What you can do, and what you should do
In the Five Colors Science & Technology library of photography are a number of old books that we still find interesting. Apart from details of procedures and chemistry that are hard to find elsewhere, they show the different ideas, through the years, of just what was a good photograph.
Our photographer writes:
I’m looking at the Ilford Manual of Photography by C. H. Bothamley, 70th thousand (there is no copyright date, but a flyleaf inscription places it shortly before 1897). There are various chapters on how to manipulate the apparatus and the chemistry of late-nineteenth century imaging. Chapter IV is about how to take a good picture, mostly what we call composition. In it the author says, “The more sacred of the human emotions, such as deep grief, may fitly be portrayed by the painter, who makes free use of his imagination, but they are outside the proper scope of photography.”
The background of this statement is in the history of Art, of the pictorialist movement in photography and indeed the widespread refusal (at the time) to consider photography to be Art at all. That’s not what I want to talk about. Instead, I’ll point out that taking a picture of a grieving widow (say) inside a Victorian house was simply outside the technical capability of photography at the time. By inference from recommended exposures (this was before standardized speeds), it appears that the “ordinary yellow express” plates would now be rated between ISO 1 and 4. This is a hundred times slower than film made a few decades later. Exposures in bright sunlight were at least a quarter of a second; exposures in a darkened room would run to large fractions of an hour. Even setting aside the clumsy apparatus of a large bellows camera and its tripod, it was all but impossible to capture private grief.
So is Mr. Bothamley, M.Sc. (Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry, Fellow of the Chemical Society of London, Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, Ex-President of the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom), simply cutting his artistic judgement to fit his cloth? One could argue that way. And it would be easy to decry our loss of privacy due to technology. Fast film and small cameras first allowed the anti-selfie, in which private grief (among other things) could be made public. Now, between Facebook, Instagram and phone cameras, it’s hard to discern any privacy left to us in this century.
But—as I argued when I looked at the phenomenon of the selfie—it’s not the fault of the machine. The urge to gossip, to take pictures of oneself, to feed on the raw emotions of other people is nothing new. Indeed, the Greek tragedies of twenty-five centuries ago were all about experiencing horror, terror, courage, redemption, all the most intense human emotions, at one remove. The question is whether there is anything indecent in watching a real human go through them instead of a fictional character.
Has technology given us more than we have lost? Do you watch reality TV? The evening news?
