[HUG ] Re: Hasselblad, Leica, Rollei, Microtek [2/27/09]


Patrick St.Cin wrote:
Photography by definition is the use of light to create and image. I don't believe the dictionary discriminates between the media used...look at the camera obscura...it is an early form of photography by means of recording an image by hand but using basic pricples of optics to 
create the image on the paper.


And there's where the very valid point lies that Jim is making.
If you hold a print that was produced projecting light through a negative, through a lens, on paper in which it is captured by chemical's reaction to that light, that truly is a photograph.
If the print is produced by squirting blobs of ink onto a bit of paper that absorbs it enough to fix it in place, but not enough to make the ink disappear entirely into the fibers (which would work too, but need muc more ink), where is the "photo" in that "graph" you are then left holding?
The medium itself is a true photograph in the first, a print in the second process.
The same holds for negatives (or positives) produced in camera (a direct result of the action of light upon the medium itself), and the CF-card and HD the digital images exist on. While both may hold virtually the same information, the former is the true photographic medium, the latter is not (a text file on your hard disk is fundamentally the same as that image file: would then not both be photographs?)
But the all important bit is, of course, in how things start, what it is that is recorded (light).
So i have no problem at all recognizing digital photography as true photography (in fact, it would never cross my mind that it might possibly not be). 

Still, the print from your inkjet is not a photograph in the true sense.


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