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"Photography" vs "Digital Art?"


anne_kerr

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<p>There's no hard and fast rule. An accomplished photographer can use a darkroom to change photos as much as a computer software program, so it depends on the final image on whether or not it's too much. If it's a news photo, in this current age, I feel any image manipulation is too much, but that's just my opinion.</p>
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<p>"So we call sandwich negative prints "digital art"? Doesn't make much sense to me. But then I'm not into insulting other people's work with remarks about "clip art.""<br>

<br>

A photograph is a photograph whether it's a truly bad one or a breathtakingly good one, it's still a photograph. Clip art is clip art whether the result is a kids birthday card or a genuinely imaginative image posted on Photonet.<br>

<br>

It's not an insult, it just is what it is.</p>

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<p>"Shades of gray, wherever I go. The more I find out, the less that I know. Black and white was so easy for me. But shades of gray are the colors I see." (Billy Joel, as remembered from the recorded song) As I age, I am perceiving everything in visual media increasingly as abstraction. A close friend of mine in his eighties with Parkinson's Disease described an abstracting of his perception to the point where dream seemed as reality and reality as dream. I find it increasingly difficult to see any photographic work as photographic in a purist sense, except for reportage photojournalism. For me, pure photography was once defined by shooting Kodachrome, "Processed by Kodak" and viewed through a loupe on a light table or projected. But I'm not idealizing that anymore. I left film in 2003 and feel that I'm a better photographer in the digital workflow now. The question or concern of realism is fading.</p>
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<blockquote>

<p>There's no hard and fast rule. An accomplished photographer can use a darkroom to change photos as much as a computer software program,....</p>

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<p>The difference is that darkrooms were never nearly as common in the past as computers are today, and digital editing is so fast and easy compared to traditional darkroom techniques that "everyone" can do it. Digital manipulation is now so commonplace that one of the first questions from non-photographers who are looking at my photographs will ask is, "Is it real?" They're wanting to know if I really saw this like I'm showing or if, instead, I created important aspects of this scene using my computer rather than my camera. I'm convinced that there is no bright line that separates photography from digital art, and that the line that goes from one endpoint of pure photography to another endpoint of pure digital art is a continuous, unbroken line, and defining where photography transitions to digital art is arbitrary and subjective. Many people don't care; to them, its only the final product that matters, and the method to reach that final product is not that important. Other people do care, and to them the process to reach the final product is an important element of that product. Different people have different degrees of comfort and acceptance of the amount of digital editing that has been applied to a photograph. The discussion is interesting and important, but if it turns into an argument there is no end. I'd like to say "to each his/her own," but unfortunately it has evolved to the point in today's world where those people who are looking at my work have to ask that question,"Is it real?" where before that question would never have come to mind. The question or concern of realism may be fading for some, but it is still an important issue for others. </p>

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<p>But what I can't understand is what the ubermanipulators feel they are adding to a photograph which <strong>so obviously looks fake</strong>? </p>

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<p>If fake looking was the intended result then I don't understand why you don't get that. The problem with images that do come across as fake is that this look doesn't support or add to the intended narrative or design of the image. It just doesn't fit.</p>

<p>When fake looks out of place then it just looks like exploration by the photographer lead by their whim, basically treating the photograph as a sculpted picture devoid of having any relationship to the subject matter. </p>

<p>In that regard Lex's "Fabulists" term applies here in defining intent IMO. Whether the viewer likes it or recognizes it as such becomes a matter of taste.</p>

<p>When it really becomes annoying for me is when this fake look is copied exactly among a wide range of photographers across a wide range of scenes as if theres some kind factory or school teaching them to churn it out like "Dogs Playing Poker" paintings.</p>

 

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<p>It is the case that digital and photoshop have democratised photo manipulation, as Stephen Penland's post opines. I don't see that as a bad thing and neither do I think it bears much on what I consider is photography. The judgement of good and bad still applies, as does the point for each photographer about what he's comfortable with doing and telling. </p>
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<p>I've said it before, and I'll say it again.<br>

Adams was not the "bad guy" in the "fall" of Mortensen from grace.</p>

<p>Look at Mortensen's work, and you can see why it went out of fashion: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=william+mortensen&num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=vo2&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=9JgrUdPvKKmQ0QHyhoH4Bw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1203&bih=640">link</a></p>

 

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<p>"At what point does photography become "digital art?" Am I doing what I refer to as cheating?"<br>

<br />What exactly do you mean "cheating"?<br>

<br />Is a carpenter cheating if he uses an electric drill instead of a hand drill?</p>

<p>I always get the impression with these kind of threads that the OP himself/herself can't do what others are doing and the first and only thing they can say is "Your photos 'only' look good because you're a cheat".<br>

<br />Look, there is no cheating. <strong>Anyone and everyone has access to Photoshop</strong>. If I <strong>choose</strong> to use Photoshop and you don't, it doesn't make me a "cheat".<br>

