PJ’s Blog

This is something that has been on my mind for some time, now, brought about by various people’s reflections, and now by my recent discussion with Marie-Eve. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, and the subject of what is art has been beaten to death and beyond by art historians and critics and artists for a very long time. But I’ll just try to get my own opinion in writing, and hopefully it will bring some insights that I hadn’t thought about.

Art and photography are somewhat at odds with each other, from what I see around me. Why is it that there is something called “Artistic photos”, which implies that some photographs are not artistic… Are there some non-artistic paintings ? or sculptures ?

Agreed, when you paint your wall blue, it’s not necessarily art, and when you build a house, or a car, that can be equated to sculpture, and thus constitute non-artistic sculpture… Is it the same with photography ? Are there photographs, like the ones you have on the cover of your favorite daily newspaper, that have only an utilitarian, non-artistic purpose, and photographs that have a distinctive artistic quality ? And where is the line between the two drawn ?

Now, some schools of thought consider all man-made objects as art in some form or another. Practical, down-to-earth art, but some creativity is involved somewhere along the way to create anything from the computer you’re reading this on, to the chair (or couch) you sit in, to your books, furniture, even a simple cup of coffee might be considered a work of art. That basically mean we’re all artists, in one way or another, and that brings the question of the status of artists, what give more right to someone to call him or herself an artist ? What makes an object be considered art, and another to be considered only as an object ?

A visit to any contemporary art gallery can be a very confusing experience for anyone trying to answer this question. A museum here is Belgium had an exhibition last fall called “The removal of the museum’s glass windows” which constituted, in short, into ripping out the doors and windows from the building and leaving it open to the elements, empty, for a few weeks. What I understood out of this is the desire to open museums to the outside world, to try and be less hermetic in the contemporary art approach, but still, it left me with a bitter after taste of “what the heck is the point of all this ?”… Let’s continue this another day, shall we ?

A comment by a friend got me thinking, and i’d like to share it with you. Basically, she likes photographs that tell a story. She is a videographer and a cinema and comic book fan, so maybe that’s why she likes images to tell a story. One way or the other, it’s obvious that a picture that tells a story may seem stronger than an image that doesn’t. Here is the image she referred to in her comment, it’s an image I quite like from a photographer in Quebec City :

(image by Neonyme )

Now, can an image be interesting without telling a story ? I think it can, but it has to say something, it has to be more than just a mountain, a tree, a nude body, or whatever subject. My photography in general tends to be very technique-oriented, and even more these days, where I am discovering and exploring new techniques. I really appreciate it when someone gives me a comment which goes along the lines of “think, PJ, get off your technical butt and be creative, try to make worthwile images !”…

Usually I go back to making the same technical pictures over and over again, but I sometimes feel that there is a glimmer of hope and that I actually might start doing something creative one day… So Miss Tick, please, by all means, don’t stop bugging me, it might just improve my work…

It’s a strange thing that today a lot of photography is presented on the web. Even the best screens don’t have the same range of color and brightness rendition that a simple photographic print has, and don’t get me started on resolution !

For LF and ULF work it’s even worse, because the subtleties that make the medium so rich and interesting are not digitizable, there is no way, even with one of those 30″ apple displays, that I can show you what a 16×20″ print from a LF negative (even from a 35mm negative !) looks like unless you see it in person…

It’s a curse for LF shooters who’d like to get more people interested, because since most photography in presented on the net, and that it’s impossible to tell on a screen which image is from a digital camera and which is from an 8×10 camera, people are impressed that the digicam is as good as the LF gear, and go digital…

Anyhow, I don’t have a decent neg scanner at the moment, so I can’t really present my Polaroid 55 images unless I scan the polaroid print, which usually is far from the quality obtainable from the neg… I’ll try to get something rigged so I can get images to post from my 4×5 negatives, since I don’t have a darkroom at the moment. The next image of the PAW will be a type 55 polaroid negative…

I sometimes feel some resistance from artists who use a unique technique to share their knowledge. The argument goes like this : “I produce unique pieces of art, with a unique technique known only to me, if I share this technique everyone will start copying me, I won’t be unique anymore, and people will get tired of seeing the same stupid trick and stop having any interest in my work, thus I will die poor and forgotten, which is not the reason I got into art in the first place…”

Now, while I understand fully the reasoning, and share the fear of dying poor and forgotten, I think that arcane knowledge is not a good thing. My side of the argument goes like this : “My art needs some technical support, lenses, cameras, films, that I could do myself if I had my whole life to do them, but which I don’t, and many people around the world are potentially much better at grinding the front element for a Plasmat, or at machining the front standard of a 16×20 camera, or at brewing the emulsion to make FP4+, than I will ever be.”

