kjsphoto said:
Okay, why not (and what about the other example, negative, scanned, printed on silver paper).
I'm asking, logically, why isn't it a photograph?
A photograph, at it's simplest definition, is writing with light. Some definitions even reduce it purely to the capture - the capturing of the image on some light sensitive material (after all, when people look at work in a book or a newspaper, they don't actually say "hey, look at that ink based reproduction... etc", they say "I saw a really powerful photo in the paper..." etc).
But even those that aren't that narrow, define photography as the capturing of light (or radiant energy) on some sensitised material and then the printing of that on some form of sensitized material (with all the usual wrinkles for projected/back lit transparencies, X-Rays etc).
And these definitions have never relied on saying something like "to be a photograph it is required that it is working with a metallic salt from start to finish"
Neither is quality a defining parameter "my analogue prints still look better than digital" - well, so what, my silver gelatin prints look a hell of a lot better than many old POP prints I've dealt with.
These definitions have served photography in all it's forms and permutations through the last 160 odd years or whatever.
The fact is, that whether we like it or not, the majority of the standard, accepted definitions of photography also apply to a lot of digital "photography" and even more so to the various hybrid process, such as the two examples - digital capture/traditional print, traditional neg/scan/traditional print.
That we might not happen to like it, doesn't change that
As soon as you start to narrow the definition down you start to cut out things that have, in the past, been considered photography or photographs.
Now, I'm not just saying this to be bloody minded, but rather because if all we can really offer is essentially some form of emotional or knee jerk response then we really just end up ghettoising ourselves.
Because in the end it isn't us who decides "what is a photograph". It's the wider populations of users of photography of all kinds, and also the museums and archives that are the depositories of photographs.
I think some of us secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) enjoy being seen as a cranky old bunch of Luddites - but if that's so, it's doing nothing to further the cause of analogue photography at all.
Wish the computer component would have been acknowledged there as I think that practice is deceptive while the term "photograph" is probably too broad to imply any deception in the current climate. I see the latter increasingly as more a case of ignorance rather than deception.
