Sad Mag is going digital-photography-free in 2012, so we asked Kevin Kerr to reflect on the value of film photography in the context of his study of photographer-scientist Eadweard Muybridge. Read on for a discussion of authenticity, trust and the artist-audience relationship.
I think the transition back to film from digital is representative of the persistent desire for craftsmanship in the art we engage with and authenticity in our experiences. Photography was a profound innovation that moved the locus of where we drew our understanding of “truth” from within our selves to outside of ourselves. Muybridge’s instantaneous photography encouraged the belief that technology would reveal the secrets of nature that were kept from us by our own physical limitations. We became convinced that a photograph couldn’t lie and that it was a portal to an authentic moment in time and space.
Digital photography, for all of its advantages, has eroded that trust in the photograph as something inherently genuine and sincere. We look at photographs today, and instead of them being proof of the remarkable around us, they are instantly suspect and we question the photo-maker’s motives rather than focus on the subject being depicted in the picture.
With the advent of instantaneous photography, Muybridge moved away from the interpretive, subjective qualities of his landscape photography (which he frequently manipulated, making him an early pioneer of photoshop as well as cinema), in favour for a pursuit of objective, scientifically verifiable “truth”. He wanted to shed all artifice and lift the veil off of nature. But even so, when viewing his body of work in the animal locomotion series, it doesn’t take long to see the artist at work behind the science. The craftsmanship is there with his attention to not only the factual results, but an aesthetic experience as well.
A portion of the fascination comes from understanding the process undertaken to achieve the results. We’re astounded by the results knowing the limitations within the technique. I think a certain amount of satisfaction of knowing that Sad Mag is going to be returning to film is imagining the quality of the experience of not only the viewer, but of the photographer. We can imagine the required specificity of the artist’s intention when taking a picture, as she can’t cheaply fire off an unlimited number of quick images, but is restricted in the number of exposures by the length of celluloid. There is a genuine connection to the materials, a basic understanding of the chemistry as the photographer becomes familiar with the interaction between light and shadow on the particular film stock. And we appreciate that there is required an added degree of intuition required in the making of the photo as there is no instant preview of the image in the digital display. The photographer must place all of her attention cleanly on the subject and trust her eye and her intimate relationship with the camera. And then simply wait and see, long after the subject is gone, the results of the intuition. There’s a sort of beauty in this pause — a chance to let the real moment complete and dissolve before its transformation into representation, media, simulacrum.
Words by Kevin Kerr. Illustration by Sarah Clement.