What is a Camera?
The dawn of a new visual literacy, but at a cost.
Cameras slice life into fractions, and they are amplifiers, making small moments public and loud. They are miracle recorders to cradle in your hands, silver nitrate science fiction once upon a time, and now mostly slabs of electronics with ‘no user serviceable parts inside.’ Once upon a time you could open up your camera to see how it captured the world, but opening your iPhone to expose its guts would be madness. Something has been lost. Something has been gained.
‘There’s something beautiful about the way film reacts to light. You can’t get that with digital. Film hid some of the flaws, and that was the beauty of it.’
— Lars Topelmann, commercial photographer in Portland
I wanted to know what a camera is, so I asked professional photographers, some clients, like Lars, others not, about how they are using the tools of their trade now. I was inspired by a New Yorker piece by Craig Mod. He refers to cameras as ‘networked lenses’ and makes the point that cameras, forever changed now, hold fresh power because of the immediate distribution of their images.
Images are knitting communities together, creating multi-viewpoint portraits of news events, and instantly keeping grandma in the loop. It’s awe inspiring, immensely useful, but potentially shallow and poetry-free. Let’s look at why.
In the blood and bone sense of things, memories are vapor. When you stare at a memory in your mind it dissipates like smoke, like a dream partly recalled, but when you stare at a memory in a photograph, it deepens and develops. Remember when you would dip the photo paper into the developer, massage it with your hands, willing the image to come forth and bring tears to your eyes? (Or maybe that was just the fixer you forgot to dilute.) Photographs are captured memories, which is not the same as a digital capture. I asked Jeff Singer, an editorial and commercial photographer, for his thoughts on this. He wrote back:
If I had my choice for any assignment or project, I prefer shooting film. I do prefer the look of film, but for me it’s more about the camera. I much prefer shooting with large manual cameras with large waist level viewfinders. I just feel like I take better pictures with them. I take more time and I really look at the shot I’m about to take. I of course could do that with any camera I use but it doesn’t happen when using a 35mm digital SLR. I just don’t like 35mm cameras and 35mm frame size and aspect ratio.
It has nothing to do with file quality, it’s the format. With current professional quality 35mm and medium format digital, there is no film vs digital argument. I think they are both great and both have their own look. But for me personally, I think film looks better (again, look … not quality). It has a different feel. It’s a cliche at this point but it really is a CD vs Vinyl debate… actually, that’s not a good debate, CDs suck… it’s a high res digital music versus vinyl debate. They are both great but they both have a different sound. Some are going to prefer one and some are going to prefer the other.
—Jeff Singer, editorial and commercial photographer, SF, LA, and NY
Digital cameras are capture machines, handy, precise and soulless. As Lars Topelmann put it, ‘the digital image straight out of the camera has no character. We do a lot of work to make it look like film. What we want is more of a feeling of film, a mood, what we think a memory might be.’
It sure does take a lot of post-production to turn a digital image into a convincing memory, or you can select the appropriate filter in Instagram and get instant 1970s. Most people go with the filter.
‘From a commercial, pro standpoint,’ Lars told me, some photographers want their commercial work to ‘look like it came right off Instagram, and others want to bring back the craft of photography. Is the formal portrait done?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Are people no longer interested in the craft of an image?’
Certainly most commercial art directors won’t wait for your contacts to be developed, for you to take half a day to page through them, circle the buys with a grease pencil, and then wait to receive the contacts via Fedex. Things happen fast in photography, as in everything else. Something has been lost, something has been gained.
When I ask What is a Camera? by extension I also have to ask What is a Photographer? With the ubiquity of cameras that can’t be looked through, but which send texts, Google where to have lunch and sometimes even make phone calls, we have streets clogged with photographers capturing images by the millions, or billions. Facebook says users have uploaded 10 billion photos to the site. ‘We serve over 15 billion photo images per day,’ their engineers announced proudly. (Back in 2008!) The entire history of photography slinks away in the shadow of that number, obliterated by a blizzard of snapshots.
When you use your camera phone, can you really call yourself a photographer? As one pro I spoke with said, when you hold a camera phone it doesn’t feel like you’re making art. Even the way you hold it doesn’t feel like you’re a photographer. Jay Brenner, a member of the Communicators Group on LinkedIn, offers some clarification:
‘There are snapshots and there are photographs, similar but different. Without question the days of using a film-enabled SLR for snapshots are no more and won’t return. Even the DSLR has a limited future for snapshots.’
— Jay Brenner, member of LinkedIn Communicators Club.
Still, Jeff Singer (and others) believe there will be a need for large images, and that means using really big digital sensors or film. As Jeff put it, ‘People are always going to want large art to hang on the wall. I look at pictures on screens all day but I much prefer the large b&w Norman Seef print of The Rolling Stones that is hanging in my living room. If people are only using camera phones to take their pictures, beautiful large prints will be a thing of the past and that’s pretty sad.’
There is tremendous power in hammering off duplicates of the world and beaming them to everyone in a second or two. Even more exciting, camera phones are creating a new visual literacy. Thanks to the networked cameras we carry in our pockets, we are all becoming more fluent in the language of the image. There is, now, a dawn of visual literacy. It’s like waking up one morning and everybody is walking around playing the violin quite well. As a world culture, now we better understand the language of the picture. That is what has been gained.
Here is what has been lost. The aphrodisiacal scent film gives off when you spool it in, the intoxicating potential of a fresh roll settling into the gate, the gravid feeling when the big mirror in your 6x6 swings up and back with a clunk and people look around as if to say, ‘now what the hell was that?’ The sense of importance and time required to make even a single image is gone.
When you looked through your ground glass in older cameras, you saw the world flipped. Right is left, left is right. I used to enjoy this, because if my image worked backward, I knew it would work forward even better. The world is also flipped now, but I’m not looking through a ground glass.
A few addenda since this was first published. There’s a Facebook conversation going on about this piece that includes big name photographers. Have a look here.
My friend Dan Stein, a talented pro photographer and a client, shares these thoughts about making the switch to digital.
Do you shoot mostly film or digital, and why the choice?
Within the past year I switched from 50/50 film/digital to 100% digital. With digital technology and cost approaching medium format film, it made sense to me to put the film cameras away. Also, the time and expense of film made the decision easier. Film development, scanning, storage were making film less of an attractive medium.
Which are your clients asking more of these days, and why?
Clients have been less concerned with digital or film and more concerned with printing. I was rejected by a gallery because I print with archival inks rather than silver prints or digital C prints. Although there is an ongoing debate over which printing format is ‘better’, C prints or pigment inks. Some galleries are convinced that a C print is a real photograph (vs. a pigment print).
What has been gained by the use of digital formats in photography, and what has been lost?
Digital gains:
Instant feedback. With digital you can hone your shooting techniques instantly based on the ability to instantly preview a shot. With the new mirrorless cameras, gear has become smaller and lighter. Dynamic range has increased with digital.
Digital losses:
I think with film, one tends to take more time with composition and technical aspects of a shot, knowing that there is a finite amount of film to shoot, whereas one doesn’t think twice shooting 50 digital exposures of one subject.
