Fair enough, ONF. It wasn't meant as a personal characterization.
Understood... just wanted everyone to understand that I'm about as opposite a "byootox kisser" as one can get. I happen to like and respect Barnbaum's work... always have. Simple as that. BTW, there are many members here and on LFP.I who's work I deeply appreciate. I'll not be brown-nosing them either.
Roger,
You have inadvertently articulated a concern that runs through this whole discussion. In his essay, Bruce Barnbaum really doesn't seem to care very much about the students he criticizes. He doesn't even seem to perceive them accurately as complex human beings. Instead, he presents caricatures. With this in mind, I hope his essay does not represent his actual teaching practice. (To tell you the truth, I had never heard of this teacher-photographer before I read this thread.) If you are correct that he really doesn't listen to those who disagree with him, I wonder why any thinking person would listen to him.
"I love my Verito lens, but I always have to sharpen everything in Photoshop..."
Mark,
Barnbaum's argument might be more persuasive for some than for others, but its relative strength depends on its logical structure, not on how persuasive it is, or even whether its conclusions are true or false.
As far as the traditional vs digital debate is concerned, for me, there isn't one.
I hope you are never asked to write a 100-page report, at a billed rate that encourages your client to demand you do it quickly. I type faster on an iPhone than on an iPad (the "keys" lack the tactile response to allow touch typing but are too far apart for hunt-and-peck). On a real keyboard with real keys, I type about four times as fast as on an iPhone. Maybe ten times as fast.
Some would argue that it's just more words, but that's not the point. I'm not seeing a reduction in words as a result of iPads. I am, however, seeing a reluctance on the part of people to read and write complete thoughts, which sometimes require more than 140 characters. I'm also seeing thoughts that aren't worth more than 140 characters, or often rendered completely senseless by garbled word replacements. I could have been fired for some of the things my iPhone thought I meant to say instead of what I actually said, but for my fat thumbs. It's a powerful tool for keeping small problems from becoming big problems, but it becomes a like a brother-in-law who came over one evening to help you build some bookshelves and three years later is still on the sofa drinking your beer. Maybe you'd rather he do that than drive your car into a tree, but then again maybe not.
Where I live, I'm doing good to get 700KB/S data rate, with frequent interruptions and sometimes enormous latency. And if I move more than 8GB a month, I pay extra. And the service I use is already expensive. It's also the only service available where I live. Forget online backups; forget replacing my hard-wired landline; forget canning my satellite TV service. So much for the cloud--I cannot depend at any time on fetching my stuff from somewhere else. I probably pay four times what you do for the same basic services, but at a much lower service model. I am not alone--even in cities, I see people saying the foulest things to to their cell phones when they walk behind a building and their call is dropped. But your model is even more dependent on an infrastructure beyond your influence than is Mr. Barnbaum's darkroom. I'm not even willing to discuss the point that reading 4-point text on my iPhone is making me even more blind than I was before.
Back on the subject, I, in fact, do approach photography differently with a digital camera than with a view camera. But that really is a false comparison--the differences between my Canon 5D and my Sinar are vast beyond the relatively trivial fact that one is digital and the other uses film. Still, I do take advantage of the ability to see the image I just made, and to check the data in that image. We used to do that, too. It was called Polaroid. And it was (and is) expensive. Fast feedback is a seductive learning tool. We can't escape the fact that the marginal cost of another provisional digital photograph is zero with the digital camera, which makes succumbing to the seduction relatively cost-free.
Mr. Barnbaum's darkroom is not as future-proof as he describes, and he cannot extrapolate the reliable availability of the necessary materials over the last 30 years to the next 30 years. At any time, he is subject to his darkroom becoming unusable if just a handful of manufacturers no longer make the few products that he critically needs. Sure, he can coat his own paper and try to find the raw materials needed to mix his own chemicals--that would test his commitment to the notion that convenience is bad for art--but I suspect that will impose a far greater modification of his work than printing digitally. With film photography, we are depending on an industry with a rapidly declining demand base. We all hope the decline stabilizes in time to sustain the minimal production infrastructure on which we depend. But we are all scared it won't, and I wonder why we keep kicking the dirt about it instead of being honest about our fear. With digital, we are depending on our own ability to maintain our computer infrastructure, which most of us do anyway, and that is not what really scares us. At the crossover points--such as keeping our prior film images relevant by scanning them--we are especially vulnerable. But what really scares us is that are hard-won skills will be seen as irrelevant, as they already are by most people.
A considered approach to the digital revolution would start by describing, free of any underlying technology, how we make our art, and then extracting requirements on technology to support that described approach. But that does not happen. Instead, products are designed for people unlike most of us, and we must live with products that fulfill someone else's requirements. Without understanding those requirements, all articles like Mr. Barnbaum's--on both sides of the debate--answer questions that have not been asked. One of those questions is whether the photographers of the future will even care to make prints. If they don't, even our digital print-making may become vulnerable to obsolescence. How's that for a cheery thought?
Rick "thinking Mr. Barnbaum's pronouncements a thinly veiled desperate fear of becoming irrelevant--and knowing how he feels" Denney
I enjoyed your post, but you sure do project a lot of fear onto everyone.
I'm not sure there's much projection needed in Barnbaum's case.
His is the usual professional response to disruptive novelty: take refuge in your job title, and only argue with puppets you make and control yourself. Here's Emerson doing the same thing over a century ago:
As we have said, by the aid of photography feeble painters and etchers are able to produce fairly passable work, where otherswise their work would have been disgraceful.
...
Art Division - In this division the aim of the work is to give aesthetic pleasure *alone*, and the artist's only wish is to produce works of art. Such work can be judged only by trained artists, and the aims and scope of such work can be fully appreciated only by trained artists. Photographers who qualify themselves by an art training, and their works alone belong to this class.
Peter Henry Emerson
Introduction to Naturalistic photography for students of the art.
http://archive.org/details/naturalisticphot00emerrich
Personally I have more respect for a flexible approach which recognises the practical need for *some* kind of decision to be made, but doesn't get too hung up on the sanctity of rules. Tortis as insect.
Oh Jay, if only your thought we're true life would be so much simpler.
Logic can be persuasive within scientific research, but even there it has to fight emotion.Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You, you may say
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
You, you may say
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one
In sales emotion wins over logic, in politics too.
The very reasons most people photograph things is for fun or love, not for logic.
The story (true or not) we tell about something adds value, without a story things are generic/commoditized/cheap.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~ Mark Twain
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