Posted on 06/21/2015 6:32:16 PM PDT by Beave Meister
Most curators hope to get glowing reviews and popular acclaim when they mount an exhibit. Michael Kamber, on the other hand, is expecting some blowback for his latest show, “Altered Images: 150 Years of Posed and Manipulated Documentary Photography,” which opens this weekend at the Bronx Documentary Center.
And he’s perfectly O.K. with that.
“I think there will be some unhappy people,” said Mr. Kamber, a photojournalist and founder of the center. “That’s good. If people would stop faking photos, then they wouldn’t have to be worried about being called out.”
The exhibit, a selection of well-known images that have been altered, staged or faked, is an indictment of some modern practices, and practitioners, of photojournalism. At a time when veteran photographers are being replaced by newcomers or untrained “citizen journalists,” it also raises important questions about the profession’s future amid increasing doubts about the veracity of images.
(Excerpt) Read more at lens.blogs.nytimes.com ...
the first usable digital dslr...required it being tethered to a Macintosh Computer....
My not that terribly expensive Canon DSLR camera produces images with more available detail that previously available using slide film.
This is all still in its relative infancy .
absolutely
I posted a photo of ansel standing between two prints form the moonrise negative..here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3302688/posts?page=10#10
when Im asked if I “used photoshop” on an image...I often refer people to that comparative image!
This one famously illustrates the how the written and broadcast copy work hand in hand with selection from a series of stills to present an altered version of reality. And done with skillful deliberation by news agencies and final outlets. Even knowing that the "victim" was a captured terr not in uniform it nonetheless evokes a visceral reaction. Too many retain that imprint forever.
some of the inane stuff that came out during the “iraq war”......[ prior to Husseins hanging’] with the same dead guy....appearing as Mr VIctim....in several series of photos at several DIfferent Locations was...rather laughable
The usual watercooler experts know damn little of film negatives and paper print processing.
We’re a bit more than a decade from popular acceptance of digital cameras. The vast bulk of the film camera users had no clue as to film processing and know nothing of the techniques used to produced excellent prints.
My dad’s first enlarger was hand fabricated in post WWII displaced persons camp. The tube was a cut down brass artillery shell with hand cut helical slots engaging the pins on the focusing tube/lens board assembly. Have no idea where the condenser lens came from. The lens shutter assembly came from some folding camera that had to be manually cocked. Exposures were necessarily long. I still have most of the pieces as well as some very sharp well zoned prints.
Back when I augmented my income selling art prints I’d spent days planning the bw print and a very long night to get to achieve what I wanted, just one frame before making a limitrd production run and yet there was still a loser or two.
At last count I have boxed and stored five enlargers and accessories, a Minox the smallest.
Personally I welcome the whiz-bang digital image capture units. The Olympus 4:3 still my favorite if now semi obsolete.
Know any body interested in a vintage Contax II with NICE lenses or a Leica f red dot?
God, I hate my android phone though.
Okay, I can’t state this with absolute certainty, but I’d bet that in the past 70 a new, more economical and more easily printed negative has been made. Exactly when, I cannot say.
70 years
It isn’t about an easier negative. Different people want different qualities of light brought out in the print.
Burn one section of the photo, dodge another, etc. That is the hand of the artist.
If you make a copy negative off the print, the print is the original and everything else is a much less valuable COPY.
Also, in the computer analogy, you cannot use “undo”. If you mess up in a step, you start all over again (you cannot remove light exposure from a piece of photo paper under the negative).
Would you pay the same dollar to see Paul McCartney singing over taped tracks of the rest of the band “getting it perfect” in a studio that you would to see the whole band giving it a go, all at once, live?
“If you make a copy negative off the print, the print is the original and everything else is a much less valuable COPY.”
Okay. They still sell prints of that image. Are you saying they haven’t made some accommodation for that and are still hand printing every one from the original negative?
If they are selling it as "from the original negative" yes indeed. And the art market notes the difference.
The rest are "collector prints" with no art collector value. That's why the genuine article brings so much at auction.
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