After having pushed out a major update to this site, and having spent several weeks working in an all-digital still life studio, and after selling some cameras on ebay and shooting some assignments for the New York Times, I have something on my mind.
I have read other posts like this, one was called, The Modern Camera, And the Dilution of Effort by Bruce Wilson. It is mostly a lament on the ease with which one can now make pictures, as compared with turn of the century photographers using wet-plate processes. You can guess where he finds value, and I might agree if I thought his premise was correct: that the dilution of effort the modern camera brings also diminishes the results.
“AND SO WE COME TO IT: the DILUTION OF EFFORT. Photographers have only so much time to take pictures. Jackson would spend days getting one negative. That’s a great deal of effort packed into one image, but what extraordinary images he made! We spend fifteen seconds or less and what do we create? Cascades of snapshots! Piles of photographs that even our mothers won’t hang on the wall. Yep, we are creating nothing more nor less than snapshots, created in an instant, and just as interesting as those Aunt Josephine shot when the family went to that Jersey beach last summer. Shooting fast is diluting our efforts, spreading one hour of our talent into dozens of worthless shots.”
For this fellow, if it is hard it is good. The harder the better. I think I know what his father was like. I also like how he ignores the 100 years of photography between the wet plate and now. I guess he does not think the Leica contributed much to the history of photography, nor Polaroid, and those 4×5 Quickloads must be suspect too. I am not doing the article justice, you should follow the link and read for yourself, but not before I demolish it here!
I think that there is something else at work here, and it has nothing to do with effort. It has something to do with time and space. Not necessarily exterior time and space either. You can imagine William Henry Jackson or Carleton Watkins standing next to a tourist or whatever species of photographer that Wilson is worried about, (and me too) for example the Flickr-fanatic, at the edge of the Grand Canyon and both taking pictures, they both are in the same time and space, but the results would be different.
And just to tease the comparison a little more, lets forget about ability. There is no denying the immense power of some of the work of early photographers (the ones who get up early?) in large format, and in places untouched by human S.U.V’s. It is very difficult to touch those early results currently, by even the best practitioners of the art. It was good to be first. But that is not what I am getting at either.
I think the difference has to do with interiority, which is the inner space of the mind and its thoughts and feelings, and the experience of that space which is called intimacy. A longer explanation would be that interiority is an awareness of a developed and active inner psychological landscape. Intimacy with that space is the ongoing connection to the feelings and thought products in that landscape. Anything that draws us into a closer dialogue with that interior landscape in this case the tools, is better.
In one sense I do agree that it is better if it is difficult: you can imagine Action-Jackson or Watkins and their pack-mules trekking for days to get to some of these locations, the campfires in-between, the hard-tack, the lack of women…But I digress. They had time to consider the work, experience the landscape, and come to a decision on exactly what they wanted to blow a 20×24 sheet of glass. So while it was definitely hard, I believe it was probably very enjoyable, otherwise, why pack 200 lbs of gear-for the fame of it all? Yes the photographs were novelties and attracted wide attention; just imagine today Burt Rutan mounting an expedition to the Moon to make photographs! Masses of fame associated with that-but loads of fun. It would be stunning. 200 tons of gear strapped to an enormous bomb and three lucky souls. Best-week-ever.
To the point, what is missing in the experience of the modern camera is the interiority that older, more difficult processes fostered. I get no joy shooting with a digital camera, but step back to the “primitive” Leica or field camera and it is bliss. Why is this? I am certainly no curmudgeon when it comes to technology. I no more miss the wet darkroom than I miss listening to music on wax cylinders. So what is it?
The experience of working is hard to define, and is different for everyone, however I believe I can generalize a few points of importance. While the “act” of photographing occurs in “real time” the “experience” of photographing occurs in the inner time space, this place I call interiority. You could say that this inner space has a vertical dimension while time, as we understand it has a horizontal dimension. I am certain the Garry Winogrand in his millions of frames never once thought that the actual time it took to make a picture mattered. He famously answered “one-one-hundredth of a second” or similar when asked by a critic how “long” it had taken him to “make” that picture. In other words we are going “deeper” in the experience of interiority than the actual time span would indicate. Digital processes and most of “technology” attempt to replace the vertical span with the horizontal span. They give us speed but no depth. Interestingly, one of the most common complaints about “digital” photographs is that they lack “depth”. Of course this is something different, it is the result of squeezing reality through a regularized mathematical filter that “combs out” irregularity, and it is something that is reaching its extinction point in the current crop of high megapixel chips, 22mp and higher for example. Finally there is enough “data” to represent reality sufficiently to the eye.
But is there something about making a process more convenient that necessarily makes it less meaningful, less “deep”?
The history of photography is the history of one more convenient technology superseding another. This is not new. Photography has always been a technological child and complaining about the lastest thing is to miss the point of photography. It is convenient. The quickness enables a mode of seeing that is not possible otherwise. But the interiority of the artistic process is not so easily “convenienced”. There is another term for this, those who saw the transformation of the typesetting industry called it “de-skilling”. But I don’t believe it is the transformation of the craft itself that is the problem. As I said before, I don’t miss the wet darkroom, although many do. No doubt some interiority has been lost there too.
When I look at the process of photography, there is the confrontation with the facts of the world and my reaction to them. And the photograph is a “new fact” derived from the collision of the two. Again that’s Garry Winogrand’s expression for it. So the question, awkward syntax and all is; is data a new fact? Or is data the description of a fact?
It is very easy to believe in the fact-ness of a negative, chrome, or print. There it sits. And I am not talking about the factuality which is truthfulness. This is the imprint of light on a medium. It has existential weight, not to mention physical weight. I might guess that exposed film is heavier than unexposed film-by how much you ask… With digital there is a momentary state change of a charge-coupled device recorded by an array of transistors. There is no fact, only a phase change. How does the production of facts differ from the production of states?
This is an important distinction. I feel like a passive visual consumer when I am shooting digitally and not an active creator. Without the transactional moment of converting raw film into exposed images, photography becomes pure consumption. Critics used to deride photography as art because it was a “mechanical reproduction” untouched by the “hand of the artist. Sounds quaint now, and here I am deriding digital production in similar fashion. We have learned to live with endless copies, but we may not have learned to live with the absence of a physical original.
The current term for shooting digitally is “raw capture” which is an interesting metaphor also, ignoring the obvious “raw” part which is technical and appropriate, “capture” is an interesting choice, as if we might decide to let it go at some time in the future. In other words, it is temporary, provisional, fleeting. (It is also aggressive, but photography has always had more than its share of aggressive metaphors, coincidentally it is very adept at depicting war.) You can say, “I captured the moment on film” but it has still not worked its way into parlance to say “I captured the moment on digital.” Perhaps some enterprising marketer will help us with that.
So what we traded for, the New World and the worshipping of convenience, is interiority. I believe that it isn’t even a trade; the language of our interiority has become the language of consumption, not thoughts or feelings. Our most, and I hesitate to use this word-sacred-space is now a marketplace where feelings are supplanted by objects that promise and misrepresent. People talk about how the culture has become “pornographic” and geeks talk about tech-“porn” (or pr0n) and I believe this is true, but not in any sexual way. It is the misdirection of the interior space, away from the interior to the external, to the world of false promises of objects that attempt to satisfy that is the result.
Excuse me while I turn off the LCD preview on the back of my camera.
Circling back,
“WE HAVE SOMETHING TO GAIN by taking our time. Instead of shooting three rolls an hour, spend three hours on one photograph. Think about the scene. Is it really worth shooting? …Does your framing of the shot and the composition convey the feeling of the subject that first made you stop and linger on it? Do you even know how the scene or subject made you feel? (emphasis mine) If you don’t know, how can you expect your photograph to successfully convey it?”
Bruce is absolutely right here; do you even know how the scene or subject made you feel? Every little thing that diminishes that interiority is what we are trading for in this New World.
Postscript: I bodged the title together for this essay from the title of a great book by Robert Adams; “What we bought: The New World” which is similar in tone but done brilliantly in photographs.