IS DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY THE NEW EXPRESSIVE VISUAL ART?
RICK DOBLE |
![]() |
![]() Read on and I will explain why I think digital photography is so different from previous photography and why I think it has such great potential. Many people do not realize, and even experienced photographers forget, that photography is all about light. Photography literally means light (photo) writing (graphy). The action of light on film (*1) creates the image. As I used to teach in a basic photography class twenty-five years ago, photography is not about objects or people or scenery. Rather it is about how the light reveals those things. As any beginning photography student knows, a cube can be lighted so that it almost disappears or so that it is virtually three dimensional. The key is the light.
In the middle of this century, the single lens reflex (SLR) camera was a technical breakthrough. For the first time the photographer could see exactly what the lens saw. This solved a number of problems, such as parallax. Digital photography goes one step further and lets the artist see what the film is seeing in " real time " on a LCD screen (*2).
|
![]() I sometimes like to add flare to my pictures which can produce a rainbow of colors. I have found that most lights have a precise point where the camera must be aligned to get the full effect of flare. Before the digital LCD screen this kind of exact positioning was impossible. |
![]() There is another aspect to this LCD screen: it allows a photographer to review pictures that he or she just shot. Again this is a radical development. Immediate feedback is vital to learning. In a personal note I have spent years trying to shorten the time between taking pictures and seeing the developed images. I have used black and white slides and color slides that I processed immediately, along with instant Polaroids. When not using any of these techniques, I developed negative film on the same day it was shot and made contact sheets to get some idea of what I had just done. There are many psychological studies that point to the importance of feedback in learning. People who aimed bullets at a target, but were not told where the bullets hit until later, could not learn quickly. However, those who were told immediately improved rapidly. While this seems obvious, it is often forgotten. (Sorry for the gun example, but that is what the study involved.) |
![]() |
![]()
Now with digital photography, those with artistic ideas can realize their imagery in strikingly individual and unique ways. A full understanding of light and color means that, in the hands of a master, modern photography is a rich, complicated, sophisticated and expressive art form. Even the permanence of color photography has been solved with the digital process because the digital file can be stored indefinitely [see my original article on digital photography]. My own quest in photography involves a number of " purist " notions added to the capabilities of a digital camera: I try to do most of my work at the moment of taking the picture rather than later with a computer.
I would like to propose a new term for this photography. The term is " photo-expressionism. " (*3). By this I mean photographic imagery that is both personal and expressive, photography that is as artistic as the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch (The Scream), or Jackson Pollock.
*1. For the sake of simplicity I will speak of film and electronic film instead of electronic light sensitive material or other term for electronic photographic
media. Back to original paragraph.
*2. The LCD screen is an approximation and is separate from the electronic film. All viewing screens show less than the full image (also true for SLRs), the resolution is much lower than the final image, and the LCD may see light somewhat differently that the electronic film. There is also a delay in the " real time " display. If you snap the shutter in a fast moving situation, you will find you get the next frame, not the one you thought you got. In short you
have to learn to anticipate.
However, the approximation is good enough so that a photographer can learn to work with it. As in all photographic processes part of the art is being able to accurately guess how the final image will turn out.
There is only one true image that shows you exactly what you shot; that is the final output form for your image. A picture displayed on a computer monitor or on the Internet will look quite different than one printed out on the best quality photographic paper or reprinted in a magazine. Photographers find
themselves unconsciously adjusting their imagery to match the final output form. Back to original paragraph.
*3. I derived this term from two movements in painting: expressionism as practiced by German and other painters (Kirchner, Klee, Kandinsky) at the beginning of the century and abstract expressionism as practiced by artists in New York in the 1940s and 1950s (Pollock, Rothko, Frankenthaler) along with others around the world. Also I realize that van Gogh is not strictly an expressionist, yet his work is considered to be one of the foundations of expressionism by virtually all critics. Clay Riley, the director of our local Carteret Arts Council, looked at my work and said that I was " action painting " with a camera. That thought started me thinking about the idea of photography as an expressive medium. Back to original paragraph.
Go to Rick Doble's Digital Visuals site to see a full listing of his visual work on the Internet.
|