Photography is literally "writing with light." Real photography may consist only of inscribing a written message onto a photosensitive surface. Thus, aim a light pen at a piece on photographic paper or emulsion in a darkened room, trace a message. Or holding candles, semaphore a signal to a video receptor. Or set a camera to a timed exposure in a darkened space and write across the surfaces therein with a flashlight. (I'll do that tonight.)

Then there is traditional (classical) photography, which involves a photo­sensitive emulsion and processing chemicals. Often a box and lens (or at least a pinhole) are involved. Ah, chemical photography: daguerrotypes, tintypes, film, wet emulsion, dry emulsion, colloidial suspensions - they requires developers and fixers and such smelly stuff. Photography that smells.

Simplest photography requires only sunight and surfaces. Put a piece of paper or cloth out in the sun with some object sitting on it. Wait a few weeks. The outline of the object will be written onto the surface, no technology needed - photons imprisoned by time.

Now we have electrical or electro­photography, where we trap photons in electo­magnetic snares and make them do our bidding like little zombie puppy-dogs spun dizzily by an evil hypnotist. Electrons and photons are so malleable, so amorphous. Fun!

ElectroPhotography:


• Electrocuting objects on a photographic emulsion, like flaky Kirlian techniques of high-voltage exposures, or photographing those being executed by electric chair;
  
  
• Electromechanical television using spinning discs (or emulations thereof) to encode and decode a transmissible dynamic signal;
  
  
• Image orthicons (the classic TV camera) for analog television, possible recorded to magnetic wire or tape or disc or drum, images written to a glowing-phosphor screen;
  
  
• Digital photography, with charge-coupled devices (CCDs) or other photon-capturing elements on one end and a glowing tube or LED/LCD (light-emitting-diode or liquid-crystal-diode) display;
  
  
• Digital cinematography, with multiple CCD chips for higher quality, saved on tape or disc and routed to an electronic display or to generate a film for projection.

Real photography involves chemicals. Real photography stinks. Electrophotography is image-capture, not light-writing. Imaging the invisible, capturing signals in ultraviolet, infrared, X-ray, radio, other realms of the electromagnetic spectrum not detectible by human eyes, either isn't really photography or only becomes photography when the EMF is converted into a human visual range. (Not that all humans see the same frequencies...)

A logical way to extend photography then would be to replace human eyeballs with sensors less limited in their scope. Will cyborg art be unapproachable by unaltered humans? Will art created by organic or enhanced nonhuman animals be undecipherable? If you teach a dog or bird or octopus to willfully trip a shutter, is their product photography?

It is difficult to talk about this good stuff without wanting to fiddle with a camera.

We can also paint with light non-visually. There are soluble photosensitive emulsions - the portion of the emulsion that's been exposed to light hardens, the rest can be washed away. We then get a three-dimensional map of the image, a tactile or sculptural photo - thus, photography for the blind and sensitive.

Logically we could render that image for other senses also. With sound, like my old idea of scanning an image and rendering pixels as different voices. With scent or taste - those may be a little more elusive - pain, pleasure, cold, heat - again, we humans in our natural form [base state] don't seem equipped to interpret those sensations with anything approaching the resolution and discrimination of sight and sound or even touch.

But there should be no reason to limit the interchangability of solid-sculptural and flat-image and temporal-sonic representations and creations. I can take the waveform I'm dictating into a cassette recorder right now, and use it to drive an automatic lathe or milling machine to fabricate a widget, or drive a printer-plotter to mould a sonogram.

ElectroMagnetic Spectrum:


• Very Low Frequency - infrasonics, sonics, ultrasonics
• Radio-Radar-Microwaves - penetrates atmosphere
• Infrared 'Light' - reflected, radiated, feelable
• Visible Light - discernible in humanoid vision
• Ultraviolet 'Light' - blocked by thin paper
• X-Ray Realm - easily penetrates tissues
• Gamma-Ray Realm - easily penetrates metals
• Cosmic-Ray Realm - easily penetrates planets

What is a photo for? For whatever you want. A more-or-less represention of reality or fantasy or some blend thereof. Something snapped offhand or prepared painstakingly, with less or more intent. Whatever it is, no matter how purportedly objective it is. an image is a construct of your human vision, of consciousness.

Even if you have an automatic camera tripped by events that a human doesn't control - just by setting it up, you have established its constraints, its parameters.

