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Sow's ear syndrome |
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I took a short break between my Ilford Masterclasses at Focus in 1999 to walk around the exhibition. There was much to depress as well as excite. I walked past one stand, which shall be nameless, that exhorted us to use our 'creativity'. As a demonstration of 'creativity' they had a set of dishes filled with various toners, most of them guaranteed to reduce the physical life of any print drastically, in which they dipped successive RC prints to bring them out in the most garish colours. They had a lot of people round the demo. They are a good company whom I am glad to see succeed commercially for their other fine products, but I wish they'd pour this lot down the drain. I don't blame them. They are only responding to the market demands. Nobody gets rich selling people what they ought to have, rather than what they want. That's the essence of the problem, and it's so damned depressing. I wheel out my toned monstrosity, 'Harvest Dusk', at my workshops on fine monochrome photography as an example of what not to do. The trouble is that participants often like it! For heavens sake, what's happened to our vision and taste in photography? You have an inferior image. Then you get creative. You use IR film, you make a diffused lith print on a fancy surface paper, you bleach it and tone it, and probably tone it in another colour as well. Then you scan it, apply a few filters, and inkjet print it. And what have you got? – a diffused, multicoloured, inkjet printed, inferior image. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. We have been through all this before of course. Things always happen in cycles. The whole pictorialist movement was about making a photograph look anything but a photograph. It had to masquerade as an imitation painting. And the devices and techniques used to transform an 'ordinary' photograph were remarkable, especially some of what we now know as 'alternative processes'. These often required consummate craft skill, but however much the skill applied, a poor picture, by whatever process, was still a poor picture. We are hiding from the strength of monochrome photography. We want to make things look pretty, or give them artificial 'impact'. Why? Real monochrome photography doesn't need that. All that gets in the way. As digital imaging gathers strength, and I welcome that not revile it, there is a real danger that this unique monochrome medium, encapsulated in the tiny fraction of recorded time from its invention in the 1830s until now, is going to be corrupted, has been corrupted, before it is swept away. We don't have to hide its qualities, cover them up, know better than it does. George Bernard Shaw said 'Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations'. That's what a great monochrome photograph is. A burning moment handed on to future generations. That is the extraordinary power of the still monochrome photograph. The very strength and essence of the medium is its directness and disturbing, if deceiving, sense of reality. The frozen moment of reality from time. The past 100 years or so could justifiably be called the century of the through-the-lens recorded image. This has been the first moment in aeons of time when man has been able to record sound and vision, still or moving. It has had a huge impact on our culture. Not just recording, but influencing, causing. Would the USA have pulled out of Vietnam so soon, at all, without the images that filled page and screen, for instance. Next Page >> |
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Buzzard Rock: Orange filter, Ilford HP5 Plus, Deltalux© developer 1:2, Ilford Multigrade FB paper, Neutol WA developer 1:10 @ 24°C, selenium toned.© Barry Thornton Page 3 of 5 |
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