Foreword
It would be difficult for most who know my work to imagine why I would be asked to write a foreword for a book on digital photography. My knowledge is solidly built upon the foundation of 20th-century analog photography. I grew up in the golden era of what was then “conventional” silver-based black and white and chromogenic color photography. And while I have come to embrace numeric imaging (a polite way of dodging the term photography when speaking about the digital print), I am by no means an expert in its theory or use.
I research and teach how photographs were made in the 19th century when the photographer was not only the picture taker, but the maker of both the photosensitive substances used in the camera and the final physical object seen by the viewer. Before digital, the art and science of photography was based on formulas, hard materials, and techniques that often seem almost culinary to a modern audience. It was the era where the craft of photography was very physical. From a contemporary point of view, it can be very romantic to embrace the alchemy practiced by earliest image makers at the dawn of photography. And there’s the problem; for some reason we can easily let ourselves think of photography in the pre-digital era as more magical, but it was not.
Those who come to me to learn these early processes are often quick to explain that they are disillusioned with their digital photography. For some reason they have the sense that the early chemical-based photographic materials are inherently mystical and digital imaging is not. I’m sorry, but the notion that digital image capture in the camera is less fantastical is a concept that is completely lost on me. Aren’t all methods of image capture some form of magic?
The Photograph as a Physical Object
It seems to me what people are really missing in the new era of photography is the physical object. Gone is the physical massaging of materials in the creation of physical photographs and, aside from a smartphone or laptop, there is often nothing of the photograph to hold.
The activity of shooting with the camera is not so different than what has been done in the last hundred years. We choose a subject, accept or manipulate the light, and compose and make decisions that ultimately affect the image capture on a light-sensitive substance. But what we do with digital images is very different.
There are more digital images made in the world every single minute than what was produced in a month’s time during the chemical age of photography, but there is not an actual object to hold in one’s hand. While not all the photographic negatives developed from plates and film over the years resulted in a positive print, a great many have been, and those that were not can still be used.
On the other hand, once the numeric record of a digital image is secured, most people share their digital images on their phones, on their laptops, or over the Internet. In a poetic way, this sharing and viewing of digital imagery on an illuminated screen more elegantly fulfills the term photography given that the Greek words photos means light and graphos means drawing. With many digital images, the visual information exists, but there is no physical object to cherish the way we revere the photograph passed down through generations.
A great concern with the transition from chemical to digital photography is impermanence and the lack of a physical print. The digital capture is fleeting and fragile. The evolution of photographic materials from its invention to the present day went from the creation of silver-based images made on copper plates, glass plates, and iron plates to the last incarnation, paper. There are vast collections of photographs made on these materials all over the world. These physical objects are finite and diminish every year due to deterioration, natural disasters, and indelicate handling. But they exist.
Countless digital captures in the form of ones and zeros are stored on hard drives, and with every malfunction of a storage device or failure to update to a new system they are lost to obscurity. Unlike the shoe box of old photographic film negatives in the attic that can always be used to produce a positive print of some type, the digital file can become useless or even disappear completely in a millisecond. Digital records need to be handled carefully and nurtured to survive more than one lifetime.
From an artist’s standpoint, we live in the absolute best time to make photographic imagery. At this moment there are still silver-based materials being commercially manufactured, digital imagery is well established, and there is a growing culture of artists using hand-formulated photosensitive materials introduced in the 19th century. They need not be mutually exclusive.
For the artist using digital photography, there are many creative options that include combining digital camera capture with the materials traditionally associated with the craft of photography. These not only include a broad pallet of historic printing processes and techniques, but also new technologies for producing digital images as physical objects, which is exactly what this book is all about.
About Mark Osterman
Mark Osterman is the photographic process historian at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York. Osterman is well known to the alternative process community as a founder of the modern movement of the wet collodion technique for fine art photography. His writings on the evolution of photographic process are appreciated not only for their content but for their clarity.
Osterman’s interest in the technical evolution of 19th-century photography caught the attention of the conservation department at Eastman House, and for ten years he taught photograph identification to conservators worldwide while continuing his own primary research using the museum’s vast collections. He now teaches public workshops on historic photographic processes at Eastman House and international venues, and regularly reintroduces rare and unusual 19th-century photographic techniques.
As an artist, his imagery, made with both historic and digital techniques, is collected by museums, institutions, and private collectors. His work is exhibited in gallery and museum venues internationally and can be seen in many publications. Osterman is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Tilt Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona.