When is a photograph created?

[RalphLambrecht]

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?

Both.

Attached is how I mark my prints on the back of the mount-board.

 

[keithwms]

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

Ether! So that's the stuff I smell in my darkroom. Buy jove, I think I finally understand where my visions are coming from! I guess it must be the diethyl ether.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

Ether! So that's the stuff I smell in my darkroom. Buy jove, I think I finally understand where my visions are coming from!

50 years ago, if you had visions, they'd put you in a nut house. Today, they make you an executive!

 

[removed account4]

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.

hi erik

the box doesn't know until you tell it

it kind of reminds me of when i was working for a newspaper and was sent on assignment
to a textile mill that was retooled for the war effort.
i submitted images of a guy who was inspecting camouflage as it came off the
rollers down into the big bin. the same day the image+story were run
a different newspaper ran a similar story at a different mill with the same
exact image ( different person ) ...
the image was in the ether, and more than one person grabbed it ...

recent is an abstraction, a conceptual thing.
it is like age. for a dog one human year is 7 years
for a computer it might be about the same ...
recent photography could be 7 minutes ago or 7 years ..
if it fits into the big puzzle of a project, it shouldn't really matter

good luck with your submission!
john

 

[markbarendt]

Great question!

First there is the moment we decide what we want to shoot, that may be months before the actual shot.

There is of course the moment it is shot that defines when it was taken and where it fits in history.

Then there is the moment when, we finish the darkroom in our house a year after the shutter was tripped when we manipulate and/or adjust and make a print.

That is where it becomes real enough to share with the world.

Maybe "I started that one in the summer of 2008 and finished it in the fall of 2009" is a fair answer.

 

[Christopher Walrath]

It honestly depends and for me it on a case by case basis. Sometimes I'm shooting from the hip and don't realize how awesome one particular shot looks until I glance at the processed negative. There are times when a shot is premeditated, more often than not. I see a subject and decide how do portray it and see the final print. Those are the times where concepcion is at perception.

 

[Vaughn]

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

Ah, Grasshopper -- you must be patient and learn the art of stumbling.

I stumble along through the redwoods, constantly moving and seeing. Not hunting for a well lit subject, but on a quest to find the forms light creates and to use those forms to create an image that speaks of that light. I laugh at myself for saying it, but I "Zen" it.

It would be rare for me to head to a particular place -- and even more rare for me to set out to create a particular image. It is only within the last mile of my 50 mile drive to the Redwoods that I finally decide where I will park the car and where I will start my hike with the 8x10. Along a ridge? In the creek itself? Which trail to take?

It is how/why I photograph.

Vaughn

 

[keithwms]

...and keep using that zen system, Vaughn, it works very well for you!

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

A photograph is created the moment the image strikes the film.
Printing it is immortalising it.

BTW; lying in wait for the right moment is the ultimate gift, something Galen Rowell made famous. Stumbling upon a scene is a wonderful suprise that will often call upon all your skill to make the most of it before it vanishes forever.

Just my age old understanding of it.

 

[brian steinberger]

I agree with others that the photograph is created the moment the image strikes the film. But making the final print is the process of realizing and re-living that moment over and over until the print gives you a sense of the feeling you had the moment you released the shutter.

 

[Willie Jan]

I disagree with all the world and think the photograph is created in the darkroom.

In the darkroom you decide which part of the neg will eventually be printed and at what gradation on which paper, with which technique (blue,lith,..). All these factors combined make or break a photograph.

The negative is just a middle step in the whole process.

 

[Ian Grant]

I disagree with all the world and think the photograph is created in the darkroom.

In the darkroom you decide which part of the neg will eventually be printed and at what gradation on which paper, with which technique (blue,lith,..). All these factors combined make or break a photograph.

The negative is just a middle step in the whole process.

By saying the negative is just the middle stage you've admitted that the creation begins with the negative

As many have written the negative is the score, the print is open to different interpretations.

