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February 14, 2008

Why Digital Photography Matters

2008 marks the year that I have decided to seriously rekindle my lost love affair with photography. When I first applied to design school and I had to declare a major, my pen wavered between checking the graphic design box or the photography box. In the end I chose graphic design, and that was probably a wise choice as my natural talent still probably lies there. But even after high school I never really left the darkroom. My Beseler 23C enlarger made appearances in various apartment bathrooms throughout the late 80s and early 90s as I continued to produce mediocre black & white photographs. When I eventually moved to Thailand in 1996 I sold most of my stuff—including the darkroom—and I never developed another print again. I still shot a lot of film with my Pentax ME Super while living in Thailand, but the corner photomat was as close to any hands-on work as I got.

Fast forward to the year 2000 and my first digital camera, a Nikon 4500. While the camera itself did nothing to improve my natural ability to take decent photographs, it did allow me to take a lot of them. Film cost no longer mattered. Mixing chemicals no longer mattered. This allowed me to take huge quantities of photographs, and in that sense it did improve my ability in one important way: I no longer waited for the perfect shot, I just shot.

At the same time some of my old-school artist friends were dismissing digital photography as a lower art form. It lacked the hands-on of real photography: the smell of chemicals, the labored processes, the selection of papers, the dirtying of the hands. I found this rather ironic as I’m sure that’s exactly what the painters were telling the photographers back at the turn of the century: This soulless new artform with its gadgets and chemicals called “photography” can never achieve the museum-quality status of the works of the great painters and sculptors.

Today, digital photography is under a similar scrutiny as it’s older sibling experienced back in the day. This distrust of digital art is odd to me for several reasons. First, old school black and white photography (which gets the most “artistic” respect) is a process in which silver halide crystals are exposed to light and are then rendered black or white. As these chemicals are grouped together they create tonality depending on their proximity to one or another. So really, light affects the crystals and turns them on or off. Black or white. 1 or 2. It’s a binary process. Black and white photography is a digital artform by definition.

Second, when you shoot film the film itself is designed to react a certain way depending on manufacturer and style. From there the processing of the film is typically done by a lab and that process adds to the number of “hands” touching the “art”. Next paper manufacturers design their paper to have specific looks and feels, etc. You see where this is going. Conversely, when I shoot a photograph in RAW format and bring it into my software application, in this case Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I am editing the raw data the camera captured and I have full control over every pixel in the frame. The chain of command is reduced to me and the camera—no lab, no film, no outside forces filtering my work. So really, my “artistic” control is enhanced with digital photography, both by my ability to shoot a higher volume of photographs and my ability to edit each pixel directly. Now, it’s important to mention that no amount of equipment or software is going to make anyone a good photographer, but that’s true of any discipline. If you can’t paint, the best sable brush will do nothing for you. But the converse is also true, one’s medium doesn’t determine the level of artistic authenticity in one’s work, that can only me determined by the skill and vision of one’s endeavor.

But yeah, now that I have the right equipment, I want to spend the next year really focusing on technique—I want to elevate the craft of making photos—both behind the lens and behind the Macintosh. I’ve never called myself a photographer, but I hope by the end of the year I will feel comfortable doing just that. And I really want to start learning more from some of the modern masters. My latest favorite is Jill Greenberg. (See photo above.) Her attitude about photography is right on to me, and this quote from a recent video interview says it all:

I don’t really romanticize straight photography. I think it’s nice to just get in there..If you want to change the picture, change the picture. It doesn’t need to be evidence of some actual event that happened.

I remember when I first started printing my own photos in high school and I would always make sure to get the edges of the negative in the print as proof that I didn’t enlarge the shot in the darkroom. As if by succumbing to the whims of the camera manufacturer’s frame ratio I was being truer to the artform. Seems silly to me now.

More photos and a completely redesigned LookatLao Photography section coming this spring. In the meantime there’s always new snapshots over on Flickr.

Posted by Lookatlao at February 14, 2008 10:46 PM