I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where a comment was made about people (podcasters at a conference in this case) armed with digital cameras and camcorders, shooting and posting anything and everything on Flickr, etc. to a point where over a thousand pictures of a three day event were posted, resulting in some good pictures being lost in the shuffle. The podcaster wished that people would actually edit their work, do some cropping, be a bit selective, etc. I for one wholeheartedly agreed with him, but after thinking about it, I think this kind of thing is not only inevitable, but a desirable part of a medium’s growing pains, as it seems to me that every medium that eventually becomes accessible to the general population seems to go through the same artistic cycle.
When a new artistic medium arises (using photography as an example), initially the cost, expense, and complexity of the medium engenders a certain respect for the medium, and the involved process that one had to go through to get any results. Certainly, if one goes back to the dawn of photography in the early 19th century, when photographers prepared all their own photographic plates, and mixed their own chemicals, and developed their own images (and in the case of daguerreotypes doing so using mercury vapour!), one did not take the image lightly. You certainly did not hear the term “snapshot” applied to the photography of this era. To even get a recognizable image took a lot of work, skill (and money), and the failure rate was quite high.
When roll film became available in a mass market sense (thinking specially of the first Kodak camera that came preloaded with 100 pictures in 1888, through to point and shoot Brownie models that were so popular in the first half of the 20th century), many photography “old timers” sniffed at what they saw as a debasement of the medium, as a reaction to how easy it had become, resulting in so many thoughtless pictures being taken. Their sense of “elite,” of exclusivity was threatened. When 35 mm photography took off in the 20th century, the same murmurs of complaint were heard.
But even in the early/mid 35mm era, a certain level of skill was required to take a technically successful picture of a higher quality than the pictures produced by Brownie type cameras, and until the Polaroid came along, there was certainly no instant gratification. I remember mailing (yes, mailing!) film in for processing, and the magic (often mixed with disappointment) of seeing the printed pictures upon their delivery to me. It certainly was not cheap to get photographs this way, and a photographer would not normally burn through a roll of film in an eyeblink. The first “good” camera I had access to was my father’s Voigtlander Vito B; when my father bought it for his own use in the mid-1950’s it cost $106 1950’s dollars. A beautiful camera, (which I still have and will always treasure), which was absolutely and completely manual, including focus. If you didn’t have some basic skill, you wouldn’t get pictures. Period.
Later, when I learned how to develop film and do my own enlarging, I felt a different kind of magic, seeing ghostly images appear before my eyes in the darkroom. Still, the film and equipment cost money (and I didn’t have much back then), and I wasn’t shooting hundreds of images a day.
Today it is cheap and easy to instantly get perfectly focussed, properly exposed images. As a result, the world is getting inundated by forgettable images, images that rather than stand alone, appear as mere single frames from a movie of someone’s stream of consciousness in a sense. I wonder if this is becoming a new medium, with a new set of conventions, or if more owners of digital cameras will free themselves from the shackles of instant gratification and become photographers? My guess is a bit of both, but I am cheering for the latter. Today’s camera can automate all the technical aspects of photography, but I hope it never automates, or even replaces, the human eye, the human heart, and our sense of wonder.
Tags: Photography
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