Imaginative invention?
Filed in Art - August 12, 2007Collectively, we still don’t have an agreed set of words for the distinction, but Mike Johnston has just published an essay (’made a post’ would be too trivial a description) about, what I’ve called in the past, subtractive photography versus additive photography.
This really ought to stand as the definitive word on the subject. Even the names applied to the range (objective evidence to imaginative invention) seem to me to be the best that I’ve seen.
Along the way he writes:
We really do know that with film, either picture would be difficult to fake, and in any event, why would you? Who would think of it? In both cases, the pictures are wonderful because we’re willing to believe—provisionally, anyway—that they’re true, that they are records of something real. This is what gives life and richness to most, if not all, of the photography I’ve learned to love. What it implies is that the real world is a strange and wonderful place, with wondrous sights all around us, ephemeral, shifting, but there, and sometimes caught.
which sums up brilliantly what photography is about for me. This is MJ’s writing at its best. Read it.
To be honest, I found the ‘essay’ to be splitting hairs. He admits that ‘digital’ photography can be straight and non-manipulative and thus allows his definition of photography, whereby the image moves from lens to representation without the intervention of human interpretation. Photography used to be about film alone, now it includes an electronic sensor. How the latter is used is a legitimate artistic debate but cannot alter the fact that if you put one camera down and pick up another nothing has changed in what you wish to do with it. The extract that you quote is fine but doesn’t really depend on whether you are using film or digital.
August 13, 2007 @ 7:08 am
John,
There are lots of ways of reading the essay, and if you look in the comments on TOP you’ll probably find each reading represented.
One reading is that the essay is about trust. Not trust in an absolute legal sense, but trust in the sense of an everyday acceptance. Trust that the Bison was really there, and that the dog really leaped. Seen on Flickr today both these photos would be suspect as records of reality.
My duck race article is about the same thing:
http://www.auspiciousdragon.net/photowords/?p=767
With scanners and photoshop the film/digital thing has become a red herring – it depends on whether you are looking at the history of change, or the consequences as currently apparent.
August 13, 2007 @ 8:24 am
I agree with everything you say! But he does digress from the issue of trust to to discuss the differences between film and digital, which, as you say, is a red herring.
August 13, 2007 @ 8:52 am
I’ll add the same post as I did on Mike’s blog:
“I‘ve finally figured out what‘s wrong with photography. It‘s a one—eyed man looking through a little ‘ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?” David Hockney
“Cameras are just boxes for transporting appearances… What is not so simple is to grasp the nature of the appearances which the camera transports. Are they a construction, a man made cultural artifact, or are they, like a footprint in the sand, a trace ‘naturally’ left by something that has passed? The answer is, both” John Berger.
either kind of photography, at the different ends of the spectrum, isn’t essentially about how things really are, but only about how they appear to be – appearances. After that, it’s merely a matter of degree.
- on the issue of “trust”, my feeling is that before the days of photoshop, it was always a somewhat mistakenly naive stance vis a vis photography, albeit widely adopted.
It was one option, probably the one most often picked, but frequently the incorrect stance, and only held thanks to a large dose of cognitive dissonance. Digital has merely lifted the curtain rather higher and made such a position in relationship to photographs harder to hold. Which obviously leads to a lot of uncomfortableness…
August 13, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
Tim,
- on the issue of “trustâ€, my feeling is that before the days of photoshop, it was always a somewhat mistakenly naive stance vis a vis photography, albeit widely adopted.
I’m not sure that I agree that it was naivety. Human beings are very attuned to the issue of cheating, and it took a lot of skill with film based photography to cheat in a way that was difficult to detect.
I think that we agree that manipulability (sp?) is a matter of degree, but I disagree that digital has merely lifted the curtain on an existing practice. It has changed the nature of that practice too.
I’m not sure what your two quotations are supposed to show, neat though they are. Photos are not the thing themselves, they are new facts, and all that. However, there is a measurable degree of connectedness to the original scene (aka ‘reality’) that some people find important.
August 13, 2007 @ 6:20 pm
However, there is a measurable degree of connectedness to the original scene (aka ‘reality’) that some people find important.
So many people chose to believe. Yet this is as much an artificial construct (Berger’s “man made cultural artifact”) as say any one of the many forms of Renaissance perspective
What is measurable is the photograph’s relationship/connectedness to an appearance – potentially the opposite of reality. Not necessarily its relationship to reality.
Which is something rather different.
August 13, 2007 @ 8:40 pm
Tim,
Yeah, OK, we are discussing the recording of appearance. The way light bounces off surfaces. But in the same way that I’m pretty sure that the forest continues to exist even when I’m not looking at it, I’m pretty sure that the wagtail feeding in front of my window right now is a ‘real’ wagtail, despite the fact that I can only experience the appearance of it.
Photographs (ignoring manipulation and constructions for the moment) show you what something looked like. Through one eye, yes, and on a flat piece of paper, yes, but there is a scale that goes real-appearance-photo-Shrek.
So, if I take a photo of that wagtail, I don’t confuse the photo with reality. Many people wouldn’t even confuse the photo with what they might have seen had they been standing next to me. But that doesn’t stop there being a measurable degree of connectedness.
August 14, 2007 @ 9:00 am
Given that reality can never be captured in the round given our partial and conditional standpoint(as we know, a half-step sideways can totally alter appearance and apparent meaning), we can strive for respect for the subject and integrity in the meaning we impart by our subjective intention. We’re hunting the snark.
September 6, 2007 @ 2:29 pm