Pontifications

There’s a perk to being a graybeard. Some people think you’re a wise, old graybeard.

My wife thinks I get a little carried away with the pontificating, especially after a glass or two of wine. But, once a year Bob Haft brings his Evergreen State College photography students to my home/office/studio to hear pontifications from, "An artist who makes his living commercially."

My spiel is this: without my personal work, and a commitment to that in the foreground of my life, my commercial work has no legs. There is no five year interval in my career where what I was doing in the beginning and the end of that interval is the same. Clients change, the proportion of stock to assignment changes, styles change. Renewal is a constant theme in the profession, and for me the wellspring of that renewal the work I do for myself.

"We’re not allowed to do digital," I was told by one student. These kids are learning the fundamentals in analog processes, so I made a point about how that has affected my work. I have a deep commitment to digital, and one of the senses I have about how inherently revolutionary the process is concerns the feedback loop. It is a critical component to get right as an artist. Digital’s loop is extremely short, which is great if you know what to do with that shortened cycle. Learning analog processes first forces you to confront and consciously understand what it takes to bring an image from emotional ignition through to a tangible object. It’s a long process when you have to expose the film, and get that right, and develop the film, and get that right, and make a print, and figure out what the right way to do that is. You have to keep a lot in your head while you trundle through the process of making that object. You need to keep the same attention to process at work in your head with digital, or the work will be missing the intentionality and substance of a crafterly approach.

Or maybe it ultimately won’t matter. We have lost many crafterly processes in art and commerce to history. Analog photography will be another one. It will change our relationship to images, and probably immediacy will develop its own craft tradition, whatever that might mean in 30 years.

Comments

[Joe Decker]

I think we have a long way to go before we see an end to the need for craft, or an end to the interest in craft, even in a digital world. I see people spending a lot of energy and interest on the learning curve for digital, not simply the questions of "how do I get it to print", but the more difficult questions about one of the most difficult aspects of the photographic craft, how to manage the contrast range of the original scene through one's workflow to the usually-reduced contrast avilable on a photographic print? How do we craft images that guide the eye to our intended mood and meaning?

I don't worry for the need for craft, I hope, in time, that the energy and popularity digital technologies have brought back to photography will fuel, not quench, photographic craft in time.