This is a guest post by Dave Hendley, senior photography tutor at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.
I can safely lay claim to the fact that photography and music have been the only unswerving passions in my life, yet while I have written extensively about the later I have carefully avoided expressing in words my feelings about the former.
Photography’s realm is by nature an elusive and unruly place and this confusion is reflected by the many contradictory academic theories on the medium generated since the mid 20th century. Photographers are not by nature theorists or verbal communicators so most of this interpretation and re-contextualization comes from non-photographers residing in their own academic vacuum.
Although this may seem like stating the obvious, the act of photography (as is generally perceived) can be described as a procedure that is a formed from two primary processes. The first is the highly regulated parametric process of physics that uses a lens to gather light reflected from a spatial area of reality in order to record an image of that reality onto a photosensitive surface.
The second element of process is biometric; it is that of the apparatus/camera operator who uses their eyes and brain to decide what to frame. Intention, emotion, intellect, knowledge and culture all, to varying degrees, play a decisive role in this process.
The photographic image is the final result of this interaction (that is a process in itself) between a system of physics and the human system of perception.
Michel Frizot (2007) in his eloquent essay ‘Who’s Afraid of Photons?’ suggests that we need to adopt a realistic definition of what photography actually is. He articulates this concept of photography as photons accumulated on a sensitive surface within a measured quantity of time (exposure) in detail to argue the case for digital photographs, where only the initial recording is formed by light (the photographic object/print generated, unlike an analog image, is generally not made by a photosensitive process, although modern processes like Lambda printing use light sensitive papers and can be regarded as photographic in the traditional understanding).
For me this definition of photography as a union of physics and human cognition provides a very clear starting point for understanding what lies at the heart of the medium. Again this may well seem to be obvious statement but over the past 12 years I have worked with many students, particularly at postgraduate level, who have not been able, or willing, to grasp this simple concept of photography and expect to visually articulate the most complex ideas (many not even suitable for visual expression) without any understanding of the fundamental photographic language.
As a child I learned these principles in a very rudimentary way by observing my dad take photographs on the annual family holiday to Bognor Regis.
My dad only ever took pictures once a year, and habitually using 64 ISO Kodachrome. Economics dictated that only the one roll a year was ever purchased, 36 exposures if funds allowed and 24 if cash was scarce. The exposures were made economically over the two-week period with only notable places and events considered as worthy of being photographed.
One year in the absence of his favored emulsion he bought a roll of Agfachrome and from the disappointing results I understood a little about colour balance and of how different films had their own semiotic peculiarities which effected emotional response to an image. Although only a child, I still can recall that theses Agfa slides had a blue bias that made me view the photographs with an air of slight melancholy – Even the blue and white striped Agfa box did not seem to me as cheery as the deep yellow the Kodak packaging.
The very simplicity of my dad’s Iford Sportsman made the concept of exposure and focus very easy to understand. There was no light meter or rangefinder so exposure decisions were guided by the sunny/cloudy/shade icons on the film’s information sheet. Focus was set manually on the lens and calculated by using the depth of field scale.
On reflection I must have sub-consciously taken all this on board at an early age in a very effortless way. Ironically many years later it is teaching these basic principles that is one of the banes of my life as the over complicated menu systems and electronics of modern digital cameras seem to willfully hinder the understanding of photography’s fundamentals. This situation is further exasperated by the inpatient idiocy of would be photographers who buy these complex objects of fantasy without considering any need to read the instruction manual.
My own journey in photography, and my fascination with its ambiguous and impossibly elusive nature, was certainly sub-consciously activated by a fascination with my dad’s holiday slides and the rudimentary understanding that things look different once they are represented by photographs
I can remember the excitement in the house whenever a yellow package of slides with the Wimbledon postmark was returned from Kodak’s lab.
As we did not have a projector family members had to wait in turn to see each transparency dimly illuminated in a small Patterson viewer. My brother and I were last in the pecking order and I can recall to this day the feelings of hopeful anticipation that the camera had faithfully recorded the precious details of our holiday that were peculiarly significant to me.
More often than not the backlit image viewed did not align exactly with the mental picture that I held of the event. It did not disappoint, but in fact it invested these fragments of the real world with a surreal beauty that somehow resulted not just from the subject itself but how it looked once it was photographed.
All these years on from the early 1960s I still find that photography remains just as beguiling, and its inherently reflective quality possesses more power to move me than any other of the visual mediums.
Looking at good photography continues to keep me on the straight and narrow, and reminds me of my humanity when I all too often stray too far from the path.
Reference
Frizot.M ‘Who’s Afraid of Photons?’ - Elkins.J. ed (2007) 1st ed. Photography Theory. New York: Routledge