Hugh Hamilton

Before the sixteenth century if you wrote a book, regardless of the quality, you were pretty well respected, since reading and writing were impressive skills in themselves. After printing was invented penmanship was still important but as manufacturing arrived pens and pencils made their way into the population at large and by the beginning of the twentieth century most of the modern world could read and write. Why did the supply of masterpieces not suddenly increase? Well, it kind of did, since now there were magazines and pulp fiction and all sorts of outlets there hadn’t been before. It does take time though for genius to be recognized.

Andy Warhol once remarked that photography was the only art medium in which there was  even the remotest possibility of an accidental masterpieces. And he was right, accidental masterpieces are being created all the time out there now, if not by you then by people you know. So the body of work has become more important than ever, since intent has become the way you judge such things. Did the artist mean to do this? Or is this just chance fooling us again? I have nothing against accidental masterpieces at all - I think they’re wonderful - particularly when I do them!

So my feeling is that photography is now at the beginning of its own century. It is where writing once was - it is no longer a chemical art that takes skill and training but something that can be done with the press of a button. The general population have become visually literate and the means of production have become democratically available. Knowledge of optics and chemistry and all that stuff has gone by the wayside and the future is before us.

I have no idea where it will lead of course, but it is worth remembering just how hard photography used to be.

Where our ancestors were lugging around view cameras and struggling with Hasselblads and roll film we are walking around with lightweight toys will soon take pictures of equal quality. Where even only twenty years ago a decent portable strobe meant carrying a generator with you (or the world’s longest extension cord) there are battery powered lights out there that have more than a thousand watts at your disposable. When I started as an assistant umbrellas were pretty well the only light modification available to a photographer. There were softboxes, yes, but they were made of fibreglass and frosted plexi and sat on a huge studio stand attached to a Broncolor power pack that came up to my hip and was on wheels to allow it to get from one studio to the next. Sync cords were always in need of repair (I don’t think thats changed) and wireless remotes were only infra-red and fairly unreliable (again - thats unchanged - I hate infra-red). Pocket wizards and other radio slaves now allow remote triggering of lights and cameras at distances in excess of a hundred feet. Even little on camera flashes now not only have dedicated softboxes, but snoots, grids and barn doors. Where film speed was once a choice between 64, 100 or 400 ISO a high end digital SLR can shoot at 1500 ISO with less grain and noise than any of the old films.  If you can see something you can shoot it, hand held no less.

White balancing was a choice between daylight and tungsten films. And being confronted by fluorescent meant a journey into hell accompanied by various combinations of magenta and red filters and the ability to judge polaroid’s color accuracy with a magic eye.Truly accurate color meant having to order a single batch of film and doing tests that required shooting test frames with a  large number of Kodak gel filters measured in small increments of bias (5M, 10R, 15Y) etc, then hoping the machine you were processing the film in would stay consistent between the day of your tests and the day of your shoot. I was almost crucified by a client once for having a green dress turn out black! The only thing that saved me was eventually finding a leaflet from Kodak explaining that certain (cheap) fabrics radiated so much infra-red that the unseen red light actually negated the green dyes in the fabric when photographed.
Nowadays the infrared filter (part of the low-pass filter) on the camera’s chip would probably take care of that problem.

And more about polaroid. As beautiful as it can be in large format , mostly it was fuzzy, time consuming, smelly and accurate only for judging composition. And anyone who’s ever tried to judge exposure and composition on a 35mm polaroid frame (yes they used to sell polaroid backs for Nikon cameras - only out of New York for a thousand bucks) will remember the whole process was frustrating from beginning to end. And the time wasted waiting for those sixty seconds to pass!

At the upper end of things you can now put a grid on an 8 foot octabank and have beautiful soft directional light that doesn’t spill everywhere. 4000 watts of it if you so desire. You can travel and plug into any voltage anywhere without having to use converters or inverters or flip an annoying little switch -which if you forgot to do meant the pack would blow up and cost you more than the price of your new car. You can have a strobe that fires a flash of infinitely tiny duration, fast enough to catch anything you require, from a falling water drop to a gymnast in mid flight.

Retouching used to mean either an airbrush or a pencil that very carefully and meticulously changed an actual print. There was no undo, or ability to start again if you did it wrong. Mistakes meant having to order another print and starting over.

Color photographic printing was a choice between prints that would fade in five or ten years or cibachrome,a medium whose color was intense and gorgeous but whose chemicals were incredibly toxic and whose tones were so contrasty that a really good print was very difficult to achieve.

And books and magazines! I used to love my parent’s old copies of Life, but when I look at them now and see what passed for color reproduction, well, I’m aghast.
The first photo book I ever bought was Annie Leibovitz’s first monograph, way back in 1985. The color is good but is simply doesn’t compare to what can be done now. And these days, you can self publish your own monograph and it will be higher quality than what the most successful photographer of our time could do twenty five years ago.

I have no idea where the 21st century will take photography but if the past is any good, the future is brighter than most of us struggling now to make a living can envisage. Time to stop mourning the dying newspaper and magazine industry. Its not death. Its change.
Go with the flow or you’ll get swept away.