Just curious Denyer; would you say the same thing about say, oil painting? There is a certain cheap oil painting coming into the market from, no surprises, China. What they do is take the photograph of painting, digitally alter it; and then kind of spray paint on a canvas. Very difficult to differentiate from a real oil painting. Now will you knowingly hang such a thing on your bedroom wall; or argue it has the same artistic merit as a real oil painting ( lets ignore the illegal reproduction issue for the moment). Will not the craftsmanship of a oil painter ( even an average oil painter) distinguish itself from this mechanised reproduction ( even if the final chinese product is brilliant).
Not meaning to be aggresive; just being curious
In my view, the craft is as important as the art; and how it has been created carries as much value. Which is why I will never hang a print on my walls; any painting, even the poor ones are more desireable to me.
That's a very, very interesting and thought provoking point. Have you read "On Photography" by Susan Sontag? I believe she touches on a similar issue and explores it far more articulately than I could ever hope to.
Once again I believe my initial explanation let me down. No doubt this one will too, but it's an ideological thread so why not? Take care, though, that earlier I was talking about artistic merit, not emotional value. The two are very different beasts. I can respect an image created digitally by a talented photographer, but I can't guarantee it will have any emotional value to
me.
There is seemingly a distinction, isn't there, between something that is difficult or time consuming to create, and something that is readily duplicated. A photographic print, one could argue, takes mere seconds to reproduce, as does an oil painting if created by (And let's just imagine a near future for a moment) some kind of robotic painter. The contents of that print may have been the result of years of labour, or a moment of circumstance, but the result can be duplicated so many times over "without effort", making the appraisal of value on the basis of invested time rather more difficult.
Where does one attach the value ? People (seemingly) value original paintings because they are one of a kind. There is a scarcity associated with them, especially if the artist is dead, and some kind of aura surrounding both the time invested by the artist in the creation of the piece and also in that particular work having been touched, manipulated and originated by the artist. (As an aside I was fortunate enough to see in Sydney, Australia, pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's codex notebooks. I can vividly recall standing there, slack-jawed, not in particular awe of the contents (Which I have seen online and in books) but transfixed by that intangible quality of those pages being the very items handled by the great man himself. Right there, behind the bulletproof glass and beneath the subdued light, were pages once touched and laboured over by someone whom I admire a great deal. It was that, not the contents, that made those pages so special and so valuable.)
If one feels a connection or admiration with an artist, then to own something so intimately linked with that person has within it its own value, one that is hard to translate into any real fiscal amount. I keep a few small items which belonged to my late grandfathers, their market value, zero, the sense of attachment to those two wonderful men? Immeasurable.
Tracking back, to oil paintings, prints and photographs. Original darkroom prints carry with them some of the mystique of original paintings. They were the direct, physical product of someone's labour. Should you admire Ansel Adams or Robert Capa, to hold in your (Hopefully white gloved!) hands something which they too once held and admired instils some sense of connection with the artist that, I think, is lost in reprinting. The physical and emotional connection severed by an dispassionate middleman or machine.
For example, take the Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche. If Delaroche had commissioned a Chinese factory to produce 100 copies of his painting and those 100 pieces were his end result, then those 100 pieces would be the items which held that emotional-physical connection to the originator. That would be his end result. The origination of the painting itself a manifestation of his skill, the robotic reproductions the end result. At this point, is Delaroche any different to a photographer? Are we paying for the brush-strokes, or just the fact that
he made them? If it's the latter, then the factory produced reprint has little value.
I guess it boils down to whether one values what is in the photograph, or whether one values the connection with the original artist. The latter sways me, on some emotional level, which is perhaps why I have difficulty connecting with anything produced digitally. Somehow the silicon chasm that stands between the ideal of the artist and the final output is too wide for my emotions to leap. People pay great sums of money for original prints by Cartier Bresson, would they pay the same fee for a digital download?
So, in evaluating
artistic merit, no, I don't care how anyone reaches their goal. A printed Delaroche is still an incarnation of his original brushwork and as such is as artistically impressive as the original. Reprint and show me a photography by any great photographer and an artistic level I can appreciate it. Whether it connects
emotionally through the physical link as I've tried (And probably failed!) to describe, though ? That's where I'm not so sure.
I know I personally have no love for any of my digital photographs (Beyond sentimentality for photographs of relatives or places of memory) because of this silicon divide, something that separates me somehow from the moment of actually being there, where the photograph was taken.
Would I hang a digitally reproduced DaVinci or Delaroch? Sure, but only as one would stick up a poster, to make the place look nice, not to fulfil any emotional desire.
I just feel a much greater connection to the process when doing it in the darkroom as compared to squinting at a monitor for a few hours before sending TIFF's off to Peak Imaging. I suppose it comes from working with computers all my life, I view everything that happens inside them with a rather cold, engineering oriented eye.
