19 Jan
2012

The Death of Photography

Eastman Kodak Co., which for 130 years has been a pioneer in camera and film technology, which brought the world the handheld camera and inspired a hit song by Paul Simon, has recently filed for bankruptcy protection. Kodak’s current struggles are indelibly linked to the ascendancy of digital cameras and the virtual disappearance of film in the past few years. The popular refrain “mama don’t take my Kodachrome away” is now answered with “what the heck is Kodachrome?” The demise of film has been but a prelude to something we are now witnessing in its final throes: the death of photography.

Okay, I am being a bit melodramatic here. What I really mean is the death of photography as most of us have known it. For the past century, photography has been dominated by film generally, and for most professional and many amateur users since the introduction of Kodachrome in 1935, color slide film specifically. In recent decades, nature photography in particular has been virtually the exclusive domain of color slide film users until the past six or seven years. During this time, black and white and even color print film had their place among nature photographers, but there is little doubt that chrome reigned supreme.

Now, of course, all this has changed. Digital dethroned chrome, and sent film the way of the dinosaurs. Indeed, there are few photographers who still cling to the analog age, and I suspect that even the die-hards would admit that it is getting increasingly difficult to procure film and processing services. After all, it is not just Kodak that has struggled to survive in this turbulent digital revolution—many camera stores and film processing labs have also been swept aside by the digital tide. Film may continue to survive for a long time as a niche product, but it is clear that its day in the sun has passed.

My feelings about digital photography are somewhat mixed. On the one hand, I whole-heartedly embrace the quality, ease of use, and flexibility of digital cameras. And I enjoy the creative control that digital processing techniques give us. On the other hand, I cannot help but miss, for lack of a better way of putting it, the artistic “purity” of the slide film days. Then, there was no “post processing” or “digital manipulation”—granted, slide film added a fair amount of contrast and color saturation that was not exactly as the eye saw things—but what you did before you triggered the shutter determined how the final image looked, and the slide itself was most often the final product marketed to editorial and publishing clients. It was a golden age when photography was photography, men were men, and the sheep were scared.

Today, in the digital age, it seems that photography is increasingly becoming a mixed media art—some part photography, some part “digital art”—in some cases, the equation is heavily skewed towards the latter. Call it what you like—“computer art,” “digital art,” “digital painting,” or something else entirely—the point I am trying to get across is that these days, it seems that many of the artistic decisions about a photograph are being made on the computer after the fact, rather than before the shutter button is pressed. This often goes way beyond merely increasing color saturation and manipulating contrast; some photographers are using the computer to swap skies, warp compositional elements, change colors, and add and subtract significant elements of the photo.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not altogether opposed to this evolving approach (although I must admit I’m not completely thrilled by it either). I believe that artists should have the freedom to express themselves in any way they wish. I am a bit uncomfortable, however, with the fact that many who have privately embraced a limitless mixed media approach publicly deny doing so, claiming photographic purity instead. A notable recent example involves the scandal surrounding the Swedish Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. I say “notable,” rather than “extreme,” because I suspect this sort of thing has become much more commonplace than most of us would care to admit.

Why all the obfuscation? I argue in a post on the Outdoor Photographer blog (The Power of Photography) that for better or for worse, most people seem to associate photography with reality. I suspect this is why some photographers intentionally obscure their sometimes heavy-handed computer manipulation: they know that for many people, discovering that a photograph is not “real” causes them to lose interest. The average viewer seems to prefer that a photo’s magic be captured as part of the photographic process—selecting a composition, waiting for the right moment and light, and triggering the shutter—rather than something cooked up in Photoshop.

I have also noticed a lot of effort in recent years to dismiss the notion that there is anything un-photographic about digital manipulation. The arguments typically get fairly convoluted, and involve several themes including (1) a denial that there is any objective reality; (2) the notion that somehow portraying reality cannot be art; (3) that art is inherently a manipulation of reality so therefore any attempt to portray reality is in and of itself a lie; and (4) darkroom manipulation has had a long tradition in nature photography, so therefore digital manipulation is an acceptable part of the photographic process. This last argument seems to gloss over the fact that most professional nature photographers over the past forty years were color slide film shooters, many of whom never saw the inside of a darkroom.

I’ve always found these “pro-manipulation” arguments unconvincing, not because I am opposed to digital manipulation, but chiefly because these arguments strike me as a “have your cake and eat it too” approach, justifying doing anything you want to a photograph on the computer but nonetheless claiming it is still a photograph. It is far more elegant, and likely more honest, to simply admit one’s mixed media approach and avoid drafting several pages of excuses for it. Frankly, I don’t understand the desire to obscure or rationalize one’s artistic process—one should proudly shout it to the heavens.

I’m not saying that digital manipulation—or for that matter, even lying about it—is necessarily bad, unethical, or immoral. I just think we need to be sober in our assessment of how the medium of photography is changing these days. Digital processing techniques are a good thing—in fact, they are necessary, especially when working with raw files, as one needs to add contrast and saturation to make digital files look good. And I embrace exposure blending techniques, which allow us to show the world more as the eye would actually see it, and other creative tools such as white balance selection. But as soon as we open a digital photograph in an image editing program and begin to make changes, we have entered into the vast sea of digital art—even if we only stick our big toe in the water rather than plunging right in. Each and every one of us must decide how far we wish to traverse the continuum between photography and digital art. Personally, I prefer to keep my craft rooted in the photographic process as much as possible, but on occasion I cross over, and I try to keep an open mind about things and to adjust with the changing attitudes of the times. What you do, of course, is up to you.

So, photography as we have known it is now dead, and in its ashes a new photography has been reborn. With it will come a whole new way of thinking about photography, and I have no doubt that in a few years the “mixed-media” framework I proffer here will be regarded as quaint and obsolete. Although I embrace the new, I can’t help but lament the passing of the old. We have exciting and challenging times ahead of us, but there’s no harm in looking back and waxing nostalgic about the past. Good luck Kodak—you’re going to need it.

"Leaf in Ice" - Shenandoah National Park (shot using Kodak VS color slide film)

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About Ian Plant (275 Posts)

Ian Plant's photographs and instructional articles have appeared in a number of books, calendars, and magazines, including Outdoor Photographer and Popular Photography. Ian writes a regular blog column for Outdoor Photographer online, and he is the author of numerous instructional eBooks and digital processing tutorials. Ian leads several photo tours each year.

Tags: digital, film, photography

18 Comments

Paul McConville January 19, 2012 at 4:54 pm

Well said, Ian. My feelings exactly!
You’ve articulated it perfectly.
Looking forward to more of your work!
- Ian Plant January 19, 2012 at 5:08 pm
  
  Thanks Paul for the kind words and for chiming in!
Daniel Ruf January 19, 2012 at 5:34 pm

A great article and interesting point of view…but, if a digital photographer that “digitally manipulated” their work was a painter, this discussion wouldn’t even be a talking point. People would never ever ask a “traditional” artist “is it real?”.
Ian Plant January 19, 2012 at 6:31 pm

Daniel, you are completely correct. Painters don’t ever seem to get the “is it real” question – nor, I suspect, do black and white photographers get the question that often. Color photography seems, in the minds of many people, to be associated with reality. Thanks for joining the discussion!
Bill Bean January 19, 2012 at 11:35 pm

Some fascinating points in an ongoing debate. Mostly this post made me a bit maudlin about Kodak and their problems. I haven’t exposed a frame of film in years since going digital in 2005 but I can’t help but think I’ll miss the smell of D-76 and Dektol. Thanks for the nostalgia, Ian.
Patrik Björk Larsson January 20, 2012 at 2:33 am

Very well written Ian and i totally agree. The problem I see this days is that we as photographers now whats going on behind the screen but the viewer is still in the kodachrome days.
Kurt Budliger January 20, 2012 at 10:22 am

As usual you’ve done a great job clearly articulating some excellent points. I miss my light table, my schneider loupe, my cute little canisters for storing various sundries (some of which shall remain nameless), the thrill of unpacking a fresh box of slides and taking the first peek held up to the kitchen window, but most of all I miss shooting without thinking of how I will process the image once I’m back in the office.

One question though; how did you accomplish the depth of field blending on the included shot? Luminosity masks? Channels? Bohemian Rhapsody?
- Ian Plant January 20, 2012 at 10:28 am
  
  Kurt, sometime I swear you are my brother from another mother. We’re essentially the same person. True, you’re taller, skinnier, better looking, funnier, and smarter, but other than that we are exactly alike.
Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images January 20, 2012 at 12:01 pm

Great write up, Ian. Very nicely addressed

Two quick points; photo manipulation is almost as old as the art form itself, technology has just moved the ‘science’ of it from hands of the professional to the hands of everyone.

You know what I miss? I miss the good old days of wet glass plate photography. It’s like… nobody takes their horse-drawn buggy out to the roadless wilderness, carrying gallons of toxic chemicals in big glass jugs anymore. ‘Sup w/ that?

It’s sad to see somethings go. Kodak Failed to adapt as a business. Fuji is still out there. But the process is fading away. Remember Dye Transfer? Best quality prints out there, ever. But alas, no more.
- Ian Plant January 20, 2012 at 12:45 pm
  
  Hey Gary, always good to hear from you. True, photo manipulation is as old as the art form itself, but there can be little doubt that in today’s digital world the scope and scale of it has increased exponentially. It is now far easier to do far more than ever before. Also, I remain unconvinced that photo manipulation, in the past, was a significant factor in nature photography, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. People always mention Ansel and his darkroom manipulation, but he was shooting black & white, and a lot of the “manipulation” had to do with the challenge of separating tonal values in a monochromatic medium. For example, a red leaf and a green leaf look the same in black & white, so one had to use darkroom manipulation to get them to appear as different shades of gray. Personally, I never look at Ansel’s work and think to myself: “wow, this looks like total BS.” Rather, it seems very natural and realistic to me (setting aside, of course, the fact that B&W is by its very nature unrealistic). But looking past Ansel, in the past four or five decades before the rise of the digital age, nature photography was dominated by slide film users, and the slide was the final product marketed by most pros to their clients. There were, of course, some people shooting nature with b&w and print film in those days, but it was a relatively small group – the vast majority of nature shooters were using chrome and there was no “post processing.” Sure, there were things like push and pull processing and slide sandwiching going on, but this was essentially at the margins. By and large, what you did before you triggered the shutter was what determined the final look of your photos. Of course, back then, most “photo maniupulation” took the form of things you do before you trigger the shutter, such as filter use. But filter use can hardly be compared to the kinds of manipulation you can now do on your computer.
  
  I’m not saying one approach is wrong or right. I’m just saying that times have certainly changed.
  - Kelly January 30, 2012 at 2:14 pm
    
    I hear people compare photoshopping to darkroom manipulation quite a bit – almost always by people who have spent very little time in a darkroom other than perhaps a class or two in school.
    
    Today, what takes seconds and is ‘easy’ in photoshop might have taken hours or days to replicate in the darkroom – if even feasible. Regardless, the quality of the original image used to largely dictate final results and I don’t think we can say the same anymore, by and large. Just my opinion of course.
    
    Loved your post. Thank you.
Yardstick January 20, 2012 at 1:12 pm

Hi Ian, your posting here reminded me of a conversation I had with an exhibitor at an art fair. This guy’s photography had all the look of classic photoshop manipulation. It was saturated. It was contrasty. His prints were very nice. He claimed to shoot digitally. He claimed to shoot RAW. He claimed he did no post-processing. My BS meter went up several notches, but I said nothing. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t care one way or the other. He may have been telling the truth. I think your point about reality in color photography is on the mark. People buying art as photography want to believe the print they’re buying is real and this guy was simply telling buyers what they wanted to hear, true or not.
Steve M January 20, 2012 at 1:34 pm

I do agree with what you have said here. I would like to further examine one point you make when you say, “…most professional nature photographers over the past forty years were color slide film shooters, many of whom never saw the inside of a darkroom.”

One of the problems I see in the explosion of digital photographers, is the elimination of the process of self-editing which took place in the days before we emerged from the darkroom. Back when we did our own processing, we had to pour over contact sheets and choose those negatives we thought would be worth the time and effort to spend on the enlarger and tray line. I can remember many times paring several rolls of film down to two or three enlargements I was proud to show to my editor.

I certainly don’t accuse the professional photographers of whom you speak of any excesses. I’m sure they spent hours with a light table and loupe, making the choices to submit to their art editors. But when photo enthusiasts started using slide film it was the beginning of a slippery slope.

I can remember sitting through excruciating, multi-hour slide shows presented by my father and our neighbors of their latest vacation. Not only did we get to see that great picture they took of Whatchamacallit Falls, we also got to see the 15 not so great pictures of the falls.

Digital has just exacerbated this glut. The boring slide shows of my youth were at least limited by the cost of file and processing. Now instead of the 16 shots of Whatchamacallit Falls, we find all 65 images that were captured proudly displayed on the “photographer’s” Flickr page.

The computers inside our modern cameras has virtually eliminated the need to learn the technical elements of photography. So with the time saved there, everyone who would like to call themselves a photographer should at least endeavor to learn to be selective about what they share with the rest of the world.
QT Luong January 20, 2012 at 3:09 pm

Ian, you make excellent points, and as someone who has worked extensively on positive film (and still continues to do so occasionally), I couldn’t have said it better.

However, arguing about the name of the practice, be it photography or digital art, strikes me as being just about semantics, which isn’t very useful. In fact, these days, many photographers would rather call themselves artists, maybe because everybody is a photographer.
- Ian Plant January 20, 2012 at 4:18 pm
  
  Thanks QT, always nice to see your name pop up. You make an interesting point, though it seems to me that “artist” is a rather broad term – it encompasses those who paint, play music, write literature, sculpt, photograph, and many other things. Personally, I think that anyone who engages in a creative process can lay claim to the word. “Photography,” “painting,” “digital art,” “shadow sculpture,” “performance art,” etc. all simply describe the type of art people make. There’s nothing wrong with people describing what they do, and defining themselves as a certain type of artist (or even defining themselves as a mixed media artist, as many artists do). It’s not semantics in my opinion, but rather a description of the path an artist chooses to take. We may all be artists but we are not all painters, photographers, mimes, fire dancers, or whatever it is we do. I certainly wouldn’t call a painter a guitarist (unless, of course, he or she also plays guitar), even though I might call both painters and guitarists artists. I guess I just believe in calling a spade a spade, that’s all.
  
  Maybe it is just an exercise in semantics, but then again, there are some real world implications, including the example of the Swedish photographer I mentioned in the post. He passed something off as something it wasn’t, and got into trouble for it. Although I don’t necessarily disagree with you, whether we like it or not these definitions do matter to many photography viewers and clients – and I suspect many of them would view opting to use the term “artist” rather than “photographer” as an exercise in semantics itself. For example, I doubt one could convince National Geographic to publish a photograph that has been significantly digitally manipulated simply by telling them that it is “art” and not “photography,” and that therefore it doesn’t matter.
  
  Thanks as always for your thoughtful comments!
nate parker January 21, 2012 at 7:41 am

I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.
Peter January 24, 2012 at 2:33 pm

You know what really sets me off? All these young gentlemen going out and tracing landscapes from camera obscura rather than taking the time needed to learn the art of drawing. And now I keep hearing about all these people worshiping images made in silver emulsion on glass plates. It’s the death of painting! Is there no reverence for skill and practice anymore?

It really is true that the more things change, the more they stay the same!
Dropping the A-Bomb | Dreamscapes Team February 6, 2012 at 8:45 am

[...] of the word photographer. In some cases, it may be the result of an honest public embrace of a mixed-media photography/computer art approach. Or maybe it is an attempt to stave off perceived or real anti-photography prejudice from art [...]

The Death of Photography

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