On Photography
Material
Exposure
It's Elementary My Dear Watson
"I was raised in a time that "exposure" was a material action (albeit somewhat mysterious and a little like alchemy, but material nonetheless) and handling a 35 SLR the measure of photographic skill and aptitude. "Going digital" is then not a progression of photographic evolution like going from carburetion on your automobile to fuel injection, or mechanical breaker points to electronic ignition, but a radically differing media with radically differing way of seeing the world, one as different an art, as a chisel on marble, or splash of drippy watercolors. It is an altogether differing mode of travel.
Baking in an oven walled up in some hole properly polarized and grounded, the outlet might be fine for some, but really it cannot compare to a real bronze from frolicking under the sun on a Caribbean island all day. The experience differs absolutely.
Though the final result might be two dimensional pictorial imagery varying in realism, they are remotely differing and to be looked at differently. One cannot look at a gothic cathedral, or at the stars through a brass telescope without a sense of connection of differing times that to some is awe inspiring. A look on the groundglass of a old large-format view camera is an experience unique in a day of high tech throw away images.
There are a lot of premium vintage cameras that will never be made again, and can be had for a song, but more importantly they offer a way of seeing that should never be lost.
Like Alice's little glass, a brass argus eye set in a camera obscura offers a look into whole differing world, that aligns us closer the ancients than little green star travelers. Like a time machine on tripod, one is transported to a differing world of sights, and sounds, and feelings, and loves, surely and forever to impinge all reality. Especially one hell bent to evaporate into nothingness from its own starvation diet. Looking thorough a view-camera is a differing way of seeing the world about us.
My early study of view camera images led me inexorably to the "dirty french postcards." But there is more to photography than Darlots and faux canvas landscapes and Greek columns. If one wants to study early photographic imagery, one is likely to do it with a very buxom 18th century chick, butt naked, poking her way right to the center of the viewfinder. My God, didn't any of these women back then have clothes, or have any idea how to keep them on?
Now, I've nothing against nudity in art, But there are certain people who shouldn't be au naturel before a camera, to circulate widely and freely. And this is about every girl before about 1920. Maybe 1950. The Victorians were known for their "prudery." The french postcard showed me why. They were doing us a favor. How would you respond to these postcards circulating freely today? My, I lost my appetite a whole day queasy and dizzy at these women, um to be nice, women larger than life.
Now that magic monocle has a funny way of bringing us the bare facts. The more I looked at Petzvals and Dichromates, the more I realized these women were objects of admiration, desire, even love. (and there was lots to love!) To understand the images, you need to look through anthers eyes. The more I drew demarcations the faster they evaporated. We are not so set out of time.
The fact if the matter is those of the Nineteenth century actually saw these women as attractive, they loved them, and more importantly, the photos were self conscious art. Great care is taken to light, composition, styling, pose, makeup. Though easy to dismiss the whole risqué era as prurient in nature, textures, fabrics, a peacock feather here, a dove there, an allusion to the marital bed contradicts any such interpretation at once. One is drawn into its artfulness where its whole appeal lay.
This is true in language, or any other authentic cultural engagement where the entrance is a broadening of experience.
Through the years photographica has been a great challenge to my thinking and art. It also makes for great studio inspiration. A few Figures or US Cameras in the foyer from the fifties have the capacity to make the whole modern world look tepid and flat. It is said that learning a language is entering the race. And Lord knows that in a aesthetically flaccid age we could use some engagement. Art is the engagement.
© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan
Photography