Reality is analog. And we always represent it digitally, even with stinky chemical photography, Extremely high resolution films exist, with eensy teensy weensy silver particles for superbly fine grain, but they still resolve down to discrete points. Digits.

Still, right now, those stinky chemical photos perform in ways far exceeding current digital gear, at least in an affordable range. In ranges of sensitivity and resolution, any ultra-cheap disposable or 35mm chemo-camera can explore areas of the electromagnetic spectrum that no digicam can approach. Some VERY EXPENSIVE digital cameras are now approaching film's capacity.

Moore's Law says that computing power doubles every 18 months. Since digital cameras are really tiny computers attached to silicon image-capture chips, we can expect affordable digital photography to surpass those stinky chemical processes within the foreseeable future, sometime before the end of the world in 2012.

The End Of The World:


• 2000 - Xian calendar, base 0 - millennium for the innumerate
• 2000 - Xian calendar, base 1 - millennium for the illiterate
• 2012 - Mayan-Aztec calendar - the sacred cycles are reset
• 2043 - Unix system clock - the electronic cycles are reset
• 2063 - asteroid impact - our biological cycles are reset

To distinguish the photographic divide, let's bandy about terms like 1) digitography, 2) electrography (for analog photo-imaging), and 3) chemography (for that stinky chemical stuff). (And photography is the use of any technology to capture images.) Those three forms are interchangable, convertible, copyable.

Of course noise is introduced, at least 3db with every step of non-digital reproduction. But effectively these photographic forms are even more convertible than are sonic, photonic and sculptural recordings and creations.

And each of these three photo-technologies has its own toolkits for manipulating images. The darkroom wizards,video-effects generators and Photoshop artistés all do what they will to further construct the image. But go back a level from there: even framing the image serves to manipulate it. There are no honest photos, merely more-or-less honest intentions.

It is said that some folks first encountering portrait photography were afraid that it would steal their souls. And they are exactly right. The camera DOES steal souls - from both ends, from both the subject and the photographer.

It's not easy to determine whether the loss or aquisition of souls does anyone any harm or good. This says more about the value and usability of the soul than of the nefariousness of the photography, the image-capturing.

What are camera-stolen souls worth?

Ah, stinky chemical photography, chemography. Over the past few decades I've done quite a bit of chemography. I quit that some years ago; I grew tired of chemicals and darkrooms, and expensive photo-processors.

Since then I've used camcorders to record both moving and (primarily) still images; then I bought my first digicam. And I gave away much of my old chemographic hardware. Now as I proceed further into digitography I find that a bit of that gear would be applicable, mostly the add-on optics and support infrastructure.

One field I haven't played in very much is videography, electrography of moving images. I haven't swerved into movie-making. Perhaps my creative soul was stolen by television. Or not.

Videography can be analog or digital, but resolves ultimately into discrete photon bursts. In the past I collected a vast library of videographic images, either purchased or taped from television or other videos. Much of that library is recorded on analog videotape, and the old CED (Capacitance Electronic Disk) technology, heritage of Voyager I. We come in peace.

With CEDs one basically takes a vinyl long-playing record disc, spin it quite fast (3600 rpm) and record sounds and images as waveforms in the grooves. This again shows the interchagability of video, audio, sculpture: the sounds and images are stored as micro-sculptural forms.

Newer technology stores the images on digital videotapes or digital discs, CDs and DVDs, which will all be obsolete very soon. Soon we'll be able to burn all forms of data into nearly any material. Sounds and images are just data, and will be ubiquitous. And then?

Many are working to digitize as much analog imagery (and sound) as possible, as soon as possible. Because once digitized, further copying introduces no noise. And digital data can be painlessly copied anywhere, to anything; and very easily reformatted for any display medium; and easily processed to enhance or obscure any characteristics and details. And in the Big Brother universe, libraries of images can be scanned for identification, for tracking individuals.

In many cities in the Western world now, in any clustering of people, spycams constantly monitor all that we do. Such monitoring necessarily enforces behavioural conformity - don't do anything unusual or unexpected, you'll be seen, noticed, recorded. Any expectation of privacy is an illusion.

And this is probably the greatest cost of photography.

I am (this very day) considering the purchase of an inexpensive spycam. A wireless color pinhole camera with microphone is available for remarkably low cost. I'm not sure that I necessarily want to spy on anyone. Still I'm tempted by fantasies of walking down a roadway with an unseen image capturing device in my hat or collar or belt or shoe, taking in the world unawares.

Ah, a radio-controlled helicopter with wireless spycam - a peeping-tom's wet dream - but too expensive just now.

My rationale for such stealthy videograpy is rather limited right now - I don't need to spy on family or neighbors or cow-orders, don't need to monitor other rooms or the front door or the back yard - except to quietly monitor the intermittant passage of deer. A camera isn't really needed as a tool for backing-up the motorhome. But just as a candid camera for stealing the souls of passersby, that IS tempting.

Night-scope image enhancement? That aesthetic doesn't really appeal to me, although such images are amenable to gamma and false-color manipulations. Unaltered, this evokes fears of military and police activity, relentless scrutiny.

Tools of Surveillance Photography:


• long telephoto lenses - no escaping
• image enhancement devices - no cover
• infrared photo systems - no hiding
• ultraminiature imagers - undectable
• wireless TV cameras - no avoidance

I like to rant that John Cage taught us that just as art is anything visual that we can put a frame around and entice people to look at, so music is any sound that we can direct people's attention to - put a frame around those sounds. 4'33" (four minutes thirty-three seconds) of silence - the videographic equivalent is a plastic webcam stapled to a rusty weathervane. Or an Andy Warhol movie.

And whose souls are being stolen by such framing endeavours? The photographer's, the subject's, the audience's, someone's mother's, all of the above? With nature photography, of animate or inanimate subjects - animals, mountains, trees, fishes - whose souls are being stolen? Who gains the souls? Do the souls accumulate or evaporate? Do the souls even notice their theft?

The camera is paradoxical. It links the photographer, the subject, the audience. It also separates them. Putting a camera to one's face and pushing through a crowd is a good way of saying, "Don't talk to me." At least in the Western world. In Guatemala, pulling out a camera evoked polarizing responses, from happiness or even giddiness to open hostility.

And that's why I try to photograph as unobtrusively as possible.

Photography can be approached with a variety of mental-emotional intents: happenstance-fate-Zen, and/or intimacy-interaction-warmth, and/or surveillance-control-frigidity, and/or precision-construction-direction. None need preclude others.

Happenstance-chance photography may now be referred to as Lomography. I've become a furtive practitioner of stealth Lomography. The wireless-spycam fly-on-the-wall approach would epitomize that. But while the image is being captured the photographer is minimizing their selectivity, their focus, to the point of being a giddy compass needle. All other image selection and manipulation occurs in post-production.

Try to make and digest images like warm low-fat custard.

I wonder what desires drive me to photography: lust for images, lust for gadgets? The need to structure and occupy time? The need to locate myself in the space-time continuum, to mark my place - where I've been, where I am, where I'm going? The need to both link to and distance myself from that and those which are around me?

The intent and expression of a photo may parallel the intent and expression of other forms: sonic, spoken, written, sung, drawn, painted, moulded, sculpted, assembled. The photo can be a haiku or lyric poem; a story, comic-book, novella, epigram; a song, symphony, blast, shout, whisper; verismé, bitter/sweet documentary; a swirl. fantasy, dream, nightmare; a process, a product, a tool, a weapon. A snippet of space-time.

Humans being the judgemental beasts we are, we evaluate those images by the strength of their impact on us, and thus by how we interpret them. A surveillance photo has a different aesthetic than a photorealistic portrait or artsy impressionism. Those images that we notice will make an impression on us, positive or negative. Revulsion or adoration, please, but not indifference!

Thus very abstract images, while very satisfying for the creator, if they don't trigger the pattern-recognition neurons in the audience, they are irrelevant. Still, creating abstract images can be fun, like any other form of masturbation.

We can try to blend the real and unreal, the recognizable and abstract. Take an abstraction, overlay it with real images, or vice-versa. Apply whatever techniques evoke recognition. People don't see what they don't know or recognize.

Chemically altering the audience can enhance their appreciation of a photographic work. But deeply acid-drenched imagery doesn't necessarily appeal to straight folks, any more than does cyborg or nonhuman art, or test-patterns.

With chemography the camera is a box in which we place the film of our choice. With electrography and digitography the camera IS the film. With human vision the optic nerve and brain are the film. In all these cases the image can be manipulated by processing the film selectively. Have another beer, mate.

Drunk or stoned photography or music may be noticed as such.

Photography is often seen as a form of communication. If the photographer has no live audience beyond the photographer, communication is not an issue. Communication is change; learning is change; information is any difference that makes a difference. If you make images only for yourself, what changes?

Disseminating images is thus an attempt to communicate, to induce changes. Every photo, every painting, every song, every poem and story and gesture, is propaganda. All propaganda is political. All politics is local. Thus, every image is interior and all change is exterior. Q.E.D.

Thorough Communications:


1. Tell the audience what you're about to say.
2. Tell the audience what you want to tell them.
3. Tell the audience what you've just told them.
4. Go to step #1.

Art is about restraint, limits. Unrestrained imagery is infinite and thus boring. Photography or painting or any other imaging process requires framing a subject. The unframed subject becomes universal, abstract, meaningless with chemical intervention.

Photography is like bicycling or snorkeling or grubby sex or spiced cooking. Don't ask me why, it just is. Photography is not like a forest. Photography is a forest.

Maybe photography should be a risky endeavour like tightrope walking and seducing porcupines. Maybe stealth photography is risk-avoidance, cowardice. So sue me.

Art should be risky, blatant, outrageous. If if doesn't shock you it's not art. Maybe it's soothing, unnoticable, wallpaper, muzak. But muzak can be exploited. A chorus softly singing KILL FOR PEACE or I TOUCH MYSELF may have some effect. What images do that?

When images are ubiquitous the subtle, the subliminal becomes erotic and revolutionary and dangerous. And vice-versa. What surrounds you? Do you choose your immersion? But what's revolutionary about images of dead people, dead animals, dead plants and trees, dead rocks and mountains and planets? What aesthetic drenches your immersion?

All photography is voyeurism. All photographers and audiences are voyeurs. All imaging is peeping. Every image is a peepshow. Every viewing is a violation. We are all peepers.

Photography as performed by humans is a form of meditation. We focus on an object, filter out the noise, take measured breaths, trip the shutter as a tactile ritual. In the timing of the photographic gesture is a silent chant.

Worship may be involved. The subject may be the object of worship. The camera may be worshipped by the kamerawerker. The photograph may be worshipped by the sighted. The photographer kneel before the icon's image and offer their obesiences. Burnt offerings sometimes result.

Happenstance photography may forego the ritual, leap out of the flow, desecrate the sacrament. Exploit random opportunities like sacrificing spiders underfoot.

A random image may not be better than no image at all.

What is the purpose of photography? What is the purpose of life? The purpose of life is to give life a purpose. Photography is the same.

And the meaning of life? And the meaning of photography? Give them meaning. Or, the purpose of life is to be lived, to be used. The purpose of a camera is to be used. How and why do we use photographs? And what is the meaning of a curious dog, of a redwood tree, of an approaching asteroid?

WHY is a photograph? WHY always implies intent. WHY did this happen? implies that a consciousness wanted it to happen. When we ask, WHY is the sky blue? that question implies intent, consciousness - something or someone WANTED a blue sky. A more realistic question is, HOW is the sky blue. Thus any photograph has a HOW, maybe several HOWs. Photographs composed, constructed, captured, manipulated by humans, contain a WHY. Totally automatic or random photos might not contain a WHY.

So WHY are you photographing? That WHY is probably more interesting than HOW. The HOWs of photography can be very simple indeed. A piece of photo paper, an oatmeal carton, a bit of tinfoil pierced by a pin, some chemicals for developing the latent image, that's all that's needed. No hu-hu about technology. We can photograph as simply or as elaborately as we desire.

Photography is a chimera. Photography is a ruse. Photography is old technology. Photography is the news. Photography is a fantasy. Photography is the blues. Something to choose.

Does your photography add to or subtract from the world's sum of human misery, luxury, pain, pleasure? From your own sum of such? Are these questions relevant? Is your photography relevant? Are you?

Physical photographs are musty detritus exuded by photographers like bunny pellets but not usually so round nor small. Electrophotos are virtual spoor stuck to glowing screens. Photos are also recyclable.

You might wonder why my views on photography are of any value. Consider that I have been engaged in photography for the best and worst parts of five decades, starting as a wee toddler with a Brownie. Many childhood nights