You do or you don't. You either like a photo or you don't. But please, don't call others or be called a cheat.<br>

<br />It's a photographic insult of the worse kind.</p>

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<p>Adams was not the "bad guy" in the "fall" of Mortensen from grace.<br>

Look at Mortensen's work, and you can see why it went out of fashion: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=william+mortensen&num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=vo2&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=9JgrUdPvKKmQ0QHyhoH4Bw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1203&bih=640" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">link</a></p>

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<p>The work isn't important, it's the vile attacks on Mortensen perpetrated by Adams.</p>

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<p>I have taken a number of art classes. The main idea, no matter the medium or technique, was to express yourself. </p>

<p>If photography is to be regarded as an art form shouldn't the artist(photographer) be allowed to express themselves? Are we only allowed to show what we saw and not what we felt?</p>

<p>Too many of these discussions take the form of film being pure and digital being totally fake. There are film darkroom techniques that would blow your mind.</p>

<p> </p>

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<p><<<<em>How much can I edit a picture before it turns into what a man in the thread I read before called "digital art"?</em>>>></p>

<p>A couple of things.</p>

<p>1) Your best bet would be to ask the man in question.</p>

<p>2) Many photos are not art, digital or otherwise. The word "art" gets tossed around a lot.</p>

<p>3) It's hard if not impossible to say definitively when a mole hill becomes a mountain. But that, of course, does not mean there aren't both mountains and mole hills and most of us manage to know the difference even if not being able to specify the exact moment when one becomes the other. Sometimes and in some contexts, distinctions can be helpful. They can be made without judgment. "Cheating" is a wrong-headed judgment in this case, IMO.</p>

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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<p>"the devil" and "the anti-Christ."</p>

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<p><em><strong>Vile</strong></em> attacks? A little hyper dramatic, I think.</p>

<p>I happen to have read a lot of Mortensen's articles in pre-war photomagazines, and his regularly expressed scorn for "straight" photography in criticism and in practice was his OWN undoing.</p>

<p>He was the one who set the tone for the "argument".</p>

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<p>Ann, referring to your OP and Hugo's image, I think the answer is that it is only the result that really counts. Regarding your example, I do not find it particularly convincing as a contrived image or as something representative of the title given to it.</p>

<p>I personally don't make any distinction between what I consider a poor digital construction or a poor "pure" photograph. Both are unconvincing. The same is true for excellent examples of either type. A creation can be convincing as art, or it can be quite unconvincing. It has little to do with the media employed or the methodology behind the creation.</p>

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<p>Photography was the first medium that made the promise (or implication) of veracity, or at least of a physical tie to the factual world. <br>

(snip)<br>

A photograph has an indexical relationship to its subject matter just as certainly as a footprint in a beach has an indexical relationship to the foot that made it.</p>

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<p>When you look at the footprint in the sand, can you tell what color the foot was? Can you tell how much hair was growing on the toes or how long the toenails were? </p>

<p>The foot makes an impression in the sand (literally and figuratively), but the impression is far from perfect. Much information is lost and left to the imagination.</p>

<p>A photograph is no more than an impression of reflected light, imperfect, incomplete, translated into two dimensions, distorted by lens and film/sensor characteristics, and subject to the characteristics of the source of light itself. There is only a trace of veracity in a photograph. The rest is a gaping void of contextual detail that the photographer can refill at the pleasure of their personal vision.</p>

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<p>And all this talk of "expresssing one's unique creative vision" and such is a load of tosh for the most part.</p>

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<p>That depends on where you look and since the internet has become a black hole photographic repository, the really good stuff (as in uniquely visionary and original) gets buried in the oblivion of the internet where mediocrity holds sway over everyone's divisive and divided attentions.</p>

<p>It's really getting hard to find something I haven't already seen before, but I know it's out there. I'll know it when I see it no matter how much the internet stiff arms me.</p>

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Whether it is "such a load of tosh" or nor, or whether "the internet has become a black hole" or not, is neither here nor there.<br>It's not about how sucessfull someone expresses "one's unique creative vision", but about the rather naive notion that using a medium to create something to look at is better than using another medium to do the same, because one would somehow be part of the thing it is used to represent in whatever is made using that medium, the other not.
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<p>When painters paint photorealistic paintings, do they become photographers? The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC currently has an exhibit of digital art -- some of which started out as digital photographs, but none of which would be mistaken for a photograph in the classic sense. I think digital photography has permanently blurred the line between photo and graphic.</p>
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<p>It's anti-creative and reflects more on personal issues than on the final works.</p>

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<p>From where do you derive "personal issues" from all this? Is this your own arm chair psychiatric analysis?</p>

<p>I don't understand what you mean by that just as I couldn't figure out what QG was saying especially when he quoted the often contrived and scribed term "neither here nor there". </p>

<p>It helps to talk plainly.</p>

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