Is It Photography?

[Mike Farley]

I don't often link to The Online Photographer blog these days. The author, Mike Johnston, who can write very knowledgably about photography, has rather lost his way over the last year or so due to a change in his domestic circumstances. If you want an example, you only need look at this fatuous piece he has just written where he attempts to differentiate between analogue and digital capture. For me, it is the end result which matters, not how the photographer got there.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.co ... aging.html

Certainly a print made in the darkroom can exhibit qualities which some might argue are not currently possible with one produced digitally, but the differences can be subtle and does that take into account the advances being made with printers and papers. How many, I wonder, would be able to distinguish which process was used given two prints of the same scene if one were made using analogue methods and the other digital? Even if they could, would that necessarily make one image better than the other?

That’s before crossover between the two processes is taken into account; a scanned negative or slide and printed digitally, an analogue print made using a negative produced from a digital file. We are even seeing analogue prints where the original negative or print has been scanned and a new negative made. Sometimes that has been done due to the condition of the original, on other occasions to make a larger print than would otherwise be possible. Such instances are quite common in the fine art market, where prints can often sell for thousands of pounds. At which point does the result stop being a photograph?

Ironically, Johnston includes a picture of an early phone in his article. When that phone was in use, end to end transmission would have been completely analogue, but these days the sound is converted to digital for routing over the network. Only the link between the exchange and the handset remains analogue. With mobile phones, the conversion happens within the device itself. Does that mean we need new terms for telephony as well?

I have rather nailed my colours to the mast here, but accept that others will have equally valid opinions which differ. What do you think?