Curmudgeon wrote:
Being old and not sleeping as well as I used to, I woke up about 4AM a couple mornings ago with this simple thought running through my mind: The trouble with digital photography is there is no analog output.
No, stop, wait a minute! Before you go off on a rant, let me set the ground rules. This post is aimed a specific group: Over 65 years of age, grew up with parents, grandparents and if you were lucky great grandparents, owned a box camera of some kind and worked up from there, you took snapshots because that's what you did with a Brownie Hawkeye, your parents took snapshots with a Brownie Junior Six-20 or equivalent.
Now, it is holiday season 1954. The family gets together for a three generation dinner. After dinner everyone is in a mellow mood, a little wine, a drink or two for the adults and a sugar buzz for the kids. The oldsters start to tell stories about the good old days and suddenly grandma's eyes light up and she leaves the room. Two minutes later she's back with a stack of photo albums, grandpa is right behind with his arms full of shoe boxes, it's picture time. Ten minutes later there are pictures and photo albums scattered all over the room. The stories are more animated now, more wine. The kids who are still up start to learn what it was really like in the "Good old days".
Now we fast forward to 1963. Great grand parents are gone now and parents host the annual family dinner. Same scenario. Drinks, wine and dinner albums and shoe boxes come out again and we watch another generation grow up. This time though some of the pictures are Polaroid. Still everything is a snapshot.
Fast forward again 2018 we are the grand parents, maybe great grand parents. If we are lucky we still have the family dinner, we have too many drinks and too much wine. After dinner we sit around with our family and the topic drifts to the "Good old days". Suddenly my wife's eyes light up and she disappears down the hall and returns a few minutes later with a lap top computer and a stack of SD cards.
Probably just an old man's nostalgia but it doesn't seem to project the same warm feelings as passing pictures around and trying to remember where and when they were taken and telling stories about what the mean and not what they show.
That's what I mean about no analog output. There is something important being lost. To me, reading a book is preferable to reading a book on an electronic device. I hold a picture in my hand, the paper is stiff and crinkly, the picture is probably a little faded and brown but it is somehow more real than an image on a screen. The very fact of holding it makes the memory more real somehow. Again all of this could be the fantasy of a nostalgic old Curmudgeon, but...
Being old and not sleeping as well as I used to, I... (
show quote)
Kodak folders: No. 2C Autographic Jr, Senior Six-16, Retina IIIc
Kodak box: Brownie Hawkeye (because it's cute)
Here comes the rant...
You are absolutely correct. Most people who capture images no longer make prints.
"Photograph" used to mean something tangible, now it means a bucket of bits.
Thank heaven everyone owns 17" high resolution monitors and the hardware required
to color calibrate them! They do, right? Ut-oh...
Fortunately, you won't have to worry about that laptop for long--it will die and so will
fhe SD cards within a couple of years. And so, probably, will the images.
The first computer I used was a Burroughs 5500 mainframe. I've been using computers
ever since and I've observed this: all digital data eventually goes *Poof!* and disappears.
I have boxes full of media that either is no longer readable, or for which a drive is no
longer made. Repeated migration to new media is fine until something goes wrong.
Backup and restore is fine until something goes wrong.
History shows what is truly permanent. If you want something to last, carve it on the
inside of a pyramid.
The pyramid text of Unas is perfectly readable after
4,300 years. But we also have silver prints from the Civil War that look great (especially
the "sepia" sulfide-toned ones).
Photographs used to look like the attached. Now they're mostly slick things in garish color,
with limited resolution and depth-of-field. But wer're assured that the gadgets that take them
and print them are really high tech. They work so well, we have to keep replacing them
every couple of years. (But hey, that's good for corporate profits and executive bonuses.
Thanks, guys!)
And who could fail to love a computer printer. What's not to love about a paper jam?
Or a plugged inkjet head? Of course, everybody here can repair their own ink jet or
laser printer, or even build one. They all undrstand how the firmware works....and all
about page description languages and bit-mapped graphics....
Joe Consumer (and his Uncle Bob) are the kings of photography, these days. They decide
what gets built. . Professional photographers have mostly gone out of business and
so have camera stores and labs. The last fine art photographer has just been stuffed as an
exhibit in the Smithsonian Insitution
Consumers don't produce--they consume. They aren't in control--the marketers are.
Nobody just woke up one morning and said, "I think I'll have a glass of caramel-colored
carbonated sugar water!" You can thank Coca-Cola Company for that wonderful innovation.
(And dang, they took the cocaine out of it!)
Photography is no longer about looking at photographs, it's about the fun of taking them
(preferably with a "selfie stick").
Last year, film director (and Polaroid still photographer) Wim Wenders was looking for a term
for "that activity which looks like photography but isn't." I suggested "fauxtogtraphy".
Welcome, fauxtographers (and you few poor souls who struggle to make decent sized prints
out of these low res, heavily processed image files). Who needs resolution when you can
just run "sharpen"? Increase color saturation and everything looks like a sunset--how wonderful!
Welcome to Oz, Inc.
Eastman Kodak made many poor cameras, but they were inexpensive and reliable. Kodak never
lied or misled anyone. And its lab research and technical documentation were excellent. Besides
which, Geroge Eastman started as a professional photographer.
And I still shoot that Retina IIIc folder fairly often.
Carleton Watkins, "Cape Horn, Columbia River", 1867 (this is just a digital scan -- the original is even better).