Sir George is the Editor of the Bristol Photographic Society. This
article was taken from the Sept. 97 edition of "Exposure"
the newsletter of the Southern Photographic Federation, and with
thanks to Editor, Pat Christianson, APAGB, for his kindness in
allowing it`s use here.
Sometimes the confusion over Digital Imaging is so great that it almost
amounts to panic. I want to suggest that this is not necessary, and
that viewed properly and in context, DI can take an understandable and
acceptable place in photography today. DI, as photographers use it, is
a method of manipulating photographs by none-photographic means. Now
there is a flat, bald statement for you, but I hope to justify it. To
do so, I have to go right back to the beginning, because manipulation
has been with us since the earliest days of photography. At the very
first meeting of the Photographic Society of London (now the RPS) on
the 3rd of February, 1853, the Vice-resident, Sir William Newton, read
a paper entitled "Upon Photography in an Artistic View, and its
relations to the Arts." In this he recommended the use of
chemicals and inks to create clouds, and so make landscape photographs
both more realistic and more artistic (at the time, of course,
emulsions were only sensitive to blue light, and skies with clouds
were inevitably grossly overexposed, and came out pure white). During
the next hundred years, many none-photographic methods of manipulating
photographs were developed, alongside ever-more strident claims by
some that the purity of the photographic image should not be
adulterated by these means. Some of these methods are still with us,
perhaps the best-known being Bromoils, which involves brushing inks
onto the emulsion; personally, I love the things and would hate to see
them disappear from our exhibition walls.
DI falls squarely into the same class. The modern definition of a
photograph, accepted (more or less) by both the RPS and the PAGB, is
"an image made by radiation of any wavelength using any means
available". This was the definition I proposed in 1993 in a
world-wide FIAP essay competition on "The Limits of
Photography", which I had the luck to win. The emphasis is on
radiation as the active agent. For the purposes of this article, we
can ignore all radiation outside the normal photographic ones of
infra-red, visible light, and ultra-violet; for convenience let us
just call this band of the spectrum "Light". Any
manipulation which uses light is photographic in nature. Thus, at the
taking stage, unusual lenses, screens and filters, or dodging and
burning-in during enlargement; or second exposures to produce
so-called solarisations; or multiple-exposures; or any use of
artificial light - all these and many more are photographic
manipulations in the purest sense. But DI is quite different;
manipulations are carried out not by light but by processes within a
computer. It seems to me that this is the real reason why DI bothers
people so much. It is not so much the way the original photographic
image is treated- you can digitise a photograph and print it out on a
none-photographic printer and the result is still arguably a
photograph. But start to manipulate it in the computer to any
substantial extent - and the number of possible manipulations in an
application like Photoshop are literally endless - and the image
rapidly ceases to be purely photographic: It becomes a mixture of
image-making techniques. It is photography with a none-photographic
element added. It has become "Photography Plus", and should,
I urge, be put in a separate category in exhibitions, along with
bromoils and all the other none-photographic manipulations available
today. The simple designation "P+" in the entry form, in the
catalogue and attached to the print, would reveal to the visitor the
essential nature of the image on show. Oh yes: it is up to the entrant
to be honest. But has this not always been the case? In this respect
today is no different from the past: there is nothing meaner, or more
demeaning than to try to win by cheating. There should be moderation
in all things. In the May 1997 issue of "Exposure", John
Tyler of Bracknell CC points out that to put a photograph in a
different category because a few spots or scratches have been removed
digitally, would be absurd. I quite agree, especially as Touching-up
is in any case normally done by applying inks or dyes, and is
therefore itself a none-photographic procedure! I also agree that
wholly none-photographic images can easily be created with and in
computers using painting or drawing applications, should be banned
from photographic exhibitions.
What about fractals? These are also none-photographic, being
produced by playing with mathematical formulae within the computer. Of
course, they can be photographed off a monitor, but the final print is
then simply a record of a none-photographic event, exactly equivalent
to photographing a painting. But for the reasons given above, I cannot
go along with John (if he is not my old friend from Barry Summer
School days, I apologise for the familiarity) when he concludes that
no separate category should be introduced, although it should not in
my view be limited to DI, but should include any none-photographic
means of manipulation.
At the risk of tedium,
let me repeat: it is not the method of production that distinguishes
`pure` photographs from others; it is the method of manipulation of
the original photographic image. Quite suddenly, we have an entirely
new technology offering almost unlimited visual possibilities.
Processes that used to be
extremely difficult, often quite hit-or-miss, and frequently very
expensive in wasted material, can now be imitated quickly, with as
many f.o.c. trials as you want, at the touch of a few buttons and the
clicks of an inanimate mouse! Not only that, but a whole raft of
entirely new effects can be produced equally easily: no wonder there
is panic in the ranks! But it all falls into place if we never allow
ourselves to forget that the essential nature of photography is
imaging with light and that the precise means we use to produce
pictures " by solar action", as Sir William Newton put it
all those years ago, are not significant. In other words, we should
not allow ourselves to be hung up on silver halide technology. Any
method that comes to hand is valid, so long as the original image is
made by light. For instance, we can now make exhibition quality prints
using photocopiers, which allow considerable control by the user,
these machines offer much cheaper prints, and I predict that they will
grow in popularity with amateur photographers in the next few years.
Digital cameras, scanners, computers, in-jet and dye-sublimation
printers, etc, etc., are just another way of handling images made by
light. We should not be afraid of them, or object to them, or ban them
from competitions and exhibitions, but - we are entitled to know when
a light image has been altered by none-luminous means.