Aha! What LWW said! I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind that the word photograph meant 'record of light', hense my obsessive compulsion to deny any photograpic trickery as a genuine photograph, despite appearences.
I tried to look back through my photograhy course notes and found pages about the chemisty and the physics involved in photography, followed by pages of sketches of the darkroom and classrooms where the history notes were supposed to be! I always did hate history. :meh: Didn't help my argument much though!
Hertz van Rental said:
We are talking about defining a 'photograph'. Unless I am very much mistaken, at the most basic level a photograph is a physical object and the end product of a process.
If you start discussing how it is made then you are talking about a process and not the end product.
Remarkably we agree, up to a point. A photograph
is a physical object. Not even I am up to debate that point with you, you may be surprised to hear. However the end product is always made by a process, obviously. Different processes create different end products, even if they are possibly indistinguisable from one another.
Hertz van Rental said:
It was used as an example in refutation of your claim that in the beginning photographs only showed the truth. It was not used as an example of double-exposure.
I didn't mean to imply it was a double-exposure. Just that the street was recorded exactly as it stood at the time, except non-permanent features. It's about seeing and recording. Someone could have gone back the next day with that photograph and compared it to the real location, and seen it was an exact replica, despite the lack of people.
If I plant Big Ben in the middle of Times Square in a photograph, no-one is ever going to be able to see that with their own eyes. Therefore there
is a difference in the actual physical object. One can be compared with what is seen with your own eye, even if what you see is in some way different, with the other it's fiction.
How about comparing it to a book? If I give you a work of fiction and an auto-biography you will not know which is real and which isn't. Unless you read it on the cover, yet publishers and bookshops go to great lengths to seperate the two. Why? Because it is different, even though they are indecernable. The difference is psychological/emotional, call it what you will. It's the same thing with a photograph.
Hertz van Rental said:
Another refutation is to point out that Daguerreotypes are laterally reversed (mirror images) so again they do not show things as they are.
I'm really getting bogged down in my phrasing! I'll let someone else talk for me:
LLW said:
If I was standing at the same spot as the camera I could have viewed the same photons of light that the camera did.
In this case, I would have to look through a mirror at the scene, but I could see it, and I could see the people moving in it, and know, from the fact that they
are moving, that they are not a reasonably permanent part of the scene and so are thus not essential in a reasonably permanent image.
Hertz van Rental said:
Or are you going to tell me that it's OK for us all have our own idea as to what a Metre is?
A metre is clearly defined. I've already told you if a photo was, we wouldn't be having this conversation. However, if you don't have a ruler to hand you can start a great argument by asking a room full of people to agree on an exact distance. They will never manage it. Each individual is going to have to adjust their actual opinion towards a generic point. And I'm sure if you measure the final answer, it won't be exactly a metre anyway.
Equally, get a room full of people to look at things that may or may not be photographs, without providing an exact definition and the only way they will all agree on what is/isn't a photograph is by adjusting personal opinion towards general concencous. Neither of us is willing to adjust. Simple.
Moving on to your glass of water. If there is a glass of water on a table it doesn't matter what colour it is, or what is floating in it. It is a glass of water. But, if you are in a restaraunt and ask for a glass of water, the implication is that you wish to drink it, so if you are provided with a glass of green water with algae swimming in it you are going to object - even though it is
technically a glass of water.
However, I'm drifting from my point. And this is pretty much the opposite of what we are discussing about what a photograph is. Here we are discussing something that
is the same, although people will try to insist it is different, and as I've already said, they could well have a case.
I claim equally that two things that look the same may not be. If I fill that glass with a colourless, odourless poison that is the same consistancy and PH balance as water and put that in front of you with a glass of water, I assume you won't risk drinking either?
There is a physical difference in this case, but the difference is indecernable, without special equipment. That doesn't make the poison safe to drink, or the water dangerous, but it does stop you drinking the water.
I know your responce to that is that there IS a way of telling the difference, but it takes special equipment that I assume you don't carry, thus at this point the two are inseperable. By your logic, if you can't differentiate between two things, they are the same... I'm still not convinced on that one!
Your point?
