Source: Fontcuberta, J. (2014) Why do we call it love when we mean sex? Pandora's Camera. Mackbooks. UK (pp 183-188)
Fontcuberta explores the documented history of the beginning of the photographic age - illustrating the fact that it was process orientated: scientists looked for the means of rendering a scene onto photosensitive paper and "truth" was captured. Fox Talbot documented reality in "The pencil of Nature". Photography was not seen as an act of expression.
Artists later started to take more creative images and make installations. Conceptually they were not understood by the public and became mislabelled e.g. Bernd and Hilla Becher make sculptures with the camera etc. Semiotic confusion - image identity is compromised. "Museum curators ...interested in the work [rather] than the technique". (Fontcuberta, 2014:185)
We move further away from traditional photography every time we make a photograph. Camera is a machine and the photographer is not an android. Photography is subjective and should be about documents becoming art.
Pictorialism - amateurs slated for being too pictorial. In the 1980's photography became more cultural and expressive. Now digital is becoming pictorial. Stark difference between digital and analogue - like the difference between writing and inscribing.
"It has not always been said that photography was the "writing of light" but that apercu is increasingly shifting from metaphor to literal truth." (Fontcuberta, 2014:187) (Apercu - comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating point)
Perfection is something which should be strived for but not achieved because perfection is divine. Perhaps as critics of our own work we don't think we have reached perfection? I wonder if this is different among other art forms?
Perhaps there was hope that digital would be the answer to conceptualism as the photographer could create the images they thought of mentally? Is digital photography still photography? Or should it be called something else?
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