Sure, photographer did it in the 19th century, build their own cameras, coat their own glass plates, but frankly, while I could (I think, and I’ll try my best to do it…) try to build a simple box-bellows camera, I’m pretty sure that Ron Wisner, Kieth Canham or Dick Phillips are better at it than I am…

What does it have do to with acranes ? And why am I going down the same path as my post from yesterday ? Well, because that’s where I’m going with my current photographic projects, that’s why I spend hours working to build the Mamut Photo website. The photographic industry has, like any other industry, only one thing in mind : getting more money, and it’s a fair goal, that’s what the whole global economy is built upon. The problem is that the ULF market is a niche market that very few companies serve. And none of those companies can depend on the ULF market to survive. Camera companies build hundreds of 4×5 cameras for every 11×14 or 12×20 that comes out of the assembly lines. Lens manufacurers have been catering more and more to the digital market. And the only move in the opposite direction in recent years has been by Schneider, with the introduction last fall of two lenses aimed squarely at the ULF market : the Fine Art XXL 550mm and 1100mm lenses.

This here is the 550mm f11 XXL lens. It goes against pretty much every tendency in the photographic market in the last 10 years, and that’s why I’d like to send major kudos to Schneider-Kreuznach for even thinking about this and putting it though the costs of development and research and pre-production, etc… With their current price tag, I doubt that they will sell a lot, but the simple fact of putting a product like that on the market today says a lot about the commitment of Schneider to the photographic community…

Now, we were talking about arcane knowledge, isn’t it ? I think that one of the reasons why Schneider has made such a bold move is that there is a growing international community of ULF photographers, who share knowledge about their photographic passion. If every photographer who got his hands on an ULF camera kept to himself and didn’t want other photographers to be interested in shooting larger formats, pretty soon he’d be alone with a camera for which he wouldn’t be able to find film, lenses and support. I’m a scientist first, so maybe that’s why I believe so strongly in the sharing of knowledge…

Polaroids are sometimes great, and sometimes, well… sometimes they’re not… Today’s image is an illustration of what can go wrong on a Polaroid transfer, mainly that the darker areas “stick” to the negative and get ripped out of the final image… It’s part of the process, ain’t nothing you can do ’bout it… except shoot “flatter” subjects… Separating the negative from the receiving paper under water is also supposed to help…

Not really, more of a madman’s endeavor… I have been selecting pictures for the Mamut Photo online galleries, and after a few, I realized that the images that I chose were the images that reminded me the most of my own. The artists I choose were those who’s vision is close to my own…

Now I guess it is normal, considering that the whole Mamut Photo project is built from my own passion for photography, but it means that I have to be extra careful to put up images that are representative of the photographer’s work, and not just the images that I like, because those images might not touch others in the same way they touch me. It also means that if Mamut ever goes further and we get a physical gallery, I’ll have to keep my passions on a tight leash if I don’t want the whole thing to look like if I had taken all the images… I begin to understand and respect the job of editors, and I even start to enjoy it. Who knows, maybe one day there’s going to be a Mamut Magazine…

