When is a photograph created?

Philosophical question. :confused:
What do you consider your creation date of a photograph? When you take it or when you print it? Would this change if you reprint a negative using a different process?

I think it´s the moment you press the shutter. The printing is only interpretation.
Benjamin

Agreed. Everything leading upto the mashing of the button is composition. Even if you don't print your own negs, someone else will.
I liken it to composers score and conductor. The composer sets the music down physically as best he can. Then musicians will sonically print it.
If the composer does the printing, so much the better.

1st trimester: intent, location, composition, lighting, timing, lens & film choice, ending with exposure.
2nd trimester: film development and proofing, ending with contact print. Likely abort point.
3rd trimester: test prints, contrast adjusting, cropping, toning, ending with final display print.

A photograph is conceived when first it is conceived.
It starts with someone thinking about creating a particular photograph, some way or another.
Its creation is complete when there is something to look at that resembles what it was first thought it should look like. When you decide that you will no longer try to do that very same thing, and move on.

I want one of those little monkeys you used to be able to mail order from the back of comic books. I'm going to teach it to press a shutter release, then I'm going to make a fortune selling the the world's only photographs by a monkey. I mean a monkey other than me. From there I plan on branching out into other animals like rats. I'll strike it rich I tells you, rich!

A work of art is not, in my opinion, a mere artefact, but a succession of actions, gestures, interventions, manipulations, etc. In other words, a performance (no, I did not invent that notion, I got it there:
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Performance-New-Directions-Aesthetics/dp/1405116676)

So, your work, your photograph is created when you stop working on it. If you want your photograph to be created at the moment you click the shutter, then I guess your photograph exists, but only as a latent image on a roll of film prisoner inside a camera.

Michel Hardy-Vallée said:

If you want your photograph to be created at the moment you click the shutter, then I guess your photograph exists, but only as a latent image on a roll of film prisoner inside a camera.

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That's totally going into the statement! "Freed from the prison of iron bars, Chim-Chim himself imprisons latent images inside cameras."

When a collection of thoughts makes me go to a place, position the tripod (if I'm using one) pre-visualize the image and press the shutter. It's quite mundane really.

But often you know the instant you've taken the image that it's special. . . . . . I've never been wrong.

Ian

It isn't created. It is seen. And then realized / abstracted by the process.

For me, a photograph is created when I see it. The rest is simply trying to make it look on paper the way I originally saw it in my head.

keithwms said:

It isn't created. It is seen.

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Very, very many are indeed created. First seen in the imagination. Hopefully eventually also seen with your eyes, as a result of a process of not abstraction, but realisation.

I like the ones that are created much more than the ones that are just captured.
In fact, i do not care for the ones that have been stumbled across and then recorded much at all.

Imagined is one thing, created is another. We can all imagine things, creating them is another level. Much harder, and requiring language that will translate imagination into something concrete.

Slixtiesix said:

I think it´s the moment you press the shutter. The printing is only interpretation.
Benjamin

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I will have to disagree with this, at least in regards to my own work. The whole process from deciding what to photograph ("seeing it") to photographing it to printing the image and matting/framing the print is one process.

Yes, printing is an interpretation of the negative -- and the negative is an interpretation of what one sees. Both are equally important in my mind. However, as I said, this is how I approach photography. Those who place all, or most, of the importance on the taking of the image are also correct. -- as long as they do not try to tell me what is more important to me.

On a more practical level, rather than philosophically, one should consider putting two dates on the back of a print -- one being the year of the creation of the negative and the other the creation of the print...especially if this year is different, or if the printing changes dramatically.

On a historical level, the date of the creation of the negative is important.

Vaughn

I think your question goes directly to the heart of the question, "What is a photograph?" Is a negative a photograph, or only a step toward creation of the photograph? Or can it be both?

There are several ways to answer these questions.

1. Legal creation. According to copyright law and criminal law, the image is created when the shutter is pressed. The film does not even have to be developed. Copyright attaches at the moment of pressing the shutter. This became an issue in several cases, especially early pornography cases, when photographers had taken photos showing pubic hair on the model and were then arrested before developing the film. (The showing of pubic hair was the dividing line between art and obscenity according to the post office regulations and most local obscenity laws until the late 60's in the US).

The copyright in the negative continues to be important. As the creator of the negative (or digital file), I control who can print the negative. I have to grant the right to print to another. Of course, the final print is also protected by copyright, a separate and distinct copyright from that of the negative.

2. Historical definition of photograph. The most generally accepted historic definition of photography was the creation of an image, usually a positive, on a light sensitive surface which was fixed to make the image permanent. Historically, I think the negative was viewed as a step toward creating the final positive. Except when the photographer intended to show the negative as the final image.

3. The combination image problem. What about the positive created using multiple negatives? Here the final image is not created at the pressing of the shutter, but when printed. The final image has no single previous iteration before the print is created. Indeed, the negatives may have been created days or years apart.

4. The post-processing problem. What about photographs created with heavy manipulation? And no, it doesn't have to be digital. I created a series entitled "Sculptural Bodies." The negative was bleached, scratched and drawn on before a print was made. The final print was nothing like the scene in the studio when I pressed the shutter. And when I pressed the shutter, I knew I was going to manipulate the negative, so it is not analogous to creating a score by the composer and an interpretation by the musician. (The manipulation of the negative was a further step in the creation of the score using the score/interpretation analogy). Someone could come in and print my manipulated negative to their own interpretation, but not the unmanipulated negative.

My own solution to the problem: I have a stamp that I put on the back of prints that I sell. The stamp has blanks for the title of the image, the year the negative was made, the year the print was made and the process I used to make the print (platinum, silver, cyanotype etc.) The stamp severs two purposes, it helps me to identify the negative used (I file my negatives by year) and it discloses to the buyer both the creation date of the negative and the print, thereby avoiding most of the issues raised by your question.

keithwms said:

Imagined is one thing, created is another. We can all imagine things, creating them is another level. Much harder, and requiring language that will translate imagination into something concrete.

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Yep. That language - in this instance - is called "photography".
Creating things that way is what photographers do.
Hard? Maybe. But not too hard.
It is, in fact, what sets photographers apart from happy snappers.

a photograph is in the ether before
the magic box captures it.

Ian Grant said:

But often you know the instant you've taken the image that it's special. . . . . . I've never been wrong.

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Really? Maybe it's a matter of experience---I've been wrong *lots* of times. The image that I just KNEW was going to be special at the time somehow escapes from its latent-image prison, leaving behind a pale shade of the photo I thought I was taking, looking more like something Bosaiya's monkey would throw at you than something that would make him world-famous.

I probably kind of suck at previsualisation.

Regarding the original question, surely it depends on what you consider to be "The Photograph"? It seems like there are cases where it's all there in the negative---a straight print will get you the "soul" of the picture, and the rest is details---and others ("Moonrise Over Hernandez" being a well-known example) where the artwork clearly wasn't "all there" until the print was made.

-NT

"Previsualization" -- something that one does before one visualizes what the final image will look like?

I think my pet peeve just bit me in the arse.

Philosophically, previsualization would be all of one's training, looking at photographs, and experiences in photography that contribute to one's ability to visualize what the print will look like.

Practically, previsualization would be loading the film holders, eating breaky and then heading to where one is going to photograph (and visualize).

Sorry -- in a strange mood today.

Vaughn

jnanian said:

a photograph is in the ether before
the magic box captures it.

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There is an interesting thought. How does the box know which ones are mine? Are they mine? Maybe they are yours.

Related to this, I am often at least slightly irritated by calls for submissions for "recent work" sometimes they define the time limit. Galleries etc, always with the recent work... If I shot it eight years ago and only now see that it fits with a body of work I want to present and I've never shown it before, why is it "old" work? I'm not covering breaking news. I've decided that the date I put it out for exhibition, in any form, that is it's creation date, relating to the body of work, not the single image. Only when the difference becomes decades will it really matter.

I think it also comes down on the medium you use. Slide shooters will lean more towards my definition while the B/W-fineprinters will widely accept what Vaughn said. Both can be correct.
Benjamin

For the purposes of dating a negative for storage and for dating the print for mounting, I use when the photograph was taken.

Some times I will spend days thinking about the way to take a photograph before I actually take it. But the date is the date the film was exposed.

I thought about shooting a movie scene for two months and then waited another month before I shot it. The day I took it was the creation date.

Steve

Shaggysk8 said:

I think that a captured image can be created I have to wait for my images I can't create them, I do not have the divine power but I know what I want and I wait and wait and then wait some more until it is before me and I capture it looks captured not created but it created not just captured.

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Lying in wait for something to happen the way you want it to happen is indeed not the same as stumbling upon something.

very true. you got me there.