Putting a twist on the argument

[mbarrick]

This goes back to Ed Book's comments about the in-camera manipulations that digital cameras do and about Photoshop manipulations. Below is an image that "all I did was resize it in Photoshop":

© 2002 Michael R. Barrick

This picture was created entirely in-camera using the "whiteboard" settting of the camera (which is intended to capture text written on a whiteboard). So, by the conventional logic of the photography groups this would be a "pure" photograph, unsullied by additional "cheating" in photoshop. Of course I could have gotten exactly the same effect by using Photoshop to reduce a photo to a 1-bit pixel depth. Or by creating an old-fashioned halftone using traditional photographic techniques. Or I could have drawn something quite like this with a pen and ink.

So what is more "pure" and why? And why does it matter at all?

Comments

Apples and Oranges

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I agree wholly. I'm being rhetorical in my questioning. The delination between what is a "photograph" and what is a "digital image" doesn't mean much to me. Like you, it's the questions of authorship and "aura" (in the Walter Benjamin sense) that are far more imporant.

The questions that digital manipulation bring to photography are rather similar to the questions photography and ready-made pigments brought to painting. The baseline criteria for painting used to be mimesis (i.e. how "real" the painting looked), but of course photography captures mimetic images in a snap. Photography became the "cheater's" way of making an image and as such was excluded from being "high art" for a very long time. In fact only a few years ago (can't remember if it was 3 or 4 years ago) the awarding of the Tate Gallery's Turner Prize to a photographic work raised eyebrows for that very reason. Around the same time paint in tubes caused a similar, albeit less significant, crisis. Prior to this the painter needed not only the skills to paint a mimetic image, but the knowledge of how to produce the paints themselves. Digital manipulation is seen as "degrading" photography because now those effects that were once the exculsive realm of those technically adept in the darkroom are now available to the rank and file. A lot of what was written between 150 and 75 years ago around the issues of painting vs. photography is becoming extremely relevant again in regards to digital imaging vs. "wet" photography.

So, yeah, it's apples and oranges in one sense, but in another it is not. In the end one is producing an image and there are issues common to all image-making regardless of media such as authorship, aura, craftmanship, composition, beauty, and content.