Lachlan717 wrote:What about someone making digital negatives to use for contact printing? Is that an art/not art/art scenario?
Don't forget that, before negatives as we know them, there were dry plates. Before that, myriad ways to do wet plates.
Even with film, there was ortho before pan. Does than mean that we dismiss pan as it didn't rely on previous knowledge? And, wide spread colour was only available after WWII. Does that make colour any less of an art?
Or, can we just get over this sh#t and make some shots?
The single crucial, decisive, absolutely unambiguous, and unifying characteristic of all photographs is that they are pictures generated
in a light sensitive surface by light acting on that surface. Film negatives, paper negatives, gelatin-silver positives, dry plates, wet plates, ortho emulsions, pan emulsions, and colour films, despite their varied characteristics share the common property of being light sensitive and being capable of transformation into photographs by virtue of that light sensitivity.
Very often pictures are called photographs because untutored people don't know the actual names for them. Open any glossy magazine and you will see colour pictures. Most folks point and say "photograph". The pictures are actually "four colour web-offset prints", not photographs. The same applies to duotones, xerox copies, halftone press prints, gravures, woodburytypes, dye transfer prints, inkjets, and monitor images. None of these things come into existence because they have light sensitive properties invoked by the arrival of light.
Another recurrent misconception is that any picture derived from a photograph, however indirect or distant the relationship, becomes by virtue of that ancestry a photograph in its own right. A photograph of a photograph is a photograph but everything else is something else. Example: I take a paper negative of a film negative. Result: a positive picture on paper I call a gelatin-silver photograph. Counter-example: I scan a photograph and generate an electronic file that I display as a picture on a monitor. Result: monitor image or "screen looker"; not a photograph.
Even sillier is the prevalent idea that a photograph is any picture that starts off from the act of light hitting a sensitive surface. The howler here lies in the fact that ALL realist pictures start off that way. Remember, realist paintings and drawings all require light to strike the sensitive retina of the artist's eye to get the process going. And (forgive the bleeding obvious) the artist's retina does not become the picture; does not become a photograph.
A popular notion equates any camera use whatsoever with photography. 'Taint so! Johannes Vermeer and Giovanni Canaletto used cameras and produced paintings. CCTV cameras deliver surveillance footage. Gamma cameras map radionuclide concentrations. Digital cameras generate displayable electronic files. TV studio cameras output broadcast television. Only in that very small corner of the camera universe in which you place labile light sensitive surfaces at the focal plane of a camera are you liable to get photographs.
It's a matter of practicality that Large Format Photography Australia traffics in monitor images accessed via the internet. My personal bias is that those images should depict the photographs that members actually make. I dislike electronic files of scanned negatives being recalculated and displayed as fictitious positives. The English site "Film and Darkroom User" bans the process outright. By all means show me negatives. I like negatives. I've seen thousands of negatives. Negatives are my good and familiar friends.
The history of photography records a salient example of the power of negatives. When Ansel Adams was granted his first audience with the famous Paul Strand there was an initial shock of disappointment. Strand had no positives to show only negatives. But Adams notes in his autobiography it was the magnificence of those negatives that finally swerved him to the path of photography instead of a career as a concert pianist.
Large Format Photography Australia is a special place for special photography. There are plenty of other sites to go for intellect-free picture sharing.