecting light onto a sensitized surface. That gives equal billing to digital and wet chemical processes. Just as some painters use oils, some use acrylics, and some use watercolors, and each on any imaginable surface, some photographers will use bromides of silver and others will use dye from an inkjet printer to reveal the latent image. But the latent image is still defined by how it was made.
Each time we draw a box around our definition, we purposely put some people (especially ourselves) inside the box and others outside the box. But when I make a photograph with a digital camera, I don't feel any different than when I'm using film. The artistic decisions that I make, and most of the craft that I apply, are not different. My tools are still composition, exposure, depth of field, focus plane management, and image tonality. My application of those tools is no different when I'm using a 5D or a Sinar. My visualization is just the same whether it's a chemical print or an inkjet print (though with the latter I'm usually closer to my visualization). Saying that photography is only this process or that process excludes a lot of people who are making purely photographic decisions in the creation of art, leaving them nowhere else to be.
It is every bit as snooty to do so as it was for painters to bitterly contest the creation of the photography department at MoMA, with the conviction that photography was not art.
Now, that ought to get me yelled at.
Rick "who makes photographs" Denney
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Sloppy huge format pic out of Deardorff is as sloppy as bad 39Mpix pic from CF-39MS back mounted to Hassy H3DII-31 and as sloppy as bad cell phone pic.
Good pic - same. It does not matter.
Adams who never printed straight neg without manipulations dreamed about digital imaging.
Now whole bunch of internet "purists" hate digital by typing on computer keyboard watching LCD screens - funny ... go to desert, take rock and scrape on the wall:) - no refresh button there.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Oil painting is just as much painting as water colour.
Different mediums have different final products. I just wish we as photographers could accept this and drop the whole debate and spend more time taking photos and not worry or feel like we have to justify ourselves and our means of capturing our vision.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
What gives those digital photos that "illustration" look, is the particular digital processing of the photos (and probably to a degree in some of them, the lighting). You can do alot of things with digital processing, most of which is very easy to go overboard, and alot of people seem to like the 'overboard processing', but it's not for everyone. I think alot of folks like that style *because* it's different.
You could easily get the same/similar results the same by scanning in an 8x10 sheet and "processing" it digitally with the same techniques. It's not the digital capture that gives them the different look, it's how they treat those captures.
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Daniel_Buck
What gives those digital photos that "illustration" look, is the particular digital processing of the photos (and probably to a degree in some of them, the lighting). You can do alot of things with digital processing, most of which is very easy to go overboard, and alot of people seem to like the 'overboard processing', but it's not for everyone. I think alot of folks like that style *because* it's different.
You could easily get the same/similar results the same by scanning in an 8x10 sheet and "processing" it digitally with the same techniques. It's not the digital capture that gives them the different look, it's how they treat those captures.
So true.Lucis and Topaz come to mind.Both of them have presets that pump up the local contrast and saturation to varying degrees.Just go to Flickr groups and type in HDR and you will come up with thousands of images using these softwares, most way over done.Once in a while an image will catch your eye, but I come from the f/64 west coast straight photography school myself, and those are the types of images I enjoy most.However just for fun and illustrative purpose (pun intended :), this is my wifes kitchen tool drawer with one of the Topaz presets applied as an example.There is no HDR software employed in the image at all, just the Topaz CS3 plugin.It is a stitched panorama of six images with a Canon G10 yielding a 19"x20" print at 360 DPI.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3386/...34aac9b8_o.jpg
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
I've got that same garlic press...
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Re: are photographs still photographs...
I'm trying so hard not to get involved, but here's my thoughts---
There are three significant elements seperating photographs done in the dark room and those illustrations printed with digis:
1) Progress. In terms of capabilities and end use, digital appears to be the cat's pajamas. Cool. There is a market for this stuff. It is a creative outlet for those who enjoy computers. Cool!
2) Fun. In terms of sheer enjoyment, photographing with film in bellows cameras and printing in a darkroom beats electrical gizmos and sitting at a computer and having a machine spurt out inkjets.
3) Energy. A conventional print made by a real human and born under an oc safelight while floating in a tray is a visual and tactile delight as it is nurtured through the stop, fix, second fix, wash, toner, and drying steps. Done by hand the photographer makes a physical object, much like a painting or sculpture. Electrons sent from a desk top to a uber printer is a completely different thing---physical contact between the "maker" and the print is just not in the equation.
Now does one picture have a different "look" than the other? Unless it was made that way on purpose, otherwise I think it would take a fairly sophisticated eye to discern any difference.
But there is a difference! Like "artisanal" bread that comes out of a factory bakery where extraordinary control is achieved through technology assuring the highest quality end product will yield some very tasty pan rustique is different from a loaf of sourdough kneaded with your own hands and baked in your own kitchen that comes out a wee bit black on the bottom.
Which would you prefer?
I'll take the home made bread every time, but if you prefer the high tech loaf, thats your choice. Either way the sandwich will still be a sandwich. :)