Exposed For The Shadows

I’m afraid I’m somewhat puzzled and amused by the heated reaction on the part of some photographers to the rise of digital photography and the decline in popularity of the silver process. To me it’s just another step in the constant development of the medium. But there are a few remarkable differences in this newest change in technology which make it a much better change than most of the ones we’ve had in the past. I want to review the progress of the medium over the centuries to make my point.

Of course, cameras (the camera obscura, first discovered when pinholes in tent fabric would project an upside down image of the outside on the wall of a tent in the desert) were around for at least 1,000 years before anyone came up with a way to preserve the image they formed. That was the secret of photography. It’s the only secret of photography, and it was revealed more than 160 years ago.

The first successful photographic process to produce permanent images was, of course, invented by Daguerre who was building on the discoveries of his partner, Niepce. It was essentially a silver process using iodine to sensitize a polished silver plate. Mercury vapor was the developer and common salt was the “fixer” which desensitized the silver.

This was a difficult and dangerous process. Many photographers died from exposure to mercury vapor. The resulting image, as we all know, was difficult to view. But it was remarkable for the high quality of the images. We know Daguerreotypes are quite permanent because many made in the first half of the 19th century are still with us.

Why aren’t we still using that process? It worked quite well, despite a few disadvantages. The silver plates were certainly more durable than the paper we produce photos on now.

Well, there have been many other photographic processes invented over the years. Talbot invented a paper-based process at about the same time as Daguerre came up with his. It was Herschel who first used what was then called hyposulphite of soda to remove the unexposed silver from his photographs. That chemical, now called sodium thiosulfate, but which we all call “hypo,” remains a basic ingredient of the chemical process to this day.

There have been many other processes invented and used over the history of photography. Talbot’s calotype was an improvement on his original process. Then the collodion process (sometimes called “wet plate”) replaced Talbot’s, using glass plate negatives. This became the process of choice. It is still used today by some photographers. This was Matthew Brady’s process. It was slow and difficult, but produced photographs of excellent quality.

OK…to keep this from getting too long (oops, too late) I’ll stop describing each process and just list a few of those that followed. For quite a few years these were just printing processes using collodion negatives: Carbon prints, Carbro prints, tin types, ambrotypes, carte-de-visite. By the 1880s dry plates replaced the wet plate process. Soon the inventions of electric light and fast printing papers allowed the beginning of mass produced photo prints. The hand-coated wet plate negative was finished.

Then George Eastman came along. Glass plates were replaced by flexible plastic film. Mass produced simple cameras and mass photo finishing made photography a common activity. The basic negative/positive silver process that is still in use today was now in place…more than a century ago.

There are, of course, a lot of other processes that can produce photographs. Gum bichromate, platinum, gold…any precious metal will work. Why did we settle on silver? Speed, ease and cost were the basic reasons. Not quality. In fact, most advances in the process of photography have sacrificed quality for a process that was easier, safer and faster.

So now I come to my point at last. The current move to digital photography is different. It is different because it is not sacrificing quality. The digital process is easier, faster, safer (it introduces less toxic chemicals into the environment…and into the bodies of darkroom workers). And the quality is now higher than what is attainable with the silver process. The sensors in the latest professional digital cameras have greater resolving power than the lenses used on the cameras can deliver. The d-max attainable with the latest pigment ink jet printers is blacker than can be achieved using a silver process. The ability to control tones in a print through computer software is vastly greater than what can be done while making a silver enlargement, even by the most skilled darkroom technician. Pigment ink jet prints have greater permanence than chemical color prints and approach the permanence of black and white silver prints.

Photography is not a religion. From listening to some bemoan the change to digital you’d think there was something holy involved. Photographs can certainly capture the holy. But how it is captured doesn’t matter. It’s just a process. The process has changed many times over the years, often for the worse in terms of quality. This change is at least one that offers higher quality. And all I really care about is the photographs. I want to share my vision of the world and I want to see what you have to share of your vision. I don’t really care about the process used to record the photos. Whatever works is fine with me. Digital works. So does silver. Use what you like. But show me the photos.

References for this post were The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall and A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography written by Robert Hunt and first published in 1841, edited by James Y. Tong and reprinted in 1973.

Today’s photo continues my red and black theme. Photographed with a digital camera using a lighting setup that has been used by photographers almost since the beginning of the medium.