It was like a carpenters' convention where one group said, "I'm never going to use a hammer." And another group said, "I'm only going to use a hammer." And no one said, "Let's build something." Conventional gear or digital gear - they are just tools. And the day a carpenter shows up at my house with only a hammer or refuses to use a hammer, I'm going to fire him. The bad news for those photographers with "digiphobia" is that pictures have been transmitted and reproduced digitally for over a decade. Everybody in the racket has been using both the old film-based technology and the newer digital technology for some time now. They are immutabley intertwined. A long time ago (the 60's), some very kind people put me on a panel at one of the University of Miami Photojournalism Conferences. I believed I was to represent the "young and stupid" point of view. Obviously others were to represent the "old and wise" point of view. I had not counted on a third point of view, "old and stupid." Several members of the audience were worried that they would not be able to master the new, electronic cameras and were afraid they would have to leave photojournalism or be forced out by the younger kids who were comfortable with this new stuff. What were they talking about? It had to be more than built-in meters and motor drives. To this day those moments stand out in my mind, and I still have no idea what those people were talking about. But, it still makes me terribly sad. I am in love with the sheer beauty of a fine silver print from film exposed in a conventional camera by a good photographer. I collect them, hang them and spend a lot of time staring at them. They bring me immense pleasure, and I think it will be a long time before digital cameras catch up with the quality inherent in a conventional black-and-white print. But I also love how the newer technologies make those images and the stories that they tell available to so many people in newspapers, magazines, books, television and the Web. It probably was the same when the printing press came around. A large group of people probably said the Guttenberg Bible just wasn't the same as the beautiful, hand-lettered and illuminated bibles that the monks over in Italy were turning out. That's correct. But for the people who were able to read the stories in the Bible for the first time, it probably didn't seem too important. And for the story tellers themselves, the more, the merrier." |
