Looking at my blog you would think I barely read any books on photography, not the case, almost all the reading I do these days is on the subject of Photography, I just don't get around to writing about it as often as I should. Partly laziness, partly a difficulty in summarizing and expressing my thoughts about what I read. I have a tendency to read a lot of material rather superficially forming a progressively composite view of how I understand what I have read.
I am also blessed with little or no memory for details, hence my original choice of Mathematics and Physics from A-level through to Ph.D., very little to actually learn but a great deal to understand. When I was 26 years old, if asked I would describe my profession as a Theoretical Physicist, I was employed by the then Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) as a research fellow at Imperial College. Theory was my meat and drink, I spent my days reading papers, developing ideas and then implementing them as mathematical arguments or computer simulations. As time passed I realized the computing side was more my thing than Physics and I stepped away from my academic career into the commercial world of the computer industry.
I have regrets, very little I have done since has challenged or stimulated me as science once did. On the other hand the change in career led me to Germany, to the love of my life, Heidi, and eventually to this study of photography. The OCA has put back into my life the love of learning and the challenge of solving problems for the sake of it.
BUT, as a former theoretical scientist, I am finding photographic theory very difficult to read and to comprehend. With Physics there is a complex language, but a logical flow of ideas from postulate to conclusion. In art theory there is an awful lot of discussion, frequently in opaque language, without any hard conclusions. Everything is an opinion and if built upon evidence, that evidence tends to be other opinions. At no point is there a beginning or end. This is not in of itself right or wrong, it is the practice in art theory, however, to the student schooled in the logic of mathematics it is very difficult to organize as a personal thought process. My inability to process abstract ideas coupled with a very poor memory makes this an almost insurmountable problem. Oddly I am very good at general knowledge quizzes none of my neighbours will play Trivial Pursuits against me any more, I even beat them playing the German version, and I don't speak German. They tried getting me drunk, I just got better at remembering odd bits of information. Somewhere all of this is stored, it is my index system that seems to be broken.
Recently I ordered a few books on photographic theory and criticism, including the rather dry "Criticizing Photographs" by Terry Barrett and a couple of books by Roland Barthes and Robert Adams. I am currently reading "Why People Photograph" by Adams having chickened out once more from tackling Barthes and really enjoying it, very refreshing and to the point, review to come soon. Among that order was the book about which I am writing this blog entry. Ritchins takes a philosophical look at the impact of digital technology on photography and how it is changing or might change the medium. First off this is a very accessible and readable book, the ideas are well put with an appropriate level of discussion. He asks many questions and provides if not an answer at least his won thoughts about what might happen.
It has prompted a good many thoughts for me about the medium I am studying and where I sit within that world. The essential premise of the book is that digital photography is a completely new animal, almost without relation to what came before it, in a sense he suggests that in the 21st century digital is to analogue what photography was to painting in the 19th. I am not so sure. I think he is mixing digital distribution with digital photography. Almost all of the points he makes are about how photographs are used rather than how they are created. The use case he describes is equally true for modern analogue photography in which almost all images are scanned to digital prior to being printed. Once in the digital domain an analogue photograph is no different to a digital one.
A digital sensor is different to an analogue one, physics versus chemistry, however, at the most basic level both do essentially the same thing, they each measure the numbers of photons striking a 2 dimensional point in space. Each then translates that into a meaningful signal, whether that is a flow of electrons or the number of atoms shifted from one state to another, it is still a measurement of photonic energy per square millimeter Analogue has the virtue or vice of being more random and that the response function of the "sensor" is non-linear, but this is not something that cannot be simulated in Digital to the extent that the unaware could not tell the difference.
Where I do agree with Ritchin is that once an image enters the digital domain from wherever it originates it is transformed into something other than a photograph. The ability to embed further information into the photograph, the ability to link context to image, the ability to distribute almost without limit, all make digital a far more democratic medium than analogue. Above all digital is highly accessible, everyone in the developed world and increasingly the developing one has a camera embedded in their phone with the ability to create and transmit images in a fashion that even 5 years ago could not be comprehended. Controlling photographic record by governments or corporations is no longer practical. Abu Graib and other recent occurrences such as the British soldiers who photographed themselves murdering a prisoner illustrate that even that most secret and controlled of government bodies, the military, is now transparent in their actions.
It also changes the very nature of what it is to be a photographer, the torrent of vernacular images created and uploaded every day to the social web questions the value of the news photographer, a search engine can probably do a better job of recording events than sending a single person with a camera. Ritchin points out that most so called news photography today is of pre-organized events created for photographers. He illustrates this with two photographs of a group of US soldiers "invading" Grenada. In the first shot distributed as "news", soldiers are hitting the deck weapons ready hiding behind cover with a helicopter hovering in the background. In the second, a different angle shows the same soldiers and a row of 10 or so photographers crouching in front of them capturing the "action" shot.
Where I started to lose a little faith with the book was when he started to use Physics to illustrate the difference between digital and analogue. He used the change from Newtonian mechanics to both relativistic theory and quantum mechanics as a parallel. I disagree on almost every level with this. First of all Newtonian mechanics is still as valid and useful as it ever was, it is simply a macroscopic approximation that averages across micro and nano scale behaviours. The introduction of relativistic theory did not invalidate newtonian physics it extended an existing theory. It is also a bad comaprison with Digital as relativity is an analogue theory, it deals with time which has no quantum nature and gravity which does, but only at a scale we cannot yet effectively probe. Time is non-linear as is space and both are affected by gravity, this is the general theory of relativity, however, neither have a digital analogue. he is on safer ground with quantum mechanics, but again this theory did not invalidate what came before it extended it and fitted into a continuum of theoretical physics. This makes the parallel to the idea that digital is fundamentally changing photography very weak in my view. I don't disagree that digital is changing photography, however, keep physics out of it. Analogue photography is no less a product of quantum mechanics than digital photography.
A really great book, with truly thought provoking ideas. AND one that brought my first academic love into collision with my current one. Even though I disagree with the parallel made thinking and writing about it was invigorating. It might not help me to understand photographic theory, but it is a start.
Your argument is compelling even though I don't understand the underlying scientific theories. However, I do think that 'analogue' photography has a distinctly different 'feel' to it, especially with older cameras and lenses. You might be able to play around in PS but I haven't seen any digital photography which really does capture the effect of film.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that as sensors become increasingly sophisticated it will become harder to tell the difference between Digital and Analog. I think there will always be a difference in a sense, but that difference will be no less prominent than the difference between film types and lens choice. I also suspect that when people sat film has a different quality it might be more down to the format of the camera, we often compare an APS-C sensor with a medium format negative.
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