The Photograph from Bitumen to Bytes

When we last left our intrepid hero, he was off on a wild tangent about the demise of the hard copy photograph at the hands of digital philistines. Well, while I’m hanging around here, let’s talk about the many ways of the photograph. First a little history.

It has been known since ancient times that passing light through a tiny hole will form an image. This fact lead to the development of the “camera obscura” which has been described as early as the 10th century. It started out as a darkened room with a hole in one wall. Eventually lenses were added and the size was reduced to a large wooden box.

Still the image was fleeting and required an artist to trace the image with a pencil in order to make it permanent. This was a situation just begging for someone to invent a way to capture the image on some sort of light sensitive material.

The first generally acknowledged true “photograph” was made in 1826 by Niepce using a substance called bitumen of Judea; a kind of asphalt which hardens when exposed to light. The unexposed parts can be dissolved away to reveal the image. The exposure took eight hours. Niepce called his creation a heliograph (sun drawing). You can see it here.

Next came the Daguerreotype, named for the inventor, Louis Daguerre. A Daguerrotype is made coating a copper plate with silver. The silver is exposed to iodine vapor to sensitise it, it is exposed, and the image revealed by exposing the plate to mercury vapors. Despite the nasty poisonous chemicals involved, Daguerrotypes became quite popular due to their sharp detail.

At nearly the same time William Talbot announced his process, called a Calotype. The nice feature here is that a calotype was created on paper instead of metal and was a sort of “negative” that could be reproduced where as a Daguerrotype was a one off process. The calotype’s disadvantage was that the image was less sharp due to the course paper fibers and the look was more like a charcoal drawing. This is considered an artistic advantage by modern calotypists, but at the time was not so hot.

Next up, the wet collodion process. This is what we see in movies set in the old west. A huge camera, the photographer under a black cloth, and maybe a minion standing by with a big stick with flash powder on it. The images were recorded on glass plates coated with collodion (nitrocellulose dissolved in ether or alcohol). The results were sharp AND reproducible AND exposures could be as short as five seconds. Woo Hoo! Too bad the plates had to be used while still wet so the photographer had to drag an entire chemistry lab around at all times. Not good.

In the 1880’s the big step toward modern photography was made. George Eastman perfected the process of coating a roll of paper with a gelatin emulsion of silver salts. The gelatin was peeled off the paper after exposure to create negatives. The roll “film” allowed for small lightweight easy to use cameras. Everyone started taking pictures. Eventually the paper roll evolved into the cellulose film that we know today.

Many people are familiar with the basic wet process photograph. You take a shot with your camera on a roll of film, the film is run through some chemicals to produce a negative, the negative is put into an enlarger that projects the image onto photo sensitive paper, and the paper is run through some more chemicals – viola! a photograph.

This is the basic process, but there are more ways than you can shake a stick at to create a photograph. Besides daguerrotypes and collodions and calotypes and silver gelatins there are carbon prints, albumen prints, gum bichromate prints, platinums and palladiums, cibachromes, polaroids, and dye transfers just to name a few. I even found a person that prints images directly on plant leaves – grow your own photo paper!

Check out this link for some cool alternative and classic photography techniques - Alternative Photography

Well, this post is getting kind of long so I think I’ll quit for today. Next time I want to check into some ways to take traditional processes and meld them with digital ones to produce photographs. There is more to digital than just inkjet printing.

MDW

Never Judge a Photograph by Its Image

 

Digital images are, for all intents and purposes, the same as photographs.

That is a lie.

That is a lie that I think is damaging the medium of photography – particularly in the fine art category.

Now before everybody freaks out that this is one of those “digital is evil and film is the only way to go” pieces –  I’m not talking about digital images in the sense that digital capture of images is bad per se. I use a digital camera and print my photographs on an inkjet printer. Before that I used film and then scanned the slides and printed digitally. I am cool with digital photography.

This is also not a statement against digital manipulation of images. I’m not going to be discussing HDR or color saturation or frankenimages. Regular readers of my blog know that I’m pretty conservative when it comes to the manipulation thing, but that isn’t the topic today.

This is also not a call to stop displaying digital images of photographs on the Web. Obviously I do this myself since I always like to sprinkle some of my recent images over my blog posts. Digital images are fine and dandy if used for the correct purposes and in the correct situations.

So what am I talking about? Read on McDuff.

I have recently seen two internet surveys basically asking the question, “How often do you print your images?” One survey found that better than 58% responded along the lines of “now and then” to “never”. The second survey came out 56% on the side of rarely to never. These may not be rigorous scientific studies, but I’m willing to buy into them since they fit well with anecdotal evidence from the people I talk to personally.

There seems to be a growing trend toward eliminating the photograph from photography.

