"I suppose it's an example of the images I would never have made on film. Digital allows the luxury of trying stuff out without wasting money in the process. Not the kind of thing I'd probably have printed up either, were my printer still able to print anything - but certainly interesting and entertaining enough for me to spend some time figuring out where it might go. That's a definite plus for digital photography, and perhaps an illustration of how it can take us to different stations not on the film circuit. Guess it takes time to work out the new options available in photography."
I posted the above in Lula, recently, and it got me thinking.
Could it be that those of us with a strong hankering for film, or perhaps with the memory of it, are not really making a realistic comparison between the two media, film and digital, but are, rather, forcing our minds into thinking unnecessarily of them as competing fighters in some imaginary battle of wits?
I come from a photographic background that was film for the entirety of my career. As such, digital arrived as a bit of a negative influence, causing a lot of harm to the world that I knew, in which I had felt fairly comfortable. Suddenly, that world became flooded - to the point of drowning - with images of all sorts, both good as bad, with the added menace of them being offered in the marketplace as alternatives to those produced through a degree of learning, experience and understanding of what made the fiscal clock keep running. The investment quotient was removed from, especially, the world of stock photography, and the perceived value of going anywhere with the objective of producing a set of professionally created photographs turned into a nonsense: the rank amateur armed with his digital camera could eventually arrive at the right exposure and, during his holiday, shoot a zillion shots for free, and at least one should be good enough to merit a sale via some library. It's what machine guns do in warfare. So immediately, the sense of digital, the way it was appreciated, was that it had become an existential threat.
That continued for quite some time, and the insidious effect of a vast supply of cheap imagery in one sphere of photography led to a gradually accelerating decline in perceived value in pretty much all genres of professional photographic work, with the inevitable result of falling revenue and much longer working hours spent producing the thing, the somewhat intangible thing finally delivered to the client.
Once set in motion, this inevitably carried on to the point where it reached its nadir or, as some might see it, the realistic, modern level of the monetary value of photography today. Most professionals have now long embraced digital, and except perhaps for some "art" photographers, that's their future, as much as it is their present.
So where is photography today, for those of us not doing it for the money?
I think that, in general, it has become a very different beast, with its prime objective no longer that little - or large - piece of photographic paper bearing testimony to the pleasure or expression of artistic appreciation a moment once gave, a feeling strong enough to make us knowingly expend time, effort and money in pursuit of it; I think it has become another creature altogether, one far more light, that seeks only to be remembered for five seconds at best.
Having written that is not to preclude those who simply use the medium as they did or would have done with film, from just going on as before, creating pictures that they love and enjoy, regardless of medium.
What has altered, though, is that for both kinds of photographer, the opportunity for experimentation is far greater than ever it was. And I think that's the crucial aspect: one should learn to forget about the innate characteristics of film grain and so forth, and just use the digital route for what it offers instead, which is low cost, unlimited opportunity to mess about, and within a different photographic experience altogether. It's in the constant comparison of one medium with the other that the older photographer might find continuing frustration.
The musical analogy with score and the interpretation of it has never been more relevant than today, where our chances of coming up with a pleasing, personal take on something is far higher than it was before the advent of digital. Instead of wasting expensive sheets of paper, test strips notwithstanding, we can today sit on our collective ass, look at a screen and alter, adapt, add, subract and lie through our visual teeth until we reach the point where we feel we may have accomplished something worth showing.
Unfortunately though, none of this alters the fact that we will always need to have somethig inside us that we can express visually. If that's not there, we are left as voiceless as ever we were.
So yes, I think photograhy is now something else, and that its "drawing with light" sentiment is of the past, more drawing been done in the computer than in any camera.
