Pushing pixels

There's an article in the latest issue of Lenswork by Frank Van Riper, where he talks about building a great portfolio print by print over one's lifetime. It's a good, inspiring article.

I like to read Mr. Van Riper's essays, in Lenswork and in the Washington Post online -- he wrote one about the Leica M series that perfectly captures my love for that camera -- but I have to address something he mentions in the current article in Lenswork.

He says:

"... here I could not help but think of being in the darkroom, producing archival black-and-white prints on actual paper from actual negatives -- immutable, permanent things, not computer-generated facsimiles of questionable provenance born of a digital camera's bits and bytes.

... it's the very "virtualness" of digital photography that bores me and gives me a headache. The ethereal, never-quite there quality of it all..."

Now, first of all, breaking from his otherwise great essay to engage in some unprovoked digital hatin'... that seems unnecessary. In other essays, he talks about using a Canon Powershot G1, and even describes it as "this terrific camera", so clearly he doesn't reject digital completely.

What's more interesting to me, though, is the content of his comment. I don't want to deny his experience -- if digital isn't real to him, it isn't, and I wouldn't want to try to convince him any more than I would want someone else to try to convince me that Steely Dan makes really good music.

My experience, however, is somewhat different. Digital, to me, has always been as real as anything else. It's not ethereal at all -- it's right there, as physical as I need it to be, coherent and understandable and very nearly concrete.

I suspect the difference is that I grew up using computers, and I have a level of comfort and trust with them that Mr. Van Riper doesn't. I don't mean to imply that I think he's old and out of touch, either -- that's not the message here. The point is that I have a lot of experience using computers as an artistic tool, and that affects my perception of them.

I've encountered this with other designers as well, although not so much lately. When I was first working out in the world, other designers who hadn't really used digital tools would complain that they couldn't place things on a page precisely -- that they felt like they were doing layout with a pointer on the end of a long pole. I, on the other hand, always felt like I had more control working digitally than I ever did with manual paste-up. Pens leak and jump around. Rulers need to be held straight. Wax is sticky stuff, and when it touches a board it tends to want to stay there. Digital gave me much more freedom to be as precise as I wanted to be.

I've seen the same phenomenon, to look at this another way, when I try to explain to non-photographer friends the process of printing traditionally. People whose experience of photgraphy is limited to taking the little metal cannister out of their camera, dropping it off at a store, and getting their photos plus some mysterious orange strips back, do not understand that first you develop the film, then you put it in an enlarger, and only then do you end up with a print on photo paper. It's all very abstract and mysterious. "Why do you need to make it bigger?" "What happens to the film?" etc.

The point of this rambling, I think, is that just because something seems mysterious and abstract doesn't mean that it isn't real: it just means that one doesn't have experience with it.

As Mr. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And we distrust and fear magic until we learn to control it.