On Photography
"From this day on, painting
is dead"
-Delaroche upon
seeing his first Daguerreotype
The
Case For Classic Photography
The box on my new epson is interesting. In four color hype it claims: "Photo Quality." I note B&H photo video digital the digital is exponentially growing like the big bang, while what a few years short ago in shutterbug filled 10 pages under "darkroom," is now less than one. But today dozens are given to 3, 4 and 5 megapixel offerings. Today, digital and photo are used interchangeably and to most people mean much the same thing. The epitaph everywhere says "film is dead."
Everyone knows we are living in the midst of a revolution of imagery and have entered the electronic age, but precious few recognize this revolution is in fact a revolution of seeing. Traditional photography and electronic imagery are diametrically opposing ways of seeing even as absolutely differing of nature.
Inasmuch as our relation to imagery has come to define our relationship to the visible world, it is important to recognize the nature of the revolution before jumping on the digital bandwagon blindly singing its praises. The demise of traditional photography is a demise of seeing as defined of nature.
Classic photography is then defined as actual visible light, in time, as optically transmitted unto two planes amalgamated silver and chemically reduced to the visible image we might see.
Creative interpretation and manipulation of the silver recording is possible at each juncture reflecting to the emotional and personal sensibilities of the creative artist.
The realization of the photographer's creative visualization of the finished image at the moment of exposure to these ends in the darkroom is no small part of the creative and unique activity.
The photograph is both real in that is an authentic deposit and footprint of authentic actual light in time, and also as a purely silver rendering of visual reality in two dimensions; "not real," where its reality is of differing order than what we see, thus aligning it with creative media and the artistic soul of the race over millennia.
Though superficially similar, there is nothing in digital image making comparable any of this.
And thus the case for classic photography.
© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan
Photography
