At 06:22 AM 2/10/2004, wildimages@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:. But that remains now only a personal interest: digital has made everyone cynical. Veracity - what's that? Who gives a damn.
I don't think this is a digital issue, it's a photography issue.
I'm reminded of an article I read about seven or eight years ago about how children were getting hurt by caged animals because they got too close. The reason, after some investigation, for their lack of fear of wild animals was the use of tame animals in wild animal photography parks and with telephoto lenses that showed closeups of wild animals looking "cute." So much for veracity.
I've used the properties of color film for years to completely warp the colors of my images. Few of them bear any resemblance to the colors that were originally there. I've edited scenes when I frame to create things that didn't happen. I've occasionally used models in street scenes to create events. All of these happen with film. I've used slow shutter speeds, camera shake, and depth of field effects to remove the sense of showing the world "as it looked to the eye." I can do this now with Photoshop, but regardless of the technique, the results don't bear resemblance to "reality."
In the end, the only veracity rests with the photographer, not with the medium, and it's always been that way.
Jeff Spirer Photos: http://www.spirer.com One People: http://www.onepeople.com/ Surfaces and Marks: http://www.withoutgrass.com
Jeff,
I see a difference - my work is often about cultural assumptions we have about photographs. It is about their ability to be a reliable witness.
We understand all pictures through the lens of our time and culture. Pictures all have some latent content that changes with time. They must be thought of as re-mixes. I wonder how much different in this respect (if at all) the material record in film is from the invented picture? Or is it just the artifactness of film that intrigues us and gives it more veracity (deserved or not)?. In academic lingo they would say film is "privileged". Like a hand-print in clay, film is a direct material connection with its subject. Nothing (no human subjectivity) intervenes. I'm saying that the viewer must be reminded of this as it may fade from the collective consciousness.
The digitality ( should that be its name instead of photograph?) contains infinite possibilities for revision and therefore has to be assumed to be entirely fictive. By that measure it falls into the same class as painting or drawing, etc.
The latencies in the film must be different than those in other pictures. Invented art is subtractive. Film contains a lot of information that could not be hidden or altered. It seems to me that that is important in the re-mix.
AZ