I’ve been dealing with many people in the last few weeks over the internet, and many people ask me where I am situated, physically. If find it a little odd, especially in e-mail dealings about an online ressource, but I guess it is understandable, people need reference points… But an URL is a reference point, why do people need more ? I guess that people get a little disorientated when they don’t have a physical point on which to pin the website, or e-mailer… I’ve been using the internet since the advent of the www in the 90s, and seeing websites from around the world, giving different views of various subjects is something that i guess my sense of orientation has gotten used to… In my “real life” as a biologist, I’ve often had dealings with scientists from all over the globe, the internet makes the whole world only a click away… This is one of the great strengths of the internet, I think, to be able to bring together people from all corners of the world who share a common passion, mainstream or obscure, and share knowledge, which is the most valuable currency. By getting people practicing obscure hobbies together, like the bunch of madmen (and women) who work with ULF cameras, creating a community helps keep the craft alive. The onslaught from the digital world has slowly eroded the film supplies, and it is only by creating an active and vibrant community, not necessarily around Mamut Photo, there are already beacons of ULF and LF life around sites like lf.info, Apug.org and galerie-photo the important thing is to keep shooting film and supporting the LF community !

Here is this week’s picture : My experimentations with Polaroid 59 in the last few has been very interesting, and I’ve come across a problem inherent to the process : Darker areas of the image, like the hair here, have a tendency to “stick” to the negative, and not transfer properly to the paper. The photo shoot which gave this image started as another concept entirely, with various clothes as the subject, but the darker areas of the clothes tended to stick, and so the images are not very usable, and I did one nude, and it gave a good result, so I’ve finished to shoot with nudes. I’ve also determined that the best paper for my polaroid transfer in Hot Pressed watercolor paper, there seems to be not many varieties of this paper, and in the size I am using, only Arches offer proper paper… Hope you like it !

I’m one of those photographers who made the switch to digital when I felt that quality was getting close to 35mm film. I bought a Fujifilm S2 pro camera, because I already owned a couple of Nikon lenses, and that i liked the superCCDs from Fuji. In the 7 months I had the camera, I probably shot more than 6 thousand frames, something I would have never done in film (that more than 150 rolls of film…). It “freed” me from thinking about per-frame cost when I was shooting, so I experimented, I tried lighting setups, subjects, macro, infrared, without any restraint. On the computer, everything looked fine, but when printed, the images, especially the black and white ones, were lacking in depth, and I clearly saw a difference between my usual film prints (I use Ilford Pan F+ printed in 16×20 FB Ilford paper…) and the digital prints. I thought that there was something lacking in the prints that made a switch back to film worthwhile.

The “crop factor” factor of the digital equation is what kills it for me. On a pro-level SLR, it’s not such a big deal, but one of the reasons why I shoot on larger formats is to get shallow depth of field. I often shoot 4×5 with my 135mm f4.7 lens wide-open… Now, depth of field is directly linked to focal length, and since the smaller sensors call for shorter focal length, the direct result is that it is very hard to get a shallow depth of field in digital, even with “prosumer” digicams with f2.0 lenses. So what did I do ? I sold my S2pro, and bought a Hasselblad 500cm with the money. A whole other world, one in which I feel a lot more at home… Your own experience may be different, but I happen to value the feel and sound of a mechanical camera…

It all comes down to physics : a CCD sensor’s sensitivity and dynamic range is linked to the size of each pixel. It’s the same thing with film, sensitivity is directly linked to silver grain size. Now. Sensor size is a very important parameter in digital camera, and most digital cameras have small sensors, and the sensor size has not changed in the last few years, only pixel number as increased, and the only logical way to fit more and more pixels on a same-size sensor is to make the pixels smaller…

CCD sensors are manufactured from silicon wafers, and those wafers have defects, which means that if a ccd chip contains a defect, it has to be rejected. CCDs are difficult and costly to make in larger sizes, because the larger the size, the higher the number of CCDs with problems that have to be rejected. That’s why sensors with double the size cost more than double the price… The way to increase the dynamic range (which is the difference in illumination intensity between what the sensor “sees” as white and what the sensor “sees” as black) the way is to increase the size of pixels, and increase the size of the sensor. That’s what is done in Medium Format digital back, and that’s why they cost as much as they do (in the 10 000$ range…) One solution would be to make a 2 or 3 megapixels camera with CCDs of the same size as current 5, 6 or 7 megapixels cameras, but with individual pixels being much larger. Fuji has a technology that uses this idea partly, by using two sensors for each pixel, one smaller that can read “high” lights, and one larger that reads “low” lights. The digital world is falling victim to the megapixels race, I think photographers would be better served if quality was favored over quantity…