Brian Ellis (beellis@gte.net)
Mon, 19 Apr 1999 08:57:22 -0400
Of course Watkins and his contemporaries sometimes had crashes - literally.
Timothy O'Sullivan (I think it was he) spent something like six months in the
wild with his portable darkroom, donkey, etc. making 11 x 14 and larger wet
plates, then on his way out the donkey slipped and all the plates broke,
destroying six months of almost unimaginably hard work. O'Sullivan (if I have
the right person) just turned around, retraced his steps, and made the same
photographs all over again. After his crash he didn't have to worry about not
being able to reach tech support. Brian
Judy Seigel wrote:
> 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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