Through a Glass, Darkly...

After I'd posted last night about the depiction vs. narrative aspects of the photographic space, I experienced a sudden and enormously welcome, almost Damascene revelation that, despite having been digitised and tweaked slightly in the virtual "darkroom" of software, the two images I used to illustrate the piece were still unequivocally, demonstrably and evidently analogue - film - in their origin: something I'd never considered before. Thinking about it in retrospect, though, no matter how we try, even at this late stage in our technological development [analogue photographic pun intended], making a digitally originated image look genuinely, organically analogue has simply escaped us, although the historical, generational and experiential cognitive bias of those born post analogue should be taken into consideration here: If you don't know what old school silver photography looks like in the first place, there's no comparison to be made.

This has, understandably, some wonderful implications, both aesthetically and philosophically. Curiously, the 'truth' of the now greater 'fidelity' of the digital realm can somehow be usurped by the rather fuzzier and more organic, direct nature of film. All I can describe it as is the 'chewyiness' of analogue photos gives them an instantly recognisable quality and somehow a more direct 'veracity'. That this survives digitisation and editing in the digital domain I find remarkable and extremely fascinating. The picture above is one of mine, again from the late 1970s: the oblique narrative being the couple isolated in the far room, the woman casting a profile not dissimilar to one of Alfred Hitchcock's famous cameo appearances in his films. I also think the limitations of the film stock used to capture the image lend it the air of an Edward Hopper painting in monochrome: another level of implied narrative.

To my mind, it's everything to do with the intermediation of digital processing - particularly of phone camera tech - vs. the direct analogue of light on silver halide. Somehow, the analogue-ness of the original image is helpfully preserved by the process of scanning/digitising it. The upshot I guess is that there is mileage in using this workflow: capture on film, realise in Photoshop or whatever [the degree of tweak is up to the individual: I would keep it to the level of normal darkroom printing parameters: straightening lines, adjusting tonal balance, etc.] and output to whatever medium suits.

Modern cameras [mainly phones, but that's how most people engage with photography these days, anyway] now take many of the aesthetic decisions away from the user, editing and compositing the 'best image' in camera from a 'burst' of exposures and using the immense processing power at hand to give the user the photograph the software designer thinks they want most: even applying flattering filters to alter skin tone/texture or capture the 'perfect' sunset to Instagram their followers with.

It is in such subtle and apparently trivial ways that AI is insinuating itself into our lives, rather than the grand sweep gestures that we all imagine will be the case. A good dose of actual realised experience and some one-to-one imagery recording those experiences would be a welcome wake-up call to a generation growing up living vicariously in a Plato's Cave of AI-mediated existence.