> No matter our personal desires, certain kinds of photography are going to
> be as obsolete as wet plate collodion -- except, interestingly, wet plate
> collodion is, I'm told, quite do-able today, for those who care to do it.
Sure. If one doesn't mind playing around with gun cotton.
> In other words, we may not have factory film & paper, but we can probably
> do whatever we *really* want to do, as long as an alternate technology is
> kept alive. My objection -- so far -- to the family of digital printers,
> at least judging by what I've seen, including this year at Viscomm, is
> that the process has to be done through an intermediary, so that you
don't
> have the ready interaction, the improvisation, discovery, the benefit of
> trial & error you get when you do it yourself with a few dollars worth of
> paper (and as you do when you sketch or make working drawings for art on
> paper or canvas).
Not necessarily. In dealing with Graham Nash, for instance, there is the
same
type of collaboration for the digital print as exists between the printer
and the
photographer when a fine art book is being prepared for publication.
Several proofs
are pulled and the image is 'tweeked' before a final print is made.
>
> That's printing I'm talking about, not the negative. Al Strauss points
out
> that your trial and error is on the monitor, and presumably after some
> experience you gain the ability to visualize what will happen from what
> you see on CRT. HOWEVER, my sense of the situation is that it tends to
> push the medium toward the preconceived and the slick -- what might be
> called the commercial -- as the photographers who know they can sell x
> number of grand shots of favorite and/or sentimental scenes can/will
shell
> out the big bucks required, at least at this point. That leads to a lot
of
> Santa Fe art (sorry Dick). Who was it on this list said the printer
> display at Viscomm a while back was like miles of placemats?
Its not the medium. its the photographer. The point perhaps is that the new
technology makes it easier for the mediocre to breed.
>
> OK, so what? You can do whatever you want. But the nature of the
process,
> and the production requirements, will not only change "photography" but
in
> lots of ways control it. How many photographers in the past learned from
a
> book and $1 worth of paper in the cellar. That won't quite be any more.
> Lots more social stratification, haves one side, have nots the other. Not
> to mention the technically disfunctional.
>
This is a general societal problem of the haves and have-nots. Photography
is
a minor sympton. Hopefully the schools and other organizations will make
adequate computer facilities available in the future just as they do
darkrooms
now.
Cheers,
Al