Friday, November 19, 2010

optical! digital! lets call the whole thing off!

whoa its been awhile. ill try to ignore that and update about life another time; i'd prefer to get this down now.

interesting lecture from justine kurland tonight at columbia college. one of the last questions she was asked was why she still shoots and prints optically these days. needless to say it sparked quite an intense and drunken discussion later in the night between friends. obviously, its a matter of preference, but in my opinion digital printing is the way to go. not just because its the wave of the future, but because digital printing has a wider gamut of color than optical, and our actual vision has a wider gamut than any man-made reproduction still has.

the question raised was, why does photography have to reference reality? obviously, the photograph is an art object and a new reality within itself. but still, photography inherently deals with reality. Even in the most modernist photograph, one thing relartes to another thing relates to another because, say, the statue in this photograph has some social connotation that we understand to relate to this couple in the photograph, and their style of dress ultimately speaks to the era of the photograph, which in turm speaks volumes about the context of the photo. what i'm trying to say that even in the most modernist tradition of photography (which i am entirely partial to and starstruck by), there is still a level of social understanding that glues the photo together. why is it do you think that douglas crimp wrote "the postmodern activity of photography." it beautiful really, photography inherently has modernist qualities and postmodern qualities all woven in almost seamlessly. this is why i'll always believe that photography is one of the smartest, most engaging and intriguing mediums of artistic expression to ever have existed.