 |
 |
|
|
 |
photography
|
I wanted to say something about reproductions... They suck. That is to say, they are never exact duplicates of the original, they can never stand in for the original. Any time that you are translating information from one medium to another, there is invariably a loss of information. This happens in the transition from what your eye sees through the viewfinder to what the film actually records, and then to the image that the print captures, and then to the image that the scanner resolves, and then to the image that the graphics application compresses for web distribution, and finally every time it is seen on variable monitor types at variable settings of brightness and contrast. There is really no way to avoid this, just to try and be aware that the image seen isn't necessarily an appropriate representation of the original, but perhaps just an adequate one. |
 24 hr donuts Columbus, OH, 1999 color slide |
 eat Columbus, OH, 1999 color slide |
 schreiner plbg & hdwe Columbus, OH, 1999 color slide |
||
| ||||
Though at least in the academic art world, photography's status as fine art is fairly secured, there are still some out there who don't think so, so it is about those particular philistines that I am about to rant (Clement Greenburg and Roger Scruton in particular can go to hell).
Recently when I was telling a co-worker about my holography class, he asked how making a hologram could count as art, that it was what it was just because of how physics work. This kind of thinking is usually applied to photography as well, the idea that all you have to do is click a button and POOF there's your photo thanks to optics and light-sensitive film.
It could also be said, however, that all painting does is take advantage of the chemistry of pigments reflecting and absorbing light and of how those pigments bond to various surfaces, of the biological operation of our eyes in seeing colors and distinguishing objects, and of our brains being able to sort through all the information that comes through our senses to find patterns and interpret 2-d forms. None of that is anything we are responsible for, just as we are not responsible for the fact that holograms can be produced by recording the interference patterns of two lasers, or that silver halide crystals are light sensitive and allow us to make form permanent images from exposing them. People have discovered all of these processes, and they function regardless of whether or not we want them to. So now the question is this: what do you do with that knowledge? Knowing how to push the shutter button and get your film developed gets you nowhere near making a meaningful, or even interesting picture.
So to sum up, philistines are bad.
| BACK to Creative Nonsense... |
|
| In Love And Reason I Trust © 1999-2006 postdlf |  |
