"ChrisM" wrote in message
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In message
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Pat Proclaimed from the tallest tower:
Years ago, when working in my darkroom, I had a pretty good idea what
a photograph was. You shone light on a negative, developed it, put in
in an enlarger, shone light on a piece of light-sensitive paper, and
developed that. When you got done you had a photograph. You could
add elements, dodge, burn, screw with chemicals or make lithos; but in
the end it all came down to shining light on a piece of paper and
getting a print.
Last week I was working on a silhouette. I took a (digital) picture
of the person, copied it and used two copies of the same image -- one
mirror image of the other -- so they were facing each other. I
printed the faces in "white" and the space between them in black. I
then used an exacto knife to cut away the white areas leaving me with
just the black area. The profile of the faces were preserved in the
cut-line.
I tried calling what I had left "a photograph" but I in effect, it was
more of a negative of the original image. The only think I really had
left was a representation of what I had NOT photographed, not what I
had photographed. The other thing that I pondered was the fact that
the image was not represented in "b&w" or in some tonality but the
image was represented physically as to whether there was paper there
or not.
I all made me start thinking "is this a photograph or not". Just what
is a photograph in the age of digital printing. How is a digital
image any different than a really pretty Excel document. How much can
you manipulate a "photo" before it becomes something else -- and when
it becomes something else, what does it become?
Have you been smoking something...??
:-)
Seriously though, some interesting points raised!
Those points and the issue suggested by the subject line have been raised
more than once and sometimes led to heated debate.
To me and to some others, a photograph is a picture taken with a camera,
reproducing the appearance of the subject as faithfully as possible within
reasonable limits. This does not preclude the use of *some* amount of
processing to make the picture appealing and to enhance technical accuracy,
compensating for shortcomings in the camera and exposure errors. But it does
exclude a picture that has been excessively manipulated and altered, such as
by adding something that was not in the original scene or by gross
deliberate distortion of shapes, content, color and light.
This is where opinions differ. Some people argue that a picture always
undergoes some processing and alteration in the camera and in the darkroom
(in film photography), that everyone sees a scene differently and therefore
there's no such thing as an accurate photo, and so on. This camp believes
that a photo is a photo no matter how much of the manipulations described
above has been applied.
I don't think anyone will object to someone creating an artistic picture by
applying any amount of alteration. It's just that some of us think that it
is no longer a photograph.