On the one hand this is a good thing. It saves trees and avoids the use of a lot of chemicals. For the vast majority of the zillions of images taken everyday, it doesn’t really matter. A shot of Aunt Peg at the family barbecue seen on a computer monitor versus as a WalMart print, although different, isn’t different in any significant way.

On the other hand photography that strives to be more than just a snapshot that strives to be considered art, is being harmed in a serious way. The problem rears it head when photographs are JUDGED based on their digital representations. When galleries, grant making foundations, juried shows, and photography contests base their selections on computer representations of photographs, then we have a problem.

I’ve searched through dozens and dozens and dozens of calls for artists and almost all of them require digital submissions only. Not digital submissions optional. Digital submissions only! Some of these are from very prestigious organizations like the Smithsonian. People who should know better, but have swallowed the lie.

To illustrate my point let’s look at a personal experience. A local photography gallery announced a call for artists for a juried portfolio show coming up this summer. I was looking forward to entering some of my photographs for consideration. Then I read in the rules that submissions were limited to digital files only.

I make it a rule never to have my photographs judged by their digital representations. So I’m out.

Since I know some of the people at the gallery, I decided to e-mail them with a request that they also accept photographs. I laid out a spiel of arguments in hopes they would change their minds. Here is the gist of what I wrote.

1.  Unless you plan to hang LCD screens around the gallery, you will be showing physical prints so why are you judging them on how they look as screen images?
 
2.  I shoot in RAW format and after editing I store in uncompressed TIFF format. A conversion to JPG will cause a loss of digital information as well as changes in the color profiles.
 
3.  I spend hours and hours calibrating my equipment toward the production of physical prints. I cannot control the equipment on which you will view the images. Your monitor may be set brighter than mine thus blowing out the highlights. Your monitor may have more or less contrast. Perhaps the color temperature is different. I have no idea what ambient lighting you will be using. What about viewing angles? Will embedded color profiles be honored or ignored?
 
4. I post some of my images to my website and to my blog just for entertainment value. I have four computers at my home – two with LCDs and two with CRTs. I know from experience that the images look significantly different on each and every computer even after I have tweaked them to be as similar as possible.
 
5. Computer monitors display images using additive colors from an active light source. A physical photograph uses reflected light and subtractive colors. There is no way they can ever look the same no matter how advanced the monitor. We are talking apples and oranges here.
 
6. I believe that reliance on digital images to judge photographs is eroding creativity and artistry in the photography medium.

• a. It places an unfair burden on photographers that prefer to work in the traditional wet process. They are forced to complete double the work in order to produce a submission; after all the time and energy invested in producing their photos, they must also scan either the film or the final print and digitally process the file. This is a waste of time and degrades the quality of their work. If all images in the future are judged digitally, it will deter these artists from competing and ultimately destroy a valuable medium.
   
  b. The limitations of judging photographs digitally forces image makers toward the least common denominator rather than expanding their artistic freedoms. The only images that consistently look good on a range of computer monitors are those that meet certain criteria. They must be evenly exposed with all histogram values falling within acceptable display levels, they must have middling contrast values, they must have high color saturation values that fall within the color gamut of the average RGB color profile, and the image must not rely on fine detail or physical presence for its impact.
   
  c. Relying on digital images to judge photographs sends the message to artists that the print is not important – it is an afterthought that can be produced by merely pressing a button. Creating a print of a snapshot may be a trivial thing, but producing a high quality fine art print is another thing entirely. Personally I use a digital workflow, but all my work is aimed at producing physical prints. Using digital images to judge my photographs cuts out a significant portion of my artistic process. What printer I choose, what inks I choose, what paper I choose, what drivers and profiles I choose, and what color management techniques I choose all weigh heavily on the printed output. Maybe after proofing the print I decide to tweak the contrast or the brightness or the sharpness – for the print only not the screen rendition. The size I choose for a print is also part of my process. Some prints have more impact in large size and some in small. I have no control over the size at which a digital image will be viewed.

7. Although many people equate having seen an image on a screen as having seen a photograph, this is completely false. A print has a physical presence and dimensionality that no digital image can ever achieve. A digital image on a screen is merely an apparition. It is a collection of pixels lit up in a certain pattern. It is completely two dimensional – it has no feel, no weight, no depth, no texture, no subtlety, no smell, no sound, no movement. It has no tie to the long tradition of the photographic print from the first fixed image of his courtyard by Niepce to the mass appeal of George Eastman’s gelatin emulsions.

So there you have it. I have never heard anyone else mention anything about this issue. Maybe I just don’t talk to the right people. Maybe I’m just nuts.

Ansel Adams once said, “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.”

I think I’ll keep making prints.

MDW