On Digital Wednesday May 18, 2005
I must admit, now I have a digital camera I occasionally think it would be nice to use film again. It would be romantic, nostalgic and fun. But I also know the reality is different, that unless you have your own darkroom the expense and reliance on high street labs is inconvenient and galling. Every time I went to my local place it was unpleasant, because I had to fortify myself against possible processing error, and what became a predictable nonchalance and hostility. The first time I comprehended the latter was in relation to a film the processing of which was less than perfect. Basically, she didn’t care at all about the results, didn’t care in the slightest that it was important to me. Even if she disliked her job and couldn’t have helped, she could have shown a little consideration for my predicament. The second time was when I ordered some print copies, they came back with a dramatically different colour balance, and when I protested about this he told me you have to request a ‘colour match’, implying that it was my own fault. Funny then that he’d never told me that before, that I was presumably supposed to know this by telepathy, that – once again – he was completely uninterested and uncaring about my predicament. He literally walked away from me, after telling me this. Bastards. It doesn’t have to be that way; I remember a considerate and gracious lady at another lab in another town who made some effort to help, and provided me with a second and more satisfactory set of prints, at no extra cost.
Film itself is OK, superior in some (but not all) respects to digital; the problems come from the production process that goes with it. Like thousands of other people I enjoy having full control over all stages of photographic work, and I enjoy the way it’s integrated into computer and internet activity. I’m also interested in how the digital medium can be theorised – it’s still relatively new, but some people are arguing that digital methods mean it is no longer photography, that the old film practices have been replaced by something both technically and semantically different. If digital imagery is part of the computer media network, the vast field of electronic code that has swallowed and reconfigured images, words and sounds previously existing with paper, vinyl etc – then is it still photography?
Basically, yes. Of course it is. The problem arises when cultural theorists, perhaps not photographers themselves, observe these changes and interpret them with an assumed ‘medium is the massage’ logic. In a popular photo magazine of July 2004, I read that most digital photographers do not conclude their activity with a print; their pictures remain on hard drives and CDs, enjoyed on monitors or televisions. I think the figure was about 20%, for those that do make prints. This is a critical point, because if a photograph never manifests on paper its semantic, aesthetic and visual meaning has a different form. When is a photograph not a photograph? When it never becomes one, but remains a digital image viewable only on a CRT or LCD screen. However, I think this deduction is too pedantic and because it focuses on technical means rather than content, it sits in the same category as the amateur photographers who obsess about cameras and lenses more than taking pictures, for whom brand names have the same self-esteem cachet as the makes of prestigious cars or clothing.
Photography is about taking pictures, and for someone who did this before the digital revolution and who understands the pleasure of recording family moments, holidays etc, digital cameras make absolutely no difference to its semantic value. Even when it remains a JPEG or TIF consisting of binary code, what’s important is that it shows little Tommy taking the stabilisers off his bicycle, or the wonderful sunset in Greece, or the wedding day. Sometimes the ‘medium is the message’ concept is applicable and useful, but sometimes it isn’t. Photography is quintessentially concerned with capturing and recording life, and the camera is simply the means to that end. When I did my MA in Creative Technology I was very glad to discover the interest and fun of taking a video camera and using it as photographers use their cameras, recording moments of thematic and aesthetic interest. I disliked the overwhelming emphasis on artificial 3D work, the superficially conceived arguments about ‘cyberspace’, ‘simulation’ and ‘interaction’, and I disliked spending days on end in front of a VDU. Video work was fun; I enjoyed the amazing power of Adobe After Effects which is like Photoshop many times more powerful, editing not static pictures but moving video. And I enjoyed the balance between walking the streets, and then pushing the pixels. Now I enjoy this balance with a stills camera, and I sometimes like to philosophise and theorise about the meaning of my pictures and of photography: a balance between words and pictures, which I find an inspiring and creative combination.