Re: digital and analogue photography -the essay
Catherine -- >>> http://www.catherinerogers.com.au/ and click on the Essays link. <<< I found your essay interesting, to say the least. (I'm relatively new to digital--8 months or so, learned regular photography in the '70s in a b/w darkroom). The following sentence caused me to stop reading and comment here: "What are the features of digital technologies compared to analogue, chemical reacting processes which suggest that digital image making should be called photography at all?" (p. 6) I can never get my knickers in a twist over this question because I always go back the original quest (aim) that eventually brought all things photographic into being: to get a slice of what one looks at, sees, onto something where it can exist beyond the time and place of the seeing. If you go back to that, digital or analogue don't matter. They are just pathways to achieving that aim. If you manage to get "what you see" so that, to you, it *is* what you saw, then you have achieved that aim. "Photography" is still "writing by light"-- no matter the camera that records it. Once you go beyond this, either in the darkroom or the computer, you engage in interpretation of reality. This is perhaps the entrance to the pathway to "art". Then again, the image you have at first, in its unaltered state, may also qualify as art. (The act of "selecting" what you you choose to record is, in my very firm opinion, an act of creation. ("The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.": Dorothea Lange.) Which of course dumps us back into the perennial discussion of "what is art". I think it is in the nature of art to come out of the artist by any means possible, i.e., the particular passion of an artist will cause that artist to search for and find a way to bring into being for others to see, what that artist wants us to see. It doesn't really matter if that artist is a painter, sculptor, or photographer (and all the other members of the media family). And, thus, I completely agree with you: "In the end, digital technologies are what we make of them and are simply a means to an end." (p. 10) Clair P.S. I spend almost all my days alone and live in the boonies, thus I hunger for intellectual exchange--thanks for this, Catherine!)
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