I have been asked twice in the past few weeks to give my opinion on traditional vs. digital photo processes.  I find it interesting that this remains an argument in the photographic universe, and even more interesting that many people seem to take an either/or approach.

Digital photography is here to stay.  There are those of us who fought the dominance of cassettes over CDs, email over snail mail, and even questioned the necessity of high-speed internet when dial-up started to become obsolete.  Once an advance in technology comes down the line, it is impossible to roll it back, for better or worse.  Throughout history there are plenty of occasions when our ingenuity has led us down a not-so-nice road, but there is no “un-discovery,” only a need to consider carefully what we have made.

In a given body of work, the choice between film and digital can have a profound effect on the content and meaning of the photographs, a fact that often seems overlooked in the ideological debate of old versus new.  We need to make the choice consciously and intelligently, the same way we choose a film speed to attain a specific look and feel to our images.

This intelligent choice forms the crux of my view on the matter and brings out a critical issue presented by cheap digital technology.  The digital camera revolution, with more than a little help from the internet, has brought photography to the masses like never before. 

The difference between consumer film cameras and professional photographic ones has usually been clear.  The Pentax 35mm point and shoot that carried me through middle and high school took snapshots.  My finished film and prints came from the one-hour photo and I placed them into fuzzy, leopard-print albums for safekeeping.  The big SLR had many more moving parts and I developed those prints myself.  At that point I was taking photographs.

Cheap consumer digital cameras have opened the floodgates for free, unlimited high-resolution pictures.  Even digital SLRs are now within everyone’s reach.  When I was in Europe, the vast majority of American tourists I saw had dSLRs.  However, I doubt many of them were utilizing the full potential of their equipment simply because they were using them as glorified point and shoots, setting the camera on full auto and snapping away.

The key here is conscious choice.  If I photograph the ruins of Bethlehem steel with really fast, really grainy black and white film, I alter the content of that work when I go back and shoot the scene at ISO 100.  Likewise, digital photographs provide a different process and a different feel.  The fact that black and white prints are made by hand and digital prints are computer- and machine-generated is significant.

Digital photography as a professional tool presents us with some responsibility.  Knowing and experiencing both processes is essential to developing a full mastery of the medium.  Choosing one over the other should be something every photographer can explain.  When using a digital SLR, I find it necessary to use all manual controls to achieve the image I want.  This is important. 

Creating truly great photographs should still require us to stop and consider the scene, adjust the aperture, shutter speed, and focus, and carefully frame the shot.  We should still look at the light meter.  Photography hasn’t changed that much.  It is still about a lot of exploration and intelligent choices with some happy accidents mixed in, all of which should be made by our own hand.  Digital has a lot of tempting shortcuts, but we must learn all the techniques of the medium if we want to mature as image-makers.  Otherwise we are just taking very pretty snapshots.

Note: Now that wedding, honeymoon, and moving have all been successfully completed, Words + Images will once again be updated weekly.

Somehow, despite a heat wave and a house full of boxes waiting to be unpacked, I managed to get to the BMA on the last day of Looking Through the Lens, an exhibition of iconic photography from 1900-1960.

A few local bloggers have already reviewed the show, which spanned four large rooms and certainly showcased the breadth of the BMA's photography collection if not their curatorial distinction. However, on the day of my visit I didn't examine the overall energy of the show, nor did I take particular interest in how the pieces communicated with each other on the walls. Blessed with only a few hours to spend with the work, I devoured the work piece by piece, notebook in hand, taking in as many images as I could before the exhibition closed.

It had been about a year since my last opportunity to enjoy art alone in a gallery setting like this. When I haven't been looking at work that interests me on a regular basis, I forget so easily the wealth of ideas and inspiration it can bring.

I won't discuss all my notes at once, but I do want to talk briefly this evening about the artist's hand. Art observers will most commonly refer to “seeing the artist's hand” in a piece of art actually made by hand. A painting or a sculpture, for example, can retain brush strokes or chisel marks to remind the viewer of the hands that created it. When we look at photographs, we likely judge them based on more scientific properties: depth of field, tonal range, composition, subject, or content. In my own work, seeing the process, the evidence of the artist's hand in a photograph, often distracts from true enjoyment of the piece.

The Raoul Ubac montage in Looking Through the Lens fascinated me, perhaps for this reason. The untitled piece featured an interesting study of a woman's face and a glass bottle. Though it looked very clean from afar, that illusion faded when I approached it for further inspection. Along the edges of the photos I saw dents and uneven cuts where the x-acto knife had wandered slightly. I saw where the man had cut the photographs with a tool.

This sight brought to mind my own late nights in the darkroom as an undergrad, utility knife in hand, working at a table cross-hatched with decades of stray x-acto marks. Though I don't always display it in the final project, I can't deny the tactile nature of traditional photo processes. Looking at work that retained some of that hands-on experience placed me squarely in the studio with the photographer, and the surreal imagery brought to mind the fragmented, incomplete images of my own thoughts. I could write a paper on traditional vs. modern photo practices, but for now I will just say I am unsure whether I would have had such a well-rounded experience with the photos had the piece been done in Photoshop.

The photo book by Charles Norman Sladen really stole the show for me, though. I scribbled down notes and gleaned a lot of ideas from the all the big names at the show, but Sladen's book Great Chebeague Island, Maine really took my breath away.

Surprisingly, we know very little about Sladen, save for the fact that he chronicled his family's travels to Great Chebeague Island in these unique and very striking photo books. Sladen pasted five or so pictures, generously spaced, onto the page and extended/embellished them with extremely intricate and talented ink drawings. The photos become only the starting point for a larger scene and Sladen weaves them together like an elaborate dream, all five connected by ink on the page.

Sadly, I have been unable to find images of Sladen's work online, and most references I found were responding to the BMA show. I would love to find a reproduction of the book I saw, but doubt such a thing exists.

I'm sure Looking Through the Lens will come up again in Words + Images. The argument can certainly be made that it lacked cohesion and focus, but the broad sampling of styles, content, and ideas also provided fertile ground for the mind to wander.

Until next week...