Any New Innovation must Incorporate the Old
I believe McLuhan had the above to say about technological progress. We should be surprised if the process of chemical photography continued just as we currently recognize it, but also if it did not continue along the trajectory so powerfully determined by its history.
If one assumes that photography is evolving and considers the connections between its states of development, one perceives that there are some important constants that cohere the discrete states in ways that other technological advances in recording media do not cohere. Consider the paradigmatic changes in photographic processes of the last 20 years to the equivalent changes in the audio recording industry: where obviously lossy, degenerating media like vinyl disks are rarely used outside of specialized creative applications ("mixing"), so too is film becoming the medium of expert expression. But: the end of the popular vinyl recording format has left little effect on popular music (beyond a couple of linguistic twists: we still buy "albums," for example), where chemical photography has determined all of the standards by which photographs of the present day are measured and established the logic by which they are produced.
Users sometimes forget that most of the processes available in Photoshop were first created in a chemical darkroom. More esoteric filters and effects are merely combinations of intricate darkroom choreographies first imagined in physical media including (and especially) cloning. This retention of creative ideology over the long term is typical of visual media in ways that it just isnt in others.
Nobody felt like cd's had to continue forever like eight-track cassettes used to; earlier, only a few had felt compelled to divide their albums into four discrete pieces to meet the eight-track medium's format, where most retained the two-sidedness of the vinyl medium until CDs came along. Then we met the "shuffle button" and all hell broke loose in audio media.
But the visual "digital revolution" currently uses the same system of ideas to describe the process by which photons can be made into pigment that has been in use for about a hundred years. We still dodge and burn, blur and sharpen, crop and enlarge. There are in film and electronica tangible limits and barriers -- many of which are expressed in exactly the same words: f-stop and asa, for example.
A friend asked my opinion about where to take her digital camera's memory card to have her snapshots "professionally" developed. I compressed the brow for a second -- I'd never thought of the drugstore photomat wallah as a "professional," but my friend was concerned about these pictures, and clearly thought the drugstore would produce the best result. I reckoned she was probably right about that, but there was still something that irked me about passing on one's digital prints to be re-histogrammed and automatically colour balanced by a stranger before they're printed or posted to a website. Finally, it struck me:
"You shouldn't give them your memory card. Ansel Adams would tell you that your memory card is like the score to a symphony, and you shouldn't let just any conductor perform it. Let me show you a few Photoshop tricks
"
Thanks,
