Not there yet
Have digital photographers yet made full use of the medium?
Our photographer works almost entirely in film. It’s not that he has a disdain for pixels or Photoshop (properly handled); it’s that he has never made the transition, for reasons that seem good every time he considers the question. It’s certainly not out of any idea of the superiority of the analog process, as will be clear below. We mention it because these, his comments on digital photography, are made from outside the edifice, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.
He thinks that digital photographers have not really explored all the capabilities of the medium. They have certainly produced types of pictures that used to be difficult or impossible, extending the technical space of photography. And he is not here thinking of the fashion of reproducing in digital what were thought of as defects in analog. But a photographer who did make the analog-digital transition, and has done excellent work in both, has expressed his ideal digital camera/workflow as something that would reproduce the tonality and expressiveness of Tri-X (a film) in D-76 1:1 (a developer). That is, his objective is based on the chemical past.
Our photographer sometimes reminds us at length of the great limitations of silver halide imaging. Apart from the basic technical challenges of getting the right focus and exposure, there were whole books about how to control contrast and somehow get the input/output curve of the negative to fall into a printable range. There followed the art, mastered completely by few, of turning out a fine print. It would be oversimplification to say that the whole object of Ansel Adams’ decades of chemical analysis has now been reduced to a few sliders in Photoshop. But not by much.
One would think (our photographer opines) that the exquisite control and tremendous flexibility of the digital camera/computer combination would have created a whole new multidimensional universe. We should have seen artistic expression of new kinds, subtle beauties and (here he’s at a loss for words). . . anyway, something like the shift from the stiff Victorian daguerreotype portrait to the masterly tonality of a 1940s Speed Graphic print. Or more. And we haven’t seen it.
It may actually exist; there are plenty of serious, talented photographers out there working hard, and some might be exploring what our photographer is looking for. But for the most part, digital work shows another triumph of convenience over quality. And we’re not impressed by the smartphone apps that do surrealistic things to your selfies. (AI pictures are another subject entirely, something we won’t go into here.)
We can think of two reasons why the digital revolution has not produced such an artistic revolution. The first is that film had already reached the point where it could do all that realistic imaging could do, artistically, and the rest of the newly-accessible universe was not in fact interesting. An analogy: most of the physical universe, after all, is immediately fatal to humans; only Earth is welcoming.
The other reason is more mundane. Images are now viewed on smartphones and computer screens. They are tiny, compared to a serious print of the Old Days, and vary fantastically in how they render any given file. A master digital image is often indistinguishable from a piece of spam. We could never even detect an artistic revolution this way.
So get out to the galleries, and see what the photographers have actually printed!
