From: Clay Harmon (wcharmon@wt.net)
Date: 10/06/03-01:42:21 PM Z
> And I must second Dave's response below, people have been manipulating
> photographs and negatives since they were first invented
Well, yeah, back in the day of paleo-photography, Hill and Adamson did
some pretty heavy duty negative re-touching to 'enhance' their images.
> . And photography
> has never been objectively truthful.
Well sure, maybe it never REALLY has been objectively truthful, but
there sure were a lot of people trying to convince us otherwise in the
middle of the 20th century. My point was that the f/64 groupthink
promulgated by Weston, Adams,Strand et al tried to give the photograph
the cachet of 'it sees even more than the eye' objectivism etc...Read
those Weston daybooks again. He and Strand in particular were
positively shrill in their insistence that the camera was somehow even
more objective and truthful than the eye itself, and that to try to
encourage the camera to be anything other 'than itself' was blasphemy,
and a crime against nature. My opinion is that neo-pictorialism is a
reaction against this limiting mind-set, and that now the digital
revolution has driven a final nail in the coffin of the idea of
objective visual truth in photography.
> We were all taught this in college.
>
>
My point is that they 'went to college' before you did. (Yes, I know
none of them actually went to college, though they managed to create
some pretty decent work despite this handicap.)
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