Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Sun, 18 Apr 1999 15:09:40 -0400 (EDT)
On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Kevin O'Brien wrote:
> Digital work has a place and will become increasingly important. During the
> last year I have been gathering up, scanning and restoring photos for the
> family history. None could do in the darkroom what is possible at the
> computer; even faded colour prints can be restored.
I must agree with Kevin that digital has important gifts & especially with
Adam, that digital is by no means easier -- if fact every new program out
of the box with an inch-thick manual (if you're lucky, most of them come
with a CD that won't install until you call tech support but you can't
find them because the phone # is on the CD !) and my impulse is just to
pack it up again and send back for the 30-day refund. But what you can DO
with the good ones (some are just fumpfer) is so amazing you wonder how
you ever lived without it.
In fact for all the harrumphing about the virtues of ground glass and
Watkins large plate of holy memory, those technologies are
finite, "mature," relatively static, and hence knowable. And once you've
learned them, you can relax. You're a pro. A master/riss. Digital is
always two jumps ahead of you & you are dealing with a "system" that
doesn't know itself, let alone follow your will. In my experience there
isn't a SINGLE computer expert in the world would go to the Grand Canyon
like Watkins (or wherever he went) with like Watkins' one glass plate, not
a back up disk, a spare hard drive, a debugger, and a backup for the
backup. And then the batteries would go dead and the system would crash.
In fact I think the experts on this list are the ones most likely to
report, um excuse me, I had system failure & lost all my addresses. The
digitons go for them FIRST.
That said, my own imagination now is seized by digital... not for image
making, but as the getting-to part. A scanner and output device lets you
think visual images beyond, with all due respect, the mountains, and great
outdoors, which with all due respect, um, do you really think you can do
better than Watkins? Read Jon Bailey's e-mail from yesterday, which is
really being polite. The difference between creative thinking and
mechanics obtains everywhere, not process related.
In other words, digital, if you don't kill too many brain cells or
bankrupt yourself or have a nervous breakdown (all distinct possibilities,
if not probabilities) is enormously liberating to the imagination. I don't
mean putting a girl's head on a dog's body either, or that kind of
"trick." I mean dealing with images... I have looked back at my own image
file and see ways to make a much better picture than the original, but
still the original, that can be done digitally but are an exercise in
futility analog. I've heard Dan Burckholder talk about this, and seen his
photograph, for instance of his mother's room, that illustrated the idea
perfectly. It was the same room, but he put the picture on a different
plane so to speak. Not the way Walker Evans or whoever would have done it
-- but his own poetry.
Is this a rant? Call it a rantlet.... just don't say digital is easy.
cheers,
Judy
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