Truth

I have been thinking about this subject for a while and it seems an appropriate time and place to put them down, whilst not on paper at least in a print form. My photography has fully spanned the analogue digital divide and whilst I could see all the deficiencies in the early digital process I never had a problem adopting it as a creative medium when it reached my critical threshold. This may be to do with my background as an electronic engineer, I had also seen the transition between analogue audio and digital audio and been very happy to adopt that technology. Or maybe it was that my ability in analogue image creation was still rising at the time of transition, I had not peaked at all and, with the advent of digital,  I just adopted it and continued to grow with it as a photographer and as an artist.

But I do feel that whilst we have gained a huge amount with the advent of digital we have lost a level of control irretrievably and have relinquished some of the creative control to the industry in much as the same we have done with modern cars. I used to be able - through financial necessity and simpler engine design - to maintain a motor car. I have a BMW and their maintenance centre manager confessed to me recently that their technicians do not have the ability to maintain them anymore, they simply fault find, replace the offending item and return to factory. I have never really wanted or felt the need to maintain a camera - even with a fully manual film camera - my mechanical dexterity would in any case forbid.

I first thought in any depth about this subject when I started to photograph in colour, which only happened when I started to use a digital camera in earnest; up until then colour was for social occasions only and monochrome was for photography(!). Previously, whilst I kept colour and monochrome separate in my mind – monochrome = art, colour = everyday, those then twin paths kept a moderate distance from each other. I have been taking digital images, and therefore colour for 5 or more years and whilst initially I would naturally pre-visualise in monochrome and then convert to monochrome to “see” how well I had created, I have gradually moved to see images in colour as having equal merit in the process of making images. What I have realised through the technical challenges of both making monochrome and colour prints from digital sensors is how fleeting the truth can be in a photograph, and it is the artist that can deliver it and never the camera. My first “photography” book was John Hedgecoe’s Introductory Photography Course”, for those that do not know it, it purported to take the novice photographer from camera choice through to photo project, I still have it and refer to it from time to time. The book is divided up into two halves with the first being a guide for the novice to get to understand the mechanics of photography, camera mechanics, light, focus etc before embarking on actual image creation and that philosophy still holds true, it still provides a good grounding into photography. The book provides guides on how to gain control of the camera’s basic functions and how to take as much control of the processing element as well. I had a completely manual 35 mm film camera at the time and it helped a lot. Digital cameras now are like modern cars, there isn’t anyone who can fully determine how one is put together, what compromises have been made, what profiles, what sensor characteristics have been mapped into the digital signal processor, what the performance of the analogue to digital converter is, what the sensor filter matrix performance and tolerance levels are. The best we can hope for is that we can get at the RAW data and we can calibrate the output mechanism to recreate the scene as we anticipated. This realisation helped me come to the conclusion that our ability to tell the truth is now further away from reality than it was in the analogue world. Not only can the eye not see what the lens depicts, its shutter speed capturing a moment in time that the brain would be unable to comprehend and framing an image artificially dependent on lens choice. But also the algorithms that have been calculated in a laboratory somewhere, probably in Japan, provide a compromise that we have not only no control over, but also no ability to override even if we had any understanding. The structure of the editing software that we all need to use, from the RAW converter to CS5 or Elements, the printer driver and profile - the choice of inks or the screen (which has probably got the greatest level of variance of them all) all conspire to detach us from the actual image which we saw prior to engaging with the viewfinder.
Or does it? Can we take these compromises and merge them with the traditional distortions of cameras and lenses and deliver a faithful image? It is only the author of the image who can answer that. The camera's software, the inherent chromatic distortion etc. make no value judgement on the image it is only the author. Only the photographer can say whether any part of the image he elects to crop out or add in upholds the truth and again, post processing of an image isn't exactly a new phenomena, air-brushing on nitrate negatives (with graphite pencils) was rife in the 1930's and '40's see "Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits" by Viera p's 55 & 56 published by Abrams.
So it is a matter of faith, the camera can only lie, the photographer is able provide the truth given the technical competence and awareness and of course the desire to do so.


Ok, now I've got that off my back - I'll get on with the course!