If you would like a lengthy possibly controversial polemic relevant to this thread I offer the following essay. It was produced to accompany a recent photographic exhibition of mine that guaranteed the absence of any digital input whatsoever. The bits in parenthesis were included in the speech notes for rhetorical effect.
In Defence of Light-Sensitive Materials
The word photography was invented to describe what light sensitive materials deliver: pictures that offer a different class of imaging from painting, drawing, or digital methods. True photographs are pictures made out of light sensitive materials.
The content of such pictures is the visible trace of a direct physical process. This is sharply different to painting, drawing, and digital imaging where picture content is the visible output of processed data. For the record some other imaging methods that do not process data include life casts, death masks, brass rubbings, wax impressions, coal peels, papier-maché moulds, and footprints.
There is a general idleness of thought that assumes any picture beginning with a camera is a photograph. Most casual references to digital pictures as photographs are motivated not by deceit but rather by the innocent or uncritical acceptance of the jargon “digital photography”; a saying which has become so banal and familiar that it largely passes unchallenged; except perhaps here, now, and by me.
I use light sensitive substances to make pictures because of the special relationship between such pictures and their subject matter. The wonder of this special relationship is also available to the aware viewer. For the record some non-photographic means of making realistic looking pictures include photo-realist painting, mezzotint, gravure, offset printing, and analogue and digital electronic techniques. These pictures may resemble photographs but they do not invoke the unique one-step physical bond between subject and true photograph.
The physical (and specifically non-virtual) genesis of pictures made from light-sensitive substances has far-reaching consequences:
Light sensitive materials are utterly powerless in depicting subject matter that does not exist. A true photograph of a thing is an absolute certificate for the existence of that thing; an existence proof at the level of physical evidence. Quite differently, data-based pictures are at best a form of
testimony rather than
material evidence.
Light-made pictures require that the subject matter and the substances that will depict it have to be in each other’s presence at the same moment. True photographs cannot be fashioned to depict times past. The future is similarly inaccessible. Since true photographs can only begin their existence at the time of exposure in the fleeting present they constitute an absolute certificate that a particular moment in time actually existed. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
Light-sensitive materials are blind to the imaginary, the topography of dreams, and the shape of hallucinatory visions. The option of making a picture from light sensitive materials is an infallible way of distinguishing delusion from reality. A true photograph authenticates the proposition that the camera really did see something. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
Light-sensitive substances do not offer discretionary editing or augmentation of subject matter content. There is a one to one correspondence between points in a true photograph and places in real-world subject matter. This correspondence, also known as a transfer function, is immutable if only the subject matter changes. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
The sole energy input for a true photograph comes from the subject. The internal chemical potential energy of the light-sensitive substances is sufficient to generate all the marks of which a photograph is composed. External energy sources are not obligatory. Remember, photography was invented in, described in, and works perfectly in a world without electricity. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix all need external inputs.)
Pictures made from light sensitive materials are different to paintings, drawings, and digital confections in that their authority to describe subject matter comes
not from resemblance but from
direct physical causation.
It is these unique qualities of true photography, its limitations and its profound certainties, that keep me committed to the medium as an integral and original form.
My light-made pictures are produced one at a time, start to finish, and in full by my own hand. The work flow is mine. No part of it is down to assistants or back-room people toiling to flatter my skills so I will feel good about paying their fee. I’m committed to making pictures out of light-sensitive substances even if these materials cease to be commercially available. I can synthesize them myself.
