Re: digital wonderings

Lisa has expressed exactly my apprehensions about what I read here daily
about the marriage of the digital with the pinhole. I began doing pinhole 12
years ago because I was already at that point disgusted with the critical
discourse that was then emerging as to how digital imagery would replace
film and what the inherent nature of the photographic art was, if indeed
there is such a thing as an 'inherent' nature of this process of image
making.
There seem to be multiple issues implicit within this discussion: the nature
of the recording matrix, film vs. hard drives & memory sticks, the medium of
display: paper vs. cathode ray tubes; the capture device: lenses vs pinhole;
as well as ink vs light sensitive salts, photons vs 0's & 1's, Pythagoreans
vs Neo-Platonists [well, maybe] alchemists vs. positivists.
While I understand entirely the allure that the digital choice offers, I've
never been able to shake the feeling that the prime reason for my doing
pinhole work was to restore the 'aura' to the photographic print that Walter
Benjamin says was lost to photography in his essay "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction" There is nothing about using digital media
that reinvests the print with that sense of the unique that chemical image
making allows, especially when one is involved with elaborate bleaching and
toning ‘post-processing’ of the print.
I feel that the fundamental difference between digital and wet photography
has more to do with our understanding of and complicity with time in the
art-making process more than the media of reproduction and that digital
manipulation of images further subverts a correspondence relationship
between an external world and what is presented as a photographic truth.
The conundrum to all of this discussion is that this dialogue/disagreement
would not be possible without our computers, networks, CRT’s or plasma
screens and software galore. It’s too darn hard to throw a ‘sabot’ into the
CD-ROM drive.
Peter
‘Down, Photoshop, down. BAD dogma!’

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Received on Tue Dec 10 13:03:03 2002