Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive » The Golden Age of Photography

The Golden Age of Photography

Ohh my poor head!! It’s January 2nd and it still feels like my head is trying to see how far it can squeeze my eyes out of the front! Welcome to 2010!

On a rare moment of lucidity I managed to sit down for five minutes and browse a few pages looking for the TV schedule to see if by some slim chance there might be a decent film on today that’s actually worth watching. As usually happens I got distracted, and I came across an article posted over at recordnet suggesting that with the advent of digital cameras we’re now in a ‘golden age of photography’. It raises some interesting points and talks of how things are a lot simpler now, a lot more accesible, and then finishes with a rather interesting thought that I won’t spoil for you, but it did make me wonder about a few things as well.

I remember back in the days when I was kid, my father used to have one of those Polaroid cameras with the image that pops out of the front (I was too young to remember the name) and I recall also that it created great family moments where everyone would be huddled around waiting to see the results of each festive shot. Those days are sadly behind us now unless you have a pogo printer to hand but as the article states, the relatively cheap price of digital cameras and their lack of film, has opened up photography to everyone in such a way that now you don’t even need a camera at all, you can just whip out your phone and take a shot with that! Cliches abound and i’m sure someone will one day step up and proclaim that “photography is the new black!” but does this mean that we are actually witnessing a demise in the technical skills that many of us associate with photography?

Going back once again to my formative years and my knowledge of computing came about partly because I needed to know a fair bit in order to run sequencers that would control the new generation of digital synthesizers that were starting to come in back in the 80′s. Prior to that there had been cables everywhere and terms like VCO, VCA, envelope generators, modulation generators, etc, were spat out as easily as a coffee with no sugar. The simplification did nothing to take away the complexity of those who wished to become an exponent of this new technology, on the contrary in many ways it actually seperated the men from the boys, the ladies from the girls. Certainly it did create an influx of ‘one note wonder’ bands where it was enough just to have a droning Prophet 5 in the background or a Jupiter 8 playing arpeggios at break-neck speed, but it also opened up a new world where the likes of Jean Michel Jarre and Klaus Schulze began to find themselves with a wider audience. Real class always stood out and, so too I think, did the natural inclination within each of us for deeper discovery.

Certainly if you look around you today you can see the results of ‘music for the masses’ with shows like the X-Factor dragging what I rather cynically consider to be talentless drones and propelling them to stardom, but that has always been the way of popular music. For those who wish to knock the skin off their rice pudding and look a bit further, quality bands like Missing Andy to name but one, can still be found. So too with photography.

As a lover of landscape photography I look around me and more and more i’m seeing photographers going back to full format film cameras. Big, hulking, brutes of cameras that look like they need an articulated lorry and a police escort to get them safely to the field. Even reading through Twitter updates recently i’ve noticed a trend in photographers posting that they’ve been out taking some new shots but they won’t get them back from the printers for another couple of days. If anything, it seems like within the professional community, the trend is actually drifting back more towards an analogue past than a digital future. That’s not to say that ‘digital’ is frowned upon, on the contrary new technologies such as hdr video in dSlr’s is being widely embraced, but when it comes to photographers really letting their passion for the art run wild, going back to film and all its supposed hardships actually seems to be the favoured route.

It’s for that reason that I think that any fear of not seeing another Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson is unfounded and actually, the opposite is true. In the same way that it’s wrong to judge a book by its cover (Just how many clichés can I come out with today!) it’s equally wrong to think that adoption by the masses will define something that has never really been dictated by them. People will always follow trends. There will always be fads and crazes. Photography though, is an artform and I don’t think it’s going to be dictated to in any substantial way by anything other than the heart and soul of the photographer. As artists or photographers (call us what you will) there is a need inside each of us to express something greater than we feel able to with words alone. It is exactly that need which will dictate the future of photography, and it is exactly that which I suspect will bring about many more Ansel Adams‘.