Digital Bigots

A thread on photo.net was called "Is There Digital Bigotry?" And in fact many who posted to the thread said that digital photography wasn't photography – it was "graphics" or some such.

Words become guilty or glorious by association. "Tragedy" comes from classic Greek for "goat song." (Early dramas replaced rituals that involved tearing a goat to pieces.) During the Renaissance the word took on the shine of ancient culture, so folks could object that Shakespeare didn't write "real tragedies" because the action didn't all happen in one place on one day, as required by Aristotle. A few years later the Romantics decided that plays like "King Lear" were the living embodiment of True Tragedy. Pretty soon everybody wanted to die tragically, since it was super cool, and now the media routinely call death a tragedy. Photography, that mechanical manipulation of chemicals and light, was dismissed for generations as "not art, just...photography." (A case can be made that the realistic paintings of the early 19th century fell out of fashion because they looked too much like photography, not enough like art.) At some point during the generation of Edward Weston and Cartier-Bresson it was discovered that photography is a kind of art after all, or at least "art photography" is. (Oddly, I have yet to see anybody advertise an "art painting.") It's a good sign, I think, that "photographer" has become an honorific, like "writer" or "sculptor," and that so many photographers say the mechanical manipulations of Photoshop don't deserve to be called photography.

In fact every photograph is manipulated. Things don't really look that way – two dimensional, often black and white, with people two inches tall inhabiting a world of dots, doomed to smile forever.

But that's beside the point, which is that the worst sin an artist – sorry, you know what I mean – the worst sin an artist armed with new technology can commit is to imitate what was done with the old technology. What you call the new stuff doesn't matter; if things work out, whatever you call it will become a badge of honor.