Film + Flash

Sunday, June 13th, 2010 - Nicholas Calcott


Image courtesy of Mus-Mus

I received a new call for submissions from mus-mus, which I’m happy to pass on:

Team mus-mus is looking for your help with an archive that will let us all see film and flash products that we’re bidding au revoir, leaving behind, or perhaps still clinging desperately to. Since George Eastman first invented an emulsion coating machine to mass-produce photographic dry plates in 1879, commercially available photography technology has been a sustaining feature of the photographer’s practice. As old technologies are increasingly falling away and sometimes re-emerging in new ‘skins’, it will be interesting to take a collective worldwide snapshot of what’s on hand in studios (and maybe flea markets) now that are gone from stores or will be tomorrow.

See details and submit here.  I have too many things to submit…

Thoughts?

Thursday, February 4th, 2010 - Nicholas Calcott

I just had a conversation with an aunt who used to own a consumer photography store – her business died with the rise of digital cameras, but she mentioned that some of her employees had entirely changed their focus from photography to film…

Perhaps the rise of the 5d and 7d cameras that also do hi-res film marks a turning point in the industry…  The lines have been blurred between photography and film, allowing people like me to work in a medium that previously required tons of additional equipment and experience…  And the drain of advertising from print to the internet has meant that still photography just doesn’t pay as much as it previously did.  Film and video, though, continues to be a moneymaker, even on the internet.  Photographers now have the tools to emigrate entirely to the moving image.  Perhaps what we’re witnessing is the end of a golden age of photography; perhaps it marks the beginning of a renaissance for film and video.  Buying a lens, recently, for my Canon, the clerk asked if I was a videographer.  When I replied, “no,” he went on to explain that most of his high-end lenses were being sold to video guys because of the technical abilities of the 5d and because they have (what seems to photographers to be) unlimited budgets…

Or perhaps the tablet PCs which now look inevitably to be coming (whether or not the iPad succeeds) mean a light at the end of the tunnel…. when pictures on the internet will finally become worth something…

Leong Repetition

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott


Sze Tsung Leong’s ‚ÄúVictorville, California, 2006‚Ä≥

“Repetition suggests that views are never singular, but that each time we look, we see something different. ”

Sze Tsung Leong, he of the horizon pictures, has posted an extended reflection of the conceptual meaning of repetition in photography as the new essay in Words Without Pictures. Because photography is a medium of repetition, this essay obviously covers alot of ground – and it’s a good one, too:

Photography occupies the meeting point between the mechanics of visual perception and the structures that shape our environments. In the process of giving visual form to the ways of seeing and behaving that define us, and to the contexts that encompass us, it engages layers of repetition inherent within ourselves and our environments. The process of repetition therefore extends in both directions, for to photograph is to multiply the already multiplied: photography mirrors the doubling process of seeing, and duplicates environments already structured by repetition.

An interesting point which does not come up in the essay is that photography is simultaneously a medium of repetition and also a breaking down of that repetition: Though we display photographs in series and create our art in the space between successive pictures, photography becomes a unique medium in an individual picture’s isolation from time and other images around it. It is, in effect, in a zoo, an area apart that allows us to examine it in detail but is constrained in its borders.

One extension of repetition in photography is the repetition of the film strip projected in the cinema. Returning an image to the flow of time helps to tell stories, but isolating it allows us to see around what is actually displayed.

Ah Film…

Sunday, May 11th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott

Depressed about film disappearing? Well, you can always make your own…

Digital vs. Analog Part 3

Friday, February 29th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott

gursky99cent.jpg
Yeah, that’s right, I’m using that Gursky image

The following is the third part in a multi part essay. The first part can be found here, and the second here. I’ll publish each part whenever I get around to it:

It must be said that there are quite a few art photographers who have taken advantage of the things offered by digital (a discussion of who, exactly, recently took place over at 40 Watt), some of whom are extremely popular, but the full on migration to digital has never really happened in the way that seemed such a possibility only a few years ago. It really seemed, for a little while, that the photo world was on the verge of a sea change to digital that would be as significant and as drastic as the migration to color in art photography was in the 70′s.

I recall visiting the Andreas Gursky retrospective at MOMA when I first arrived in New York, and being some what shocked to hear that he actually created some of the works with digital manipulation. Now it seems so old-hat that I usually forget to include him in my list of photographers who use digital because he does it in such a subtle way. And if, as Mcluhan states, “the medium is the message,” and digital is a much different medium, how can we react to work done digitally with such a shrug?

Well, frankly, it’s because digital is apparently not such a different medium, and photographers have always accepted the idea of manipulation in their work. The very act of framing is a manipulation, as Joel Sternfeld recently announced to the Guardian in defense of photography, so a manipulation like Gursky’s which doesn’t seem to invalidate photographic reality seems like such a small thing.

But crossing that line into photographic un-reality seems to be a much bigger deal, and one that the photo community seems, in large measure, to recoil from (unlike the art world, from which photogs like Loretta Lux seems to have found a much more comfortable home). As photographers, it still seems normal to announce that “I prefer straight photography.” And most of the photo blogs fit this criteria.

So why hasn’t the increased freedom of creative possibility (as opposed to distributive possibility) spread throughout photography? The only site I know about which consistently showcases explicitly digital un-realities is the red headed step child of the photoblog world, (the often featured here) i heart photograph. The rest seem to stick with the traditions of documentary photography, always constrained by journalistic ethics, which (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) conveniently ignores the act of creation that is the taking of a picture.

Due to that whole ethics thing, photojournalism has settled into the digital age much more comfortably. This biggest changes in this field seem to be distribution and speed. There are a bunch of photojournalism online magazines, and, of course, the big boys like the NY Times, Newsweek, and Time all feature multimedia content on their websites [which I occasionally feature], and numerous sites have popped up with picture news that is the supposed antidote to the mainstream media (two of my favs are Pixelpress and Mediastorm). Of course, one can argue that the speed with which work is published in this realm leads to a failure to engage with a story for longer than it takes to file a story, but I have to say that I, for one, am glad to see images coming out of news events immediately after they happen. But film still raggedly holds its grip on a select few (many of whom find their home in the boutique agencies like Magnum and VII), where its sometimes seen as a mark of commitment and a willingness to really become involved in a story, in opposition to the wire agencies, who exclusively use digital.

Some people have engaged within the fine art tradition without breaching the decorum of ‘straight’ photography. The book ‘End Commercial‘ [which, Dean, I finally got a chance to see] is a great example of how digital has freed the medium. Its a compendium of images- a photographer and art director’s attempts to index the city. And it’s exhaustive. There is almost everything in there, and in a volume that never would have been possible without cheap digital cameras, databasing programs, and the organizational skills that the web has taught us all.

This, I think, has been the real revolution of digital – not the one image, but the many. Blogs like The Sartorialist (and, indeed, most blogs) are great for this, in that they index a particular component of the world in an obsessive manner. But this approach is inherently limited – No one image will provide a payoff (For more on this particular example, see Robert Wright’s blog, here and here). The experience of these indexes is more akin to a scientific study (even if the subject is not one normally so deserving of rigorous analysis) than it is like literature or classical art, an approach not without merit but somewhat limited.

Part 4 will be posted Monday or earlier (perhaps).
If this post interests you, please link it or post to the comments РI’d love to get feedback, suggestions, evidence for and against, but most of all a discussion.

Digital vs. Analog Part 2

Sunday, February 24th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott

img077apreview.jpg
Found via Shorpy

The following is the second part in a multi part essay. The first part can be found here. I’ll publish each part every day or two:

There’s something about how reproducible digital images are that robs them of some of their power and the sense that they are a unique treasure. Can you picture, in 50 years time, wading through a database with the same pleasure that we go to flea markets and historical societies and thumb through prints. I love sites like Fffffound, but the thrill of finding prints, well thumbed, with a scrawl of a caption written across the back, eclipses anything (for me) comparable that the internet has to offer. And of course, there is the frequently-featured-here Shorpy, which gets a large part of its appeal by featuring, on the internet, these flea-market prints. It’s notable, with Shorpy, that the author frequently notes where, exactly, the prints were found, further reinforcing the idea that these images are actual objects. It is somewhat ironic, of course, that the massive increase in images reduces the serendipitous thrill that one gets when finding a true one-of-a-kind treasure.

That being said, that one big thrill has been reduced to thousands of tiny thrills. Do a Google image search for something right now. Search for whatever. Search for anything and see what pops up. The sheer variety of images that pop up, and the mental gymnastics that one must do to discover any apparent relationship between them all is pretty incredible. And there are some real treasures to be found, too. I suppose that what we all want, at least in part, in an image is the thrill of discovering something unique, whether that is in the content, or the style, or the idea.

The digital revolution has been unique in that it shows us that though we may all be unique snowflakes, from a distance we all look pretty much like just some more snow. We can no longer fetishize a print, and the technical ability required to get a good image has dropped through the floor, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to begin making images. I suppose all that is left for us to just get out and find those things which are really good. This hasn’t changed in the switch from analog to digital – The difference is that we have so much more crap to wade through, but so much more opportunity to discover something really unique.

And it’s along this front that most of the effective critical engagement has taken place. The Abu Ghraib images were an important milemarker. As a media event, they showed how important (and, of course, repulsive) a bunch of average Joes armed with digital cameras, with the assistance of the wide distribution network of the electronic news media, could be. Sontag wrote an awesome essay, declaring “The pictures are us,” and she was right: But not necessarily specifically right. Digital images are us, because they have spread beyond professional photographers. Now images are not just about our rarified views, but about the views of everyone with a camera, which is pretty much everybody.

Part 3 can be found here.
If this post interests you, please link it or post to the comments РI’d love to get feedback, suggestions, evidence for and against, but most of all a discussion.

Digital vs. Analog Part 1

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott

ames.jpg
Polaroid taken by me and scrawled upon by Brett Scieszka on trip upstate, 2005

The following is the first part in a multi part essay. I’ll publish each part every day or two:

It’s funny: Every time I assist someone new, there is always the same topic of discussion. That topic is, of course, digital versus analog. We’re all obsessed by it, and no one really knows whether our beloved film will stick around. Almost all of us were, as it were, raised in analog, and so many of us would prefer not to see it disappear altogether. Still, though, Kodak has pledged it will make film for only another 5 years – after that it’s anyones guess – and Polaroid just went out of the film business. To compound it all, it’s cheaper for schools to teach photo on digital cameras than with film and developing tanks and etc., so there’s an entirely new generation growing up without that tactile commitment to analog. Who knows if they’ll even care whether or not film is still being mass produced in 15 years time.

Well, I suppose, though, that it’s not strictly digital versus analog. Most photographers come to the conclusion that they’re both useful for different things. Many of us, at heart, still prefer using analog, but sometimes a client just demand it. I will note, here, that the desire to stick to analog is not just limited to photographers, and that the roots of that desire are practical as well as… Nostalgic? Perfectionist? Whatever. At any rate, in the 4 or so years that I’ve worked as an assistant for primarily editorial photographers, 9 times out of 10 the magazine would ask for prints. There are many reasons behind this, but the most important ones are that art directors are frequently visual people, and hence prefer prints, and that for printing a magazine, it’s far easier with prints. If you send a magazine a digital file and they send that on to the printer, there’s no telling what the color will do, as there’s no way of checking the image as its printed in the magazine against a hard copy. But if you send them a print, which they scan, they have the digital file to go into the spread, and they also have a record of how, exactly, the photographer wants an image printed.

I mentioned perfectionist in the above paragraph because its not just a bunch of holdouts hanging on to an obsolete technology. In actual fact, digital is quite limited. I don’t know the technical exact technical specs of various digital chips, but there are differences between film and digital in their ability to capture light of various hues, colors, and intensities. The differences are actually quite minor, but many photographers I work with maintain they can tell the difference. I believe I can too, but I’ve never quite been convinced that I actually can, or just that I want to be able to.

I guess it must be said that digital is not such a big change after all. Photography is still… well… photography. We’re still writing with light, fixing an image using lenses and cameras, and though that process is no longer chemical our essential tool, light, remains the same. The big change, in the end, is the means of distribution more than anything else. What has changed is how easily we find images. The fact that you’re reading this on a screen, and looking at images too, is more important than the way that the images are now captured.

But we’re probably losing something of the experience of photography that we’ve all grown to love. The recent news of the death of Polaroid is indicative of all of this; After all, Polaroids still mean much to us. But the advantages that they originally conveyed, that of being able to view an image instantly or near instantly, have certainly been eclipsed by the LCD screens on the back of cameras, now. But Polaroids have stuck around until now and still mean quite alot to quite a few of us because of the fact that you were producing a fundamentally unreproducable object. It’s possible to copy them, of course, but when you take a Polaroid, it’s a particular treasure imbued with the time and place that it was taken.

Part 2 can be found here.
If this post interests you, please link it or post to the comments – I’d love to get feed back, suggestions, evidence for and against, but most of all a discussion.