ksmattfish said:
There is no right or wrong, we are discussing philosophy.
Right on, Matt.
joseph said:
they do not represent the real.
But neither does a photograph. This is the most common complaint I hear about digital photography, but just the fact that film does not have the light sensitivity of the human eye means that a picture taken on film does not show you what it was really like to be there. Henri Cartier-Bresson shoots with only a 50mm lens and prints full-frame with no cropping or burning, and yet he uses B&W film. How is B&W any more real than super-saturated colors? It's the same dramatic change, just in the other direction. The thing that B&W has going for it is that it's been around for more than 100 years, so people are used to it.
At the turn of the century, traditional photography wasn't even seen as art. It took Alfred Stieglitz a long, hard fight to try and get it at least a little bit of recognition. It was new and traditional artists didn't see it as being worthy. I know people aren't saying that digital photography isn't art, but saying it isn't photography feels like the same thing to me.
I completely understand it, too. Having legions of hacks making images of purple cows floating in the sky and calling them photographs is unsettling. It cheapens what we think a photograph should be. The worst of it is it's so easy to do. It would take a lot of skill to make a purple cow floating in the sky using traditional darkroom methods. It could be done, but by the time a person gets good enough to do so, they usually have no desire to, so we don't see it often.
If it's the fact that it's taken digital that makes it not a photograph, then a large number of the images posted here aren't photographs, and we aren't photographers, as many of us are using digital cameras. It would mean that one of these images was a photograph, and the other wasn't:
That seems a little strange to me.
If it's the manipulation that makes it not a photograph, then again, a majority of images, I dare say all images, aren't photographs, even traditional ones. There is at least some manipulation done to every image somewhere down the line. If a photograph was only a photograph if it showed only what was "real", we would have one focal length - whatever was normal for the particular camera; one film - color, and it's saturation would be as natural as possible; one developer - whatever gave the most perfect tones; everyone would shoot at f22 or narrower; etc.
Photographers have to be graphic artists, otherwise our compositions suck. There are so many variables that we choose amongst. A good way to improve your photographic skill is to take some graphic arts classes along the way.
The digital workflow has blurred the lines, and people don't like that. We like having neat labels that we can apply to things so that they can be sorted, and judged, in our heads. This is something that's going to take a while to settle out. It took a long time for wet-plate photography to be accepted as art. It took a while for color photography to be accepted as real photography (that "color" always had to be tacked on to make sure people knew you weren't talking about "real" photography; people did some strange stuff at the time with that color). It's going to take a while for digital photography to be accepted as just "photography", but it will happen.
I've worked both traditionally and digitally, but right now I'm 100% digital, and I usually have to tell people that my prints are such. They have a hard time telling the difference. I consider myself a photographer, no matter if I pick up my EOS5 or my 10D. I feel I have a stake in this arguement because whenever someone says that digital work isn't photography, they are saying I'm not a photographer. That's everyone's right to think that way, but I'm also going to defend my right to call myself one at the same time. The exact same creative process is going through my head; it's only the tools that differ.
