photoroy6@xxxxxxx wrote:
I think what I was trying to say is that it is feasible to create a reproduction of what is out in the world that accurately represents the colors. It might be a 2D representation or a 3D representation as Prokudin-Gorsky did all the way back in the early 1900s. I see his work as holding up well as art today even though he viewed his objective as recording many parts of Russia at a time when few people had traveled so extensively in that country. Often when I look at photographs in National Geographic they seem as valid as art or science but perhaps others might not view them that way. I have seen those composites of multiple photos to create a sense of depth of field that would be difficult to create in other ways. They are very interesting to look at. It is interesting to speculate about what "realities" exist as capabilities of our physiology and what "realities" exist as social or taught ones. When I was in Vietnam as a combat photographer I had an interesting experience. I had learned a small vocabulary of Bahnar Dega words and was able to photograph in Bahnar villages because I could speak a tiny bit of the language. At the time we called these people Montagnards but Dega is the accepted term today. We used to take them B&W prints of the pictures we took of them a week or so after we had photographed and these were hugely popular. They were people only beginning to use metal and undoubtedly none had ever seen themselves in a mirror except perhaps then our jeep mirrors. One day we had the idea to take a color Polaroid camera and surprise them with instant color pictures. To our amazement they considered these to be vastly inferior ... nearly worthless. It was not an issue of print size because we had been taking 4x5 and 8x10 B&W prints and they loved them all. I am fairly certain that many of these villages had never seen a photo before and especially of themselves. In our minds color prints were a superior choice that we were offering them but to them B&W prints were more special. In a sense maybe we are moving in that direction ourselves with B&W or abstract color being valued more as art than the accurate color that Prokudin-Gorsky and other early photographers strove so hard to recreate. I guess it is science or technology that invades artistic turf? What a treat it was to get to know those people and their ways. I knew the war was foolish and that we would lose it by the middle of the first year in 1968 but stayed a second tour because the country was so fascinating and I wanted to photograph more of it ... and get out of the Army early. How horrible it is that the US exploited the Dega and left them to suffer the consequences of fighting along with us in that foolish war. I wish we would get out of these foolish wars today and learn to be a peaceful nation. We have chosen not to have TV the past 4 years because it seems such a blatant distorter of reality, or at least to get used that way for economic purposes often to the exclusion of art and science. When we stay in a motel it is disturbing how easily we get re-addicted though. It seems to me that TV offers a form of selectable reality reinforcement that is quite dangerous, making it impossible for so many to accept the reality of something like Global Warming or war. I think it would be a treat to live the reality of people in Prokudin-Gorsky's photos or of Bahnar people before the First Indochina war ... at least for a month or two. Ed |
