I've been following this thread with genuine interest, but now feel the need
to interject a thought or two....
Perhaps the metaphor for this thread should be shifted from "apples and
oranges" to "the horse before the cart" or maybe "losing the forest for the
trees."
I'm well aware of the necessity of debating these issues, and of debating
them out to some sense of completion. But I am feeling like this debate is
taking place in a vacume.
It all sounds pretty "heroic" to me: Like we *have* to make these decisions
- we *are* in control of this process - and we *will* realize this image
to it's "full potential" (no matter what). A rather iron-fisted *possession*
of "the technical." (And why do these discussions wander so easily into
monotheism?)
Excuse me, but I think these processes (or these papers) are *incidental*!!!!
In the end what's truly remarkable about these various processes is not in
how they are *different*, but in how remarkably THE SAME they are. As
Frederick Sommer said on a related theme, "These are manueuvers to try to
evade the fact that there is not much difference between them."
The magic that is a photograph happens in the transformation *INTO* the
photograph. And there is no way to be "in charge" of that transformation,
to mastermind it. It is easy, however, to loose sight of it.
Sommer again, "The blessing of the whole thing is that the damned
photographic processes aren't that good, and the seeing isn't that good, and
everything is wrong somewhere. And it's that discrepancy that, in spite of
everything, becomes the work of art."
At some point we have to learn to trust the materials and the processes to
express *THEIR reality to US.* And I might add, to stay out of the way of
allowing that to happen.
Sommer loves photography because of it's "inevitability....in that it
simply cannot do anything else. It shows YOU what some process shows
IT.....it's this long involvement with our senses which has to be honored."
I am also had a long involvment in wine and winemaking, and I find many
useful parallels. The grapes and the yeast know very well what they are
doing. (And what they are doing *exactly*, we know precious little about.)
They are doing something which once begun, is inevitable. The wine that
results is always an expression of the particular circumstances that made
the grapes. Good wine making is about accepting those circumstances and
letting the raw materials express themselves into the wine. Yes, the
winemaker has an arsenal of "options" available to "mold" the wine into a
predetermined style. Great wine never (never) comes about through such
intervention. It's also known that the world's greatest wines all have some
"flawed-ness" (for lack of a better word) to them that is indeed, intrinsic
to their greatness...They all fall short of the mark on some purely
*technical* issue. And *technically* correct is usually pretty boring
stuff.
"It don't have to be perfect, to be PERFECT."
We all have at any given moment all the tools, and all the materials, and
all the knowledge we *require* to put that into service of something that
really matters.
Thanks for the soap box.
Jon Bailey