Old Values, New Tools:

Photography and Electronics

As a 12 year old kid in Birmingham, Alabama, just after the Second World War, I was fascinated by gunpowder, electronics and photography.

Life somehow weaned me from explosives, but electronics and photography never relinquished their hold on me.

In those days, the 1940’s, these two fields, electronics and photography, were completely unrelated.

Photographic technology was much older, dating back more than a hundred years to Henry Fox Talbot in England and his salt paper prints. The word “electronics” had been first used only ten years before, and the field itself had begun only forty years before, in 1906, with the invention of the triode vacuum tube by a young man named Lee De Forest in New York.

At the same time in New York the Photo-Secession movement was in full swing under the leadership of another entrepreneurial spirit, photographic giant Alfred Stieglitz. De Forest believed passionately in the possibilities of radio communication. Stieglitz believed equally passionately in the possibilities of aesthetic communication through photography.

Both men lived to see their dreams come true. But neither could have remotely realized then that, almost a hundred years later, the fruits of the work of one of them would transform the world of the other.

Nor was any such historical notion in my head in 1947 as I tinkered with my developers and Tesla coils in my parents’ basement. Nor in anyone else’s head, for that matter, not even in the sizable brains of the physicists at Bell Labs who were busy just at that time putting together the first transistors--and thus taking a giant step toward the digital revolution that we are in the midst of today.

Prior to 1998 all my photographs were made on film, using technology that would not have been a mystery to Stieglitz or even Fox Talbot.

But after 1999 most were made digitally, filmlessly, using technology traceable back to De Forest in 1906, to Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen at Bell Labs in the 1940’s, to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, who built the first integrated circuit - a train of development completely unrelated to photography.

This electronic revolution has now transformed both the capture and the reproduction of the image. The two faces of photography have been changed forever, each in its own way.

Alfred Stieglitz was an innovator in both of these distinct areas. His obsession was with the photographic print as an object of aesthetic worth in itself - as an object of art. He used numerous darkroom processes to produce his prints. Though his works always remained clearly photographic, they all bore the imprint of their particular path through his darkroom. Stieglitz was a tinkerer and an experimenter. He was always interested in new printing techniques.

Today we have a new darkroom, called Adobe PhotoShop. We have new methods of getting the image on paper, methods that use ink instead of silver salts. The aim of the photographer remains the same, but his tools have changed radically. To my mind and eye, these filmless, silverless images remain photographs in a sense Stieglitz would have understood and embraced.

For myself, I welcome all these new tools, if with a bit of wistfulness sometimes for the smells and stains of the darkroom, and the magic of the slow emergence of an image in the developer tray. But the new tools have their own magic.

Over the years my film cameras have included Pentax, Olympus, and Ikoflex, and more recently Rolleiflex, Hasselblad, Leica and many varieties of Nikon. Currently, I work primarily with digital cameras: a Toyo 4 x 5 view camera with a Better Light digital back, a Hasselblad 555ELD fitted with a Kodak Pro-Back, and more recently a Nikon D3. With the advent of these high-quality digital cameras, I now use film only for special purposes – such as to indulge a fit of nostalgia.

Film-based photographs have to be scanned into digital form. For my gallery, and for ArtSurround Printing, I do this using a Scitex IQsmart3 flatbed scanner.

Of course, the images from digital cameras, or those from scanning original subjects such as flowers, all start out in digital form. These computer files, whether from camera or scanner, become the modern analog of the film original. They are refined in PhotoShop, the new darkroom, and made ready for printing.

The aims of the photographer working in PhotoShop are precisely the same as the aims of the photographer working in the darkroom – the qualities that make a fine print haven’t changed. But in scope, power and finesse, the tools provided by the new darkroom -- PhotoShop --win hands down.

To produce gallery exhibition prints today, or to make prints for ArtSurround Printing, I print on a high brightness, cotton-based fine art canvas using pigment inks in Hewlett-Packard Z-series printers. This combination yields archival prints with deep blacks and a wide well-controlled color range. The exceptionally smooth-surfaced canvas can yield brilliant, tack sharp images where required, or images with a painterly feel that is enhanced by having no glass in the way.

The history of photography includes a multitude of printing processes: salt, albumen, platinum, dye transfer and many others. Each has its own personality and image qualities. Photographers have always gravitated to the technology that allowed them to best achieve their artistic ends. This is still true today. I believe that printing on canvas represents a new step forward for presenting photographic images. It combines the traditional look and feel of the canvas medium long favored by painters, with the appeal of direct viewing (since canvas doesn’t require the protection of a distracting glass shield between the art and the viewer.) It’s a new look in photography, and one that has demonstrated great appeal to many photographers.

Still, no new process ever completely replaces its predecessors, because no new process ever duplicates them. Some photographers always continue to work in the older methods for their own individual purposes. It is interesting and somehow satisfying to me that the platinum and palladium printing of Stieglitz’ time are now enjoying something of a renaissance, right in the midst of the digital revolution.

I am gratified today to find two of my childhood interests, electronics and photography, so nicely united. But they are not united as equals. Photography, I believe, retains its traditional objectives as an art form (though with vastly expanded horizons). And electronic technology is its powerful new servant.