ku # 607 ~ the temptation

A marshy Summer thicket • click to embiggenAs of the year 1964, in his book, The History of Photography, Beaumont Newhall stated in the 4 pages about color photography (at the back of the book) that:

The greatest users of color film are amateurs: it is estimated that 40% of all snapshots are in color. To the commercial photographer color has long been indispensable ... [M]agazines are using more and more color editorially ... [S]urprisngly few photographers, however, have chosen color as a means of personal expression ...

Since that was written, color photography has, as is very evident, become the preferred medium of choice for personal expression. In fact, with yesterday's announced passing of Kodachrome film, color photography has since passed through one era of picture making into another. That is, of course, from film to digital.

Now, I should point out that I don't buy into the notion of the so-called digital revolution. Anyone who thinks or postulates that picture making has changed in any substantive manner with the advent of "digital" is most likely engaged in the business of selling of something "digital".

To be clear, that is not to say that digital tools have not revolutionized the means/tools employed in making pictures because, quite obviously, they have. But ... as just about anyone who is familiar with the history of the medium knows, when it comes to making pictures (with precious few exceptions - there were no electron scanning microscopes or Hubbell telescopes), just about anything that is being created today (in the realm of picture making as art) was being created within the first few decades of the birth of photography.

As an example, the Cinemascapist might be surprised to know that tableaux vivants were being made in droves as early as 1848 and many of those were made by combining several negatives to make a single print. One notable example of this technique - titled combination printing - was Oscar G. Rejlander's The Two Ways of Life (1857). Rejlander, a Swede, painstakingly combined 32 different negatives on a single print - interesting enough for the Cinemascapist, a print that was 31×16 inches.

The picture was entered into the Manchester Art Department Exhibition of 1857 where it was purchased by another amateur photographer, Queen Victoria. It was hailed by critics as "a magnificent picture, decidedly the finest photograph of its class ever produced."

It is also believed that Rejlander introduced Henry Peach Robinson to combination printing, the technique that he used to overcome the "limitations of photography". Robonson's picture, Fading Away (1858), was made from 5 negatives. That picture was not so favorably received by many critics of the day because the subject - dying and despair - were not considered to be suitable subjects for photography.

And, while we're on the subject of "the more things change, the more they remain the same", it should be noted that many thought that Fading Away was made on a single negative. When Robinson later revealed his technique of combination printing "at a meeting of the Photographic Society of Scotland, he was greeted with howls of protest from people who seemed to feel that they had been deceived. There was much discussion about what one correspondent referred to as "Patchwork", rather than composition".

Sound familiar, re: Photoshopping?

BTW, another early use of combination printing was the practice of adding clouds to an otherwise blank sky caused by the picturing methodology characteristics of the day.

All of that said, what I really wanted to note in this entry was another statement by Newhall from his short chapter on color:

The color photographer is faced with many esthetic problems ... [T]he temptation is to chose subjects which are themselves a blaze of color, and to ignore the fact that color is everywhere, and that it is not the colorful subject itself, but the photographer's handling of it,which is creative ... [B]y the nature of his medium, the photographer's vision must be rooted in reality; if he attempts to create his own world of color he faces a double dilemma: his results no longer have that unique quality we can only define as "photographic" ... and he cannot hope to rival the painter with the range of pigments he can place at will upon his canvas ... [O]n the other hand, the painter cannot hope to rival the accuracy, detail, and above all the authenticity of the photograph.

IMO, there it is, the same as it ever was - simply stated, the medium of photography can not be rivaled by any other of the visual arts when it comes to matters of "accuracy, detail, and above all authenticity. The truly "unique quality" of the medium is "rooted in reality".

IMO, those picture makers who choose to ignore or deny this reality regarding the medium's truly unique characteristics are like children playing with finger paints - their picturing results may often amuse or entertain, but they rarely, if ever, illustrate and illuminate anything that isn't obvious or already known.