old flower - print by Daniel Vineyard
Sometimes new doesn’t equal better. Well, most times it does, but sometimes, and perhaps in the terms of fine art photography, new may be worse than old.
What am I getting at?
I love cameras. They enable us to capture slivers of life. You take a photo, and then in an instant, there it is, life, right in the palm of your hand. It’s mind blowing if you really think about it. The camera gives you the power to hold reality in the palm of your hand. You have time in a box.
But the camera is just a tool. And we humans love making tools. This particular tool helps us to capture a snippet of life. We can then print it out on a piece of paper, and have it and hold it. It’s ours to keep forever.
Like with most tools, we want to make the tool better. And when we make that decision, we’re going to go in a certain direction with that decision. By saying, ‘better’ we are making a value judgment. We then have to decide what ‘better’ means. And for the camera, the tool makers have decided that ‘better’ means quicker. It means taking 8 photos in a second. It means using digital memory to quickly capture what you’re looking at. It means instant check on what you’re photographing by looking at the back of your camera.
But is this really ‘better’? Is it? Yeah, it probably is, but maybe for a select few, they don’t want better to mean quicker, they want better to mean something else. Perhaps better should mean more beautiful (largely something you can’t measure, and perhaps that’s the reason better was meant to be quicker; quicker you can quantify, more beautiful is something you can’t necessarily measure).
And as the tool was perfected to be quicker, some photographers were lamenting the change. The beauty makers. The beauty makers, or fine art photographers, were left out in the cold with the new advances in the tool. In fact, the tool had changed the nature of their product so much that many current fine art photographers are going back to the old tools. They’re going back to the old.
Why? Well, in a market sense, the product that is being produced by the tool makers is inadequate for the demands of their desires. So they need to either develop a new tool that does meet their desires, or go back to the old tools. And since most photographers are not tool makers, they go back to the tried and true. Here are a few fine art photographers that either use old camera equipment, or they try to duplicate the process:
Sally Mann
Kerik Koulas
Quinn Jacobson
Ellen Susan
Mia Friedrich
What does that mean?
It means the tools aren’t working. At least not for a certain segment of the tool users. If there was a tool maker that could make a camera that had the convenience of a digital camera but the quality of an old camera, then you’d probably have the right tool for this group of people. Until then, I think we’ll see people wanting more from the current class of cameras. They want something better.
digital memory fine art photographers fine art photography photography
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by daniel
Filed under: Uncategorized
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