The Universe Folds Back On Itself
My friend Matt Barton holds the Salon of Surface Noise every weekend, dj'ing 78's (that's 78 revolutions-per-minute record albums, just in case someone under 25 ever reads this) every weekend at The Living Room, in the East Village. Today's edition of The Next Big Thing (a great radio show produced here in New York City) presents a sound sampler of the tunes Matt devotes his life to exploring, preserving and popularizing. Not merely a weekend platter maestro, he's an American roots music expert at The Smithsonian.
Dean Olsher, The Next Big Thing's creator and host, describes Matt's gig spinning 78s as "one more example of the universe folding back on itself."
After yesterday's open house at the School of Visual Arts, I am thinking about the onset of digital media in photography. Is the emphasis of SVU's graduate program about art, or commerce? Is it ridiculously 20th century of me to persist in thinking they're different?
This kind of technological upheaval is intrinsic to photography. The daguerreotype, (the first true photographic process) was announced by the French government in 1839, inaugurating daguerreotype mania in France, England and the United States. It was outclassed 12 years later by the wet collodion process (which really is wet), and in 1871, a more convenient dry process was created that tossed wet collodion into the commercial dustbin.
And this leaves out all kinds of other processess that were trying to make it on the market at the same time: ambrotype, talbotype, albumen printing...daguerreotype -> wet collodion -> dry plate process is simply the progression annointed by art historians as the main current in the history of photography.
Each brought a particular look to photographs.
The aesthetics and physicality of these old processes continue to engage. Sally Mann makes collodion photographs using an ancient 8x10 camera and old lenses. Photorealist painter Chuck Close makes daguerreotypes.
There's a commercial photographer doing wet collodion, in the Tribeca building where I rent a darkroom. He's also got a high-speed Internet connection in there. The universe folds in on itself.
Digital's main contribution to photography is not the technology--monitors instead of glass plates, computer processors instead of chemical processes. (There's certainly no ecological advantage in digital over chemical.) In the end, most photographers are still trying to get their work output onto paper, no matter how they created it.
Digital will really come into its' own when a new, accomplished artistic aesthetic emerges, actively advancing the history of photography.
Posted by Emily at November 9, 2003 11:26 AM