When Is, Not?

This is not some fanciful rendering of a Japanese landscape, but rather the view from our house in Rachub the other night at around nine-thirty in the evening, at the setting of the sun over Ynys Môn. Or is it?  I must say that the camera/software on my iPhone is truly astounding: to get anything like an image such as this on film would have been practically, though not totally, impossible, in the days of film or nowt photography. Of course, this manner of imaging the world about us begs some questions, which frankly are not always obvious and probably lie more within the ambit of philosophy or psychology than any particular photographic practice per se. Are we depicting exactly what's out there or is it a confection mediated through many layers of software abstraction and rendered likewise via many layers of hardware? Both, of course; and here's the thing. This process of abstraction is exactly parallel to that human process that translates the 'real' onto the flattened realm of paper or canvas via photographic film or paint.

The fact is that whichever path we choose to render the world to suit our needs, our chosen technology and our intentions and desires curate, rather than simply reproduce. When we paint 'realistically', the style, materials, and techniques employed are as much a part of the message we convey about our subject as the image itself. Even if the style of painting is 'photorealistic', it will still carry the freight of the artist's intentions and personal choices. It will still have the 'painterly' evidence of selective compositional decisions and brush marks, however small. It will ultimately visually decompose from the apparent photograph of a real scene it suggests that it is, as one physically approaches the picture itself, into the tiny series of abstract paint marks made by the artist in its construction.

As far as photography goes toward being an actual depiction of reality, as I've mentioned here many times before, I disputed that in my final year thesis, and since that time much more rigorous and academic work than mine has been published in this area. Until the advent of modern, ubiquitous, digital imaging, the idea that a photograph was anything more than an indexical representation of its subject - its direct two-dimensional analogue - was pretty moot, and I would suggest that in the stuffier world of Fine Art that prevailed then, this was the central reason why photography was never quite 'art'. Even many photographers of the time would never consider what they did as 'art'. Don McCullin, one of the very greatest of modern documentary photographers still eschews the notion into his nineties.

The corollary to that of course is the number of world famous 'documentary moments' that subsequently have been shown to have been staged for the camera: the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, to name just the one. A gentle re-staging of an actual historical moment to better suit the composition of the final 'news' image for the papers and the reputation and success of the photographer. Reality at one remove, and that's before the image goes through the darkroom, where further tweaks are made to enhance the image at all stages of the development process. Think of the images we make daily on our phones and post online, which are deliberately filtered, compositionally altered and amended to suit the way we would like the image to look, for whatever reason, and we're not a million miles away from the old days. We've gone from 'Oh, that is a rather good likeness...' to 'You look better in this one...' to actively curating ourselves and the images we want to see of us and the world about us in real time, aided and abetted by the enormous computing power that most people have about them constantly without actually realising it for what it is.

In essence, there is little difference between the eras - from paint to film to digital - save the motivations that lie behind 'realistic' image creation and the development of the technologies we employ in the realisation of the images we make and keep; the cost and scale of the technologies/techniques we employ; and the general availability and ease of use of these technologies and techniques. The general trend at the 'general' level of image making has always been towards ubiquity and the democratisation of the activity of making pictures. At the professional or experimental levels, little has changed at all but the technologies themselves: a professional portrait photographer, much like a sixteenth or seventeenth century court painter, must understand their subject's desires as to how they would appear in the final picture: the image-maker-for-hire has to be as much psychologist as technician in understanding the wants and needs of their patron. But then there are the more 'artistic' and experimental forms of image making and their place alongside 'straight' photography in history. But that's for another day's ramble, methinks...