Photography does not exist anymore!
Intro
The title of this essay is a bit provocative. Nevertheless the bottom line is clear. Most people assume that digital photography (a huge misnomer) is simply photography by other means than the use of film and chemicals. Take a camera body from the film-based era and substitute a sensor on the spot where the film gate used to be located. Then proceed as if nothing else has changed. This attitude is not only widespread it is the conventional wisdom worldwide. Being universally accepted does not make it true. If that were the case, we would still believe that the world is flat or that the world has been created six thousand years ago.
Core values
The essence of film-based photography is not only the fact that the mechanism of capturing an image and fixing it in a silver halide grain structure creates a final picture that can hardly be altered. The fundamental issue here is the fact that the laws of physics create the image, in particular by the characteristics of light rays and the interaction between photons and silver halide grains. Photography is writing with light, and fixing the shadows. Human interaction and manipulation are minimized and reduced to the location, viewpoint and moment of exposure by the photographer. Reading the new book about Cartier-Bresson, the Scrapbook, makes one aware of that peculiar and forceful truth that photography is not only intimately linked to the use of film, but in fact depends for its very existence on film.
Some days ago Jim Lewis wrote an analysis about John Szarkowski and noted (I quote in full): “In the years just before Szarkowsky retired, the best of photography underwent yet another deep change, becoming integrated into the broader concerns of art in general, influenced by conceptualism, performance, painting. It is only slightly overstating matters to say that there's really no such thing as photography anymore. It simply doesn't exist, except as one of many ways to make something that counts as art;” Many pioneers in image making did not believe in photography as a distinct medium requiring special skills (one is reminded of David Hockney who has held the same position).
Recently Jonathin Lipkin, has stated that same position: the transition from film-based to sensor-based photography is not a simple change in technology, but a fundamental change in culture and philosophy. Everybody can create technologically perfect images at this moment: the powerful post processing software will take care of all technical hurdles that the film-based photograph had to master. I am not claiming that the mastery of the craft is the essential element of photography. What I claim is that the relation between craft and result defines the result: the medium is still the message.
Fundamental differences
The best way to understand this difference is to take pictures with a film-loading camera like the M7 and the sensor-provided M8. Handling of both cameras is quite similar, but mentally and in the workflow there is a world of difference. Andre Rouille, La Photographie, needs 700 pages of densely written French to get to the core: “On montrera que l'improprement nommee 'photographie numerique' deborde totalement la photographie par sa matiere, son mode de circulation, son fonctionnement et son regime de verit - seuls certains usages la relient momentanement encore a la photographie proprement dite.” There are indeed a few uses of the digital camera and its software manipulations that are close to the essence of the classical film-based photography. It is possible to select a number of products and to adopt a certain workflow that is close to the heart of what constitutes the classical film-related photography style, exemplified by the Magnum photos, but not restricted to that approach. It is truly bad that the Leica company has been totally occupied with the transition from film-based to sensor-based image capture and is forgetting its heritage of great silver halide photography. The recent issue of the German magazine Geo has a portfolio of classical pictures, several made with a Leica camera and Tri-X film.
This is great photography that can evoke strong emotions such that one wishes to grab the M6/7/MP and run to the streets.
It has been noted that the prediction that photography is dead has been prematurely made. I am afraid that this prediction is false.
Law of physics
It has been said about the films of the late Ingmar Bergmann that he carved his images in celluloid. This is true in a physical sense. The scene we want to photograph exists and is real: the scene emits electromagnetic energy that is collected by the lens and is transmitted as wave fronts that are captured on a recording medium consisting of silver halide grain clumps. Image formation then is physical and the image recorded by wave fronts in the emulsion layer is molded and fixed in the structure and distribution of the grain clumps. You cannot change this imprint and the recorded scene is physically represented in the grain structure by the physical wave fronts interfering with the emulsion layer.
Digital image detection with pixellated solid-state sensors is based on a reconstruction of sampled images and is recorded electronically. There is no one-to-one relationship with the original physical scene.
Of course it is possible to take pictures with digital cameras and to create prints that are indistinguishable form silver halide prints. And you can take pictures with a DSLR or an M8 or a mobile phone in exactly the same way as Cartier-Bresson worked.
The attribute painting is connected to a certain technique and a certain set of materials. Even if you take pictures that look like paintings (the preferred style of the early 19th century photographers), no one would mistake the result for a painting. And the word 'photography' had no meaning or did not even exist before we had the technique to write with light and fix it permanently n a medium.
With digital imaging we may start with an image that is created with light rays, but once it is recorded electronically as an image file, we are free to manipulate the numbers with software and the original relation to the scene is lost.
Returning to the original notion of celluloid carving, we may try to preserve the notion of photography in the digital manipulation workflow by conscious restriction of the manipulation options to exposure corrections and tonal scale changes. This would be the same technique as a digital scan of a film with minimal corrections.