Dec. 2001
President's
Message
Article - "Is Digital Imaging Photography?"
Is Digital Imaging Photography?
- Bill Talarowski
As many of you have noticed, I have made the switch to digital imaging in pursuit of my imaging needs. I no longer follow the time-honored way of standing for hours looking over a tray of solution checking the proper time, and removing the print from the tray.
Since my conversion four years ago, I have been asked many times, "is that really photography"? The sides have been split amongst us members and others, and neither side seems to be giving in to the other.
To me, an image is an image and it matters not one bit how it was obtained. Whether it was obtained via the traditional camera equipment or out of the more modern computer, it is still an image.
In 1412, in the Duomo in Florence, Italy, Renaissance architect/painter Brunelleschi used a mirror to project a reflected image of the Baptistery onto a panel and used this as a guide for painting his picture "Perspective". That was 590 years ago and experts regard this as the first camera and photograph.
Cameras can be fashioned in many ways. It can be either a tiny pin hole, a hole with a lens, a hole with a mirror, or in a computer hard drive, but all need a dark place to develop the embryo and what’s darker than a hard drive?
It follows then that
when Brunelleschi worked in the dark cathedral, while looking out into
the light, the dark cathedral and the mirror became the first camera.
"Camera" just means, "room" in Italian. The term "Camera
Obscura" just means "dark room".
During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s photographers went to
all matter and means to give their photographic endeavors the "Painterly"
look, trying to mimic in some fashion the look of painting.
Since that time, all kinds of filters have been manufactured. Techniques such as shooting through textured and rippled glass, sandwiching of two or more images with duplication, color copiers and, yes, even Polaroids with manipulation of the prints while developing have been tried. All efforts were aimed at the image looking like a painting.
The invention of photography as we know it, was the invention of chemicals to fix an image already seen. That thinking has lasted for 160 years, but the computer is forcing us to look at things very differently. With the computer, the photograph begins to lose veracity.
Time was when you
saw something in a photograph, you assumed that at one particular point
in time and space these objects looked like what was in the photograph.
Now, that’s not necessarily the case, and the photograph, with the
help of the computer with all its capabilities has moved back towards
drawing and painting.
In the final analysis, isn’t the creativity and thought portrayed
in the image the important point of the image and not how it was obtained?
Photography really comes out of painting. It’s a child of painting,
and it’s going back to it now.