Curvemeister Forum

Catchy title for a lecture, eh? (see attached flyer)

Last Saturday I attended a lecture by Andrea McLaughlin that may be of interest to some of you.  The title of the lecture was "Has Digital Photography Killed Ansel Adams?  The Future of Black and White Photography".

Andrea is the owner and manager of
Photolab in Berkeley, California. They specialize in traditional film and print development, and provide digital printing services.

She dispensed pretty quickly with the first part of the title: "Has Digital Photography Killed Ansel Adams?".  The answer is "No".  I agree.  There is every reason to believe that he would have been drawn to experiment with digital, just as he experimented with other new technology, such as Polaroid process.

The remainder of the lecture covered the second part of the title, "The Future of Black and White Photography".

She started  with a rather impressive list of the 10 most expensive photographs in existence.  Most of these were taken in the late 19th and early 20th century, and purchased in the last 10 years, and prices for the big names: Stieglitz, Strand, Man Ray, Abbott, are typically in the several hundred thousand dollar range.  I don't have her list of images and prices, but here is a Man Ray that recently went for $296K!  At the time he made this image - which is nice but not any kind of masterpiece, IMHO - Man Ray was living on a shoestring.

Surprisingly, Ansel Adams's images did not appear on the list, nor Weston's.  I suppose both of them are still considered newbies by the collecting world.  Hey, more bargains for the rest of us :-) The thought of a 5x7 contact print pulling in half a million dollars is - heh - breathtaking.

Andrea mentioned that Dorothea Lange's son, Rondal Partridge still makes platinum prints of his mother's work for sale in New York galleries.  A platinum or silver print sells for about 30 percent more than a high quality digital print, which collectors have only just started to purchase.  So in the very high end, fine art market, traditional chemical prints still reign supreme, and they are becoming more precious as digital continues to take over from film.  Does this matter to folks like you and me?  Probably not.

Andrea then showed an historical overview of photography, starting with the dagurerrotype and callotype, through digital in the early 21st century.  The point being that although photography has been relatively static for the last 30 years or so, it's overall history has been one of new processes being invented and re-invented, with photographers having to play catch-up and change technologies in order to keep up. Kodak's phrase from 1888 "you press the button, we do the rest" sums up today's message of consumer oriented digital photography.

There were a few words on the topic of the archival quality of digital versus the older silver process.  This was along the conventional lines of "silver good, digital bad".  Here I differ from the conventional wisdom.  Like most people extolling the virtues of film based photography, Andrea did not mention the fact that the negatives of nearly all the masters of photography have long ago turned to mush, while archival CD's are made of gold encased in plastic and may well last for centuries.

She summed up with some quotes from photographers of the past.

Cartier-Bresson's quote (paraphrasing) was: "I am a photographer, and as such the technology of how the image is produced is of no interest whatsoever to me".  He was a master of the decisive moment, and although he stipulated that no one could crop his work, he never looked at his images, satisfying himself with clicking the shutter and moving on to the next target.  Other than loading batteries instead of film Cartier-Bresson would not have cared one way or the other about digital, provided he could look through the viewfinder and push that button!.

Adams's quote was something like "Dodging and buring is a way to correct God's mistakes in tonal balance".  Humorous, and again in keeping with his philosophy that printing the image was as important and difficult as creating the image.  For Adams, then, digital would have provided an incredible number of choices about what to do with his images.

The questions from the audience were good ones.  One person, was under the mistaken impression that Nikon was short changing the world by providing 12 bit images, when 24 bit images are the minimum required for good work!  Several retired professional photographers mentioned that they were not sure they could make their original pay grade in today's world.  Several people were quite serious about the superior quality of film over digital - IMHO the quality question is not even up for debate, at least for 35mm format, and increasingly so for medium format.

An interesting lecture that covered the current state of black and white photography.  I'm interested in your response.

Mike

I'm no expert, here, Mike, just an enthusiastic amateur.  Here are some personal thoughts, having just come from a photo exhibit and fresh with opinions.

Photography has changed drastically over the years as equipment and techniques have matured.  In any art form (painting, classical music, photography, etc.), it becomes more pressing for the artist to see things in a new way, to avoid the great products of the past which have become cliches because of their greatness.  How many thousands of photos have been taken of Half Dome in Yosemite from the same spot Adams shot his awesome image?  Some may have been as good, but they won't sell because they are imitation now.  How many images have veered away from imitation solely for the sake of trying to be different, not necessarily good, just "new"?  In both jazz and classical music, new works don't seem to be catching on, either.  The original images that created these benchmarks are worth money to collectors with deep pockets.  The more cheap imitations, the more the original is worth.

I was struck by the images chosen at the local exhibit because many of them would have been relegated to my waste basket.  The judge seemed to be as interested in the physical techniques of image printing as in the subject matter.  The second place photo was a simple b&w snap of a young girl with insect bites on her abdomen.  No, I've never seen such a shot before, but did it win because no one had ever thought that to be of interest, or just because no one had done it?  There were images out of focus, ghostly attempts at expressionism.  Sometimes that works, usually it does not (for me).  Some images were hand colored, some composites, some printed with excessive saturation.  Printing ranged from silver gelatin, to inkjet, to Polaroid, to platinum, ... you name it.  There was almost nothing in the "decisive moment" category, nothing in landscape, no photojournalism.  The winning images were a group of large (24" x 24") oversaturated color inkjet prints of family scenes.

I began photographing in 1969 when I bought a 35mm camera.  I dropped out for a while as family demands took priority.  But digital brought me back.  I never had enough money to work in color in the 1970s so everything was transparencies or b&w.  Now I can print in color, control my images, and continue to produce what I like.  I don't enter contests and I don't try to impress others.  I shoot only for myself, and I shoot mostly color because I no longer have a darkroom and my home color printer does not print b&w well.

But b&w is still a viable medium.  It, paradoxically, has become more difficult than color.  There are few labs that will print b&w, and only the newest and more expensive inkjet printers can handle b&w tonal ranges adequately.  I think b&w will survive, and perhaps continue to evolve.  We can more easily deal with contrast and highlight/shadow detail with Photoshop.

In my own work, the key to decent (if not great) photography is to isolate the subject matter.  Show the viewer (or yourself later) what it was that caught your eye before you took the shot.  Eliminate distractions.  B&w helps to do that much more easily than color.  It also forces you to see in tonal ranges which is quite different from color visualization.  Perhaps the glut of color images will force us to value the true b&w image, the image shot expressly and intentionally as b&w, as a work of art.

Hello all,
Since Ansel died years before practical digital photography, I'm pretty certain it is not responsible for his death. That being said I think the real issue here is the lack of a serious study of light by many newer photographers.  I find many people do not "get it" when it comes to exposure.  A little under? oh well just bump up the lighting. A little over, same process...

To me it is always the capture of light, My first professor in photography taugh me many things but most of all he taught me to "see" Some of his thoughts and expressions still ring true today.  A camera is still a box with a hole in it for catching light on some media.  Composition is still the building block of the image story.  Lenses are still the eyes through which we see. 

I feel that if you worry too much about the mechanics, you lose the inspriation and art.  Don't get me wrong, there are many great photographers out there.  Many people who pay fantastic attention to the image they are trying to create.  But for every 1 of those out there ther are a few thousand who shoot first and make corrections later.  Never mind the composition full steam ahead. 

I sometime find myself in that catagory and always regret the image that could have been,  if only  I had restrained my trigger finger for a few seconds and made some better choices.  I only hope one day to be as dead in the artistic sense as Ansel Adams is.  I think that would be a spectacular death indeed.

Greg