Originally Posted by deudeu
I was talking about this with a friend of mine yesterday.
He is a student in Fine arts photography and he told me something that makes sense to me:
With the digital revolution came a new age of photographic illeteracy.
What he meant by that is that with the ability to produce tones of shots without spending any money, people are losing the photographic knowledge they didn't even know they had.
Because of the thousands of snap shots taken and displayed everywhere, the photographic standards are being lowered. The fact that with film, everytime you were pushing the shutter you were spending money, made people more concerned about their technique, their composition, their exposure... Now people press the button without thinking, and they accept the images without thinking as well. Just look at how many actuations our cameras get. Photography, for the majority of people, is becoming about trial and error, not science and love of the medium.
This explains the "nice picture! You must have a good camera" because for most people, taking pictures is less about the skills of the person behind the camera than about the camera itself. With film at least, when one was showing his work, he was always disconected from his tool, and the artifact that he had in his hand, a piece of paper, was simple enough that to the masses, the photographer was what produced the image, not the camera.
But don't get me wrong. I don't miss the days of film only. If I did, I would just go back to film. But I love my digital camera. I just think that for people to appreciate what passionate people do, the passionnate people need to protect their images and threat them with care and respect. I don't want my best pictures to be thrown into a pool of garbage snapshots (by garbage I mean that they don't hold any artisic value, or at least, they were not taken with the intent to be artsy). I don't have anything against snapshots and careless photography, but it is just not what I do.
I don't claim to hold the truth on this though, I am just throwing my opinion out there to see what people are thinking. I am pleased to see that it got people talking!
DeuDeu,
Some of the most elitist people I know are art students. In their world everything must have several meanings and the more levels of meaning the more significant the art. These are the people that take out of focus shots of the backs of people heads and put them into a gallery pretending there is a cosmic meaning to the arrangement. Please realize I speak from experience here. I was an art major and earned a BA in photography back in the 1980s. It took me decades to free myself from the elitist and narrow minded "art school" mentality.
As for digital creating an age of "photographic illiteracy" this is no more true than an opinion that the ability of millions of people to use a paintbrush makes painting less literate. Accomplished and "literate" photographers are no more negatively affected by the millions of snapshots taken every day than a talented and "literate" painter is affected by people copying Bob Ross paintings. More than 99% of people who pick up a camera do so only to record their lives. They do not pretend to create art beyond what their family or friends may appreciate. How are "photographic standards" lowered because of the proliferation of the snapshot. Indeed I think just the opposite may be true. Could it be possible that the more lousy snapshots there are that the real good work can stand out. Admittedly it may be harder to find in the sheer volume but consider how brightly a diamond shines in the midst of a seam of coal.
To address the issue of people losing knowledge because it is now cheap to take lots of photos, again I think you and your friend have it somewhat backward. Does the ease and"cheapness" of digital cause lots of bad photos to be taken. Sure it does to some extent, but you are ignoring the potential for experimentation and individual improvement. Many people learn best when they can do something and fail and try again until they succeed. Digital makes this much easier and indeed levels the playing field somewhat. A relatively poor person can now shoot enough to learn from his mistakes whereas with film you had to be relatively wealthy to shoot and develop enough film to gain practice and experience. People were admittedly more frugal with the shutter button because film and processing were expensive.
This simply reflects the expense load balance of film vs digital With film photography the average (discounting high or low-end models) 35mm film camera was rarely over $200-300. However, film was an expensive consumable and processing added to the expense every time you shot a roll. Thus the expense was heavily balanced on the"production" end of the process and was potentially "endless"..
Digital on the other hand is a front-end loaded loaded process in that it requires a significantly higher outlay of cash even for an "average" DSLR, and computers and image processing software. However, once you have the "stuff" the per image cost is negligable unless you do a lot of printing.
One of the beauties of digital though, is that you can also get in fairly cheaply with a decent P&S camera and free software. Most people these days (in developed countries anyway) already have a suitable computer around the house so there is little if any additional dedicated expense there.
You are correct in that many people equate a good photo with a "nice camera" however this is no different than in the film days. If you make a print from a digital file you are exactly as "disconnected" from the original click of the digital shutter as you were from the click of the film shutter. The process in-between is irrelevant and neither adds or subtracts intrinsic value.
I do admire your passion for what I'll call "the historical integrity" of photography but I submit that you are really making much ado about nothing. Today, as an instant in the history of photography and the interpretation of its impacts upon society are questions best left in the hands of posterity. Only the future will tell if photography survived the tidal wave of the digital snapshot. I like to think that the answer will be "yes", just as it survived the advent of roll film and the attendant flood of amateur photographers.
Great debate so far!
Mike