Teaching Photography: Notes Assembled

The Digital ‘Revolution’

54 A photographer is walking in the park. She sees a bench. There are two couples on the bench. Each couple is very much in love. The two couples do not know each other. Just by coincidence, the situation is this: Both couples eyes are cast down and they are speaking of their love in shy, quiet tones. Their hands are folded on their laps. This, you must admit, is not an uncommon situation; it could be happening right now on a park bench somewhere. Our photographer sees this, quietly goes over and makes a photograph like this: The picture is then hung in a gallery in an exhibition about how modern couples are having trouble relating to each other. No one will question it. An ‘ologist’ might even write a scholarly article addressing the issue. Along comes the editor of National Geographic and he pushes the pyramids at Giza closer together so that they will fit the vertical format of his ‘colonialist’ magazine. THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 55 It’s done with a computer rather than razor blades and rubber cement. Everyone goes nuts about how you can no longer trust the camera to tell the truth. In 1888, Henry Peach Robinson was gluing and pasting as many as 10 pictures together and re-photographing them and making seamless Victorian melodrama. Photographs could never be trusted on a factual level. Art is a lie that reveals the truth. Pablo Picasso Because the camera always frames what is in front of it, in a sense everything photographed is ‘out of context.’ Since all photographs slice time, they are also inherently ‘out of context.’ Even photographs that we call ‘straight’ are not ‘true’ for these two reasons alone. All this before you even ‘boot up.’§§§§§ If one sees the function of photographic education as primarily technical: learning optics, chemistry and the handling of machines, the shift from chemical to digital methods will represent a major upheaval. On the other hand, if the aim of photography is to develop vision, to find out what it is in me that corresponds to what I perceive as phenomena, and to create a form in order to express that correspondence , then indeed the use of digital tools becomes a wonderful expansion of possibilities. As of now, the ability to scan negatives and edit lots of material very fast is positive. Some of the prints being made are beautiful, a kind of hybrid between a photographic print and a fine reproduction . Digital technology can help a person to ‘range bigger’ if their artistic scope can handle it. 56 The fact that photographs can be more easily altered is a mixed blessing. The ease of doing this can make an artist go soft in the same way that electronics in music can seduce musicians to lose their edge. The basic and most profound aspects of photographic education should remain the same. A person learns to deal with space, tone, color, perspective, time, choice of prospect, expression, relation to other people as subject, collaboration; not to mention history and aesthetics as well as the vast world of ‘meaning’ in the creation of photographs. The shift to digital tools will not eliminate these aspects any more than the shift from film to video has changed the basic concepts of montage and narrative in motion pictures. The ability to observe with rigor, to translate from three or four dimensions to two with real speed and clarity and to do it ‘fresh’ is still the central problem of learning photography and it doesn’t really matter what the recording method is. This is an oversimplification. New technologies have, and will continue to have, as profound an effect on the aesthetics of the medium as have the hand-held camera, modern color processing, fast films, electronic flash, etc. But I feel strongly that the underlying principles of making something that we think of as transcendent remain basically the same. It is like motion around a center core that is constant. I hope I’ll still be able to get film and printing paper. It’s interesting to note that as this new technology develops and gets more accessible, there is a re-emergence in the use of ‘historical ’ processes like platinum, palladium, carbro and cyanotype. A great deal of the collage/montage work now being done on the computer has its aesthetic reference late 19th and early 20th century materials. Never...