I think there are important aesthetic distinctions to be made among various methods of doing photographs particularly between analog and digital. Again, it doesn't mean one is better than the other.
The quagmire I see is defining those distinctions. Where do things really change? I've seen some traditional prints have been worked into a place that disconnects from what many people think of as photography (see, for example, Josephine Sacabo's images in the recent reprint of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo.) I've seen "alternative process" prints that look like watercolors. But I've seen digital prints that look far closer to "reality," or maybe just "traditional", that have been manipulated with additions and subtractions of elements. So the line drawing seems very difficult and indistinct.
I've digitally altered a lot of my images recently. Some could have easily been done with traditional methods. For example, this image - http://www.spirer.com/images/chinamkt.jpg - could easily have been made with Tri-X and high contrast printing in the darkroom in a style used by a photographer like Moriyama. But it started out like this - http://www.spirer.com/images/chinamktorig.jpg - from a digital camera. Is this "digital"? I've been asked what film I used... As a different example, here is something which involved multiple images - http://www.spirer.com/tubring/images/tub3.jpg. A lot of people probably wouldn't notice, but the person in the "photo" on the wall is the same person on the keyboard, taken in the same show. A completely impossible photo, except - it could have been done by putting a photo of him on the wall. (I've used my own images as examples because I know how they were made, but there are plenty of examples out there.)
We end up with such a wide variety of methods of creating an image, of varying degrees of "reality," that it seems impossible to put working labels on anything except the medium, e.g., inkjet print or silver fibre print. It's reminiscent of digital recording, where the recording industry came up with silly three letter labels for the recording process, such as ADD and AAD to indicate recording, mixing and mastering. Of course nobody pays any attention to the labels and, as far as I can tell, they have mostly disappeared because people just care about the music and not how it was made. I predict that the same thing will happen over time with photography, and we will just look at what's in front of us without the designations for methodology and tools.
Jeff Spirer
Photos: http://www.spirer.com
One People: http://www.onepeople.com/
Surfaces and Marks: http://www.withoutgrass.com