It's exceedingly difficult to produce a good visual image from a poor negative.

Ian

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

By saying the negative is just the middle stage you've admitted that the creation begins with the negative

As many have written the negative is the score, the print is open to different interpretations.

It's exceedingly difficult to produce a good visual image from a poor negative.

Ian

Very, very true, Ian. Even worse from a badly exposed transparency!

 

[Q.G.]

Ah, Grasshopper -- you must be patient and learn the art of stumbling.
[...]
It is how/why I photograph.

So you're photos are more found than created.

I don't share your belief in "the decisive moment", Poisson.
Nothing in this world is unique. In a temporal sense as little as in any other sense. The momentary constellation of thingies does not hold anything special. It's like with busses: another one will come along shortly.

 

[Willie Jan]

By saying the negative is just the middle stage you've admitted that the creation begins with the negative

No, maybe i should have written it different in english.
What happens than if I use a leave and put it into the paper to make a print?
I do not use a neg, so there is no creation?

A terrible darkroom worker will not make a terrific print, but take a terrific darkroom worker and you could get a winner. So the person behind it creates the photograph not the negative!

 

[Q.G.]

I think attempts to identify steps in the process from idea to final product as the moment a photo is created will come to nothing at all.
It takes all steps in the process.

Trying to give "photograph" a very narrow meaning will lead to nothing as well.
A terrible darkroom worker may give up on making prints, and produce projected images on screens.
Despite the many attempts, there is absolutely no way that can be described as not being photographic, not a photograph.
So is it the image captured on film? Then what about the thingies i see in, say, my local newspaper? There is no way you could (convincingly) argue they are not photographs.
So it's not the negative, not the slide, not the print: it is the way something has come to be, and the particular attributes that way of coming into being imparts on what it is that resulted (in short: the action of light producing something visible. And - crucially important - something that does not happen by itself).

 

[markbarendt]

By saying the negative is just the middle stage you've admitted that the creation begins with the negative

Ansel Adams' books would seem to argue that visualization is an earlier step yet. They also argue that deciding on developement should happen before exposure.

The film shows us nothing until it's developed. Given the occasional thread that we see here, development is regularly done months, sometimes years later.

We have to decide on what basic palette of tones or colors we are going to use; Velvia, Kodachrome, HP5, Efke IR.

We have to pick the place and time we are going to shoot. We may have to arrange for models or our family to be there or for the moon to align with a geologic formation.

Blah, blah, blah...

My point here is that letting a little light into the camera is a really small part of the process.

 

[keithwms]

So now a related question: which came first: the hen, or the egg?

 

[Ian Grant]

My point here is that letting a little light into the camera is a really small part of the process.

We all have different perspectives, and much of it boils down to experience.

From my own perspective I know at the taking stage what I want in the image, all cropping/framing etc is done then, I will already know how the image will print to a large extent because before I press the shutter I will have made a decision about the type of development.

So conceptualisation is totally at the taking stage "when that little bit of light hits the film" all the parameters for subsequent processing and printing have already been chosen.

I don't re-interpret my images at the printing stage, but others can and do, that's their choice.

Ian

 

[Paul Jenkin]

In advertising / product photography (and even some landscapes and portraits) isn't the photograph created at the point where the perameters of the shot are defined - i.e. when the storyboard is signed off by the customer and the process of building the sets begins?

 

[keithwms]

So now a related question: which came first: the hen, or the egg?

Clearly the hen comes first, the hen previsualizes the egg.

 

[keithwms]

Clearly the hen comes first, the hen previsualizes the egg.

No! You are wrong. In all my years of experience I have never known a hen that didn't come from an egg.

 

[keithwms]

No! You are wrong. In all my years of experience I have never known a hen that didn't come from an egg.

That's the last straw, I am putting you on my ignore list.

 

[markbarendt]

We all have different perspectives...

Exactly

 

[LucyS]

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 consider creation to be that magical moment when you press the shutter and create a work of art with light onto the negative.