I am absolutely not interested in discussions of the supposed merits of digital versus film or vice versa. This kind of discourse brings to mind the photography versus painting discussions of the past. However, for my own purposes, I have to come to an understanding of what film and digital photography mean to me and how I have to react in my work to the existence of both. I grew up in a film world. When I bought my first digital camera, a Sony Cybershot, I quickly came to the conclusion that now any idiot could take technically excellent photos.
I realize that this is a ‘bumper sticker’ sentiment. However, I feel it does contain a lot of ‘truth.’ Thinking about the film and digital issue for a while, and working in both media, I came to the conclusion that we have not even begun to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the impact of digital photography.Most importantly, it is not an issue of one against the other. They are really ‘apples and oranges;’ actually not even that, because those two are more closely related..
Film photography takes its characteristics, its end result – the print, from the physics and chemistry of its components. These components can vary a great deal: from the pinhole to the Zeiss lens and from the Daguerreotype to the Polaroid print. However, the result is still going to be an image on a surface. Not so with digital. Digital photography is a construct engineered to mimic [at present] a film photo image. Instead of resulting in a print, the output from a digital camera could just as easily be presented as a mixture of sounds, or laser formed objects, or numbers, or random colors, or written or spoken words; anything that a programmer could dream up.
Right now, among black & white photographers, one of the hot button discussions is which combination of digital hardware and software, combined with which inkjet paper will give them the print most closely resembling the most perfect print which the most perfect printer could produce from the most perfect negative, using the world’s best chemistry and fiber paper.
My feeling is that as the numbers shift more, and only an extremely tiny fraction of even ‘art photographers’ will know what a silver gelatin print looks like, and more importantly, how to make one, this debate will become mute. Photographers will cease being interested in trying to mimic an antique process, and become much more interested in having equipment and materials that will push the technical envelope, and respond more fully to their creative vision. Simply stated, the digital photograph will become something that we presently don’t even have.
My question remains: ‘where is my photography going’ now that, other things being equal, I can – most of the time – get a technically better print with an inexpensive, digital camera, printed on my Epson 2400, than what I can produce in my darkroom?
