When Ethics Become Semantics

Maris said:

The people who care what "photography" is are the ones who look at a photograph and take the mental journey to connect the photograph with something in the real world. This journey is not something worth doing with paintings, drawings, or digi-graphs because they don't offer an indexical relationship between subject and picture. Photographs (uniquely!) do offer this indexical relationship.

It is perfectly legitimate to embrace pictures at first reading and accept them as a beguiling pattern of marks on a plane surface. Suspending enquiry, suspending disbelief is a pleasant entree to a comfortable world of fictions were "seeming" is indistinguishable from "being".

Photography is a ticket out of this world.

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I think that's just one way of looking at it.

I agree with the "Who cares?" mentality of looking at it, NOT necessarily within the context that "photography and its meaning doesn't matter" but just that "I don't care what other people think it is [for]." An award winning novelist can right a darn good novel without caring what I (or anyone else) personally thinks of novel writing.

The other thing I think that gets overlooked is that photography can be used as a means to other artistic expressions. IMHO, people who are using photography (as a step/springboard) to produce work that looks more-so computer generated (or whatever) have an artistic right to their own point of view about photography (e.g,. Erik Almas not only shoots old school, large format style but he also produces work that looks more like graphic art). Where any individual person wants to take their photography is their business. And, I don't think "ideological/semantic wars" need to break out just because everyone has their own view of what photography should be.

I just think my work (and everyone else's) should speak for itself, without the need for battles about definitions, categorizations, and abstract explanations. I have a sense of what photography means to me, and whether or not anyone else agrees with that sense is quite irrelevant.

chriscrawfordphoto said:

I would suggest that most people who get all upset because someone is 'cheating' by using a computer or digital camera would be better served worrying about the quality of their own work. If it sucks, no amount of whining and running down those using a different media will make you look good. It makes curators and dealers walk away from you. If your work is good, then you'll still be turning off educated people whose help you need to succeed, thus ruining your efforts at making good art.

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30 Nov 2010

I completely agree! Thank you Chris for your thoughtful and informative comments in this thread.

Regards,
Darwin

I don't think it is problematic, or too much to ask, for people to make meaningful semantic differences between digital imaging products and film imaging products. Where the gray area comes up is when the image is hybrid - do you call it a digital image if it is in fact a platinum print, but it was made from a digitally produced negative which was made from an in-camera film original that was manipulated? From a digitally produced negative that was made from a digital capture that was NOT manipulated? A C-print that was digitally enlarged from a film negative? An inkjet from a scan of a film negative? and so on...

I do think there is an honesty factor that needs to be injected when it comes to describing prints specifically - DO NOT try to pass off an inkjet as a platinum print or a gum bichromate or a silver gelatin print. There is a very good reason for this - all those types of print require different archival methods for handling: if someone believes that for example an inkjet print is in fact a platinum print, and forty years later the print develops a problem that requires archival treatment, it is perfectly ok to get water on an actual platinum print, but the pigment image will dissolve right off the page under the same treatment. Requesting honesty in this labeling is not bashing - it is a meaningful distinction with significant ramifications for the original buyer and all subsequent owners of the print. It is not a per-se value judgement - that should be left up to the viewer and buyer of the image, but they should also be given full and accurate information with which to make that judgement.

I value an inkjet differently than a c-print than a silver gelatin enlargement than an albumen print than a platinum print than a gum bichromate because each has their own aesthetic qualities and each requires a different kind and amount of labor to make. That distinction is my distinction to make, and my specific values for each will not be the same as the next persons.

You value an inkjet print? I know I came back to film in large part because I haven't been satisfied with any inkjet prints I could make from either my digital or my scanned film work.

Drawing
Painting
Watercolor
Oil Painting
Photograph
Tin Type
Film Photograph
Digital Photo

In the above list we all have a quite clear idea if what some of those things are, and as you move down the list it gets foggy, that is the problem, not how people are making images, but how present language handles defining them.

We have had in some cases thousands of years to define some of these things and but a handful of years to define others. Until language catches up this battle will rage on, I would like to propose that we start calling images burned onto an emulsion with light Photographs, and images captured electronically Photos, if you change an image it should probably be called a HDR Photo, or a Digital Image depending on how it was edited.

As for are these people cheating somehow, I see it as using the tools available to produce what they want the viewer to see. This altering of images is done in all forms of image based art, that is what you are trying to do whenever you take a photograph and bring it into a form for viewing. Unless you are trying to document something as it truly is you are altering the image somehow, be it with lighting, angle, depth of field, or zoom, you alter reality all the time with the tools you have available to you.

Lets define these things so we can understand what they are, not complain about them.

hpulley said:

You value an inkjet print? I know I came back to film in large part because I haven't been satisfied with any inkjet prints I could make from either my digital or my scanned film work.

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I said I value an inkjet DIFFERENTLY than I value a platinum print. Personally, I don't buy inkjet prints because I don't like the look and feel. I don't make them because I don't like the process of making them. But that's a personal subjective valuation, and does not mean anything with regard to the content of the print itself. Who knows, maybe in time I will come around and buy an inkjet print - there are a rare few artists I know whose work I like that work in the inkjet medium, and I might be willing to have on my walls. But not now.

MattKing said:

I have to ask .....

What is "quivelling"?

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Simple. It's a portmanteau word composed of the components "quarrelling" and "snivelling". In other words, arguing in an unpleasant whining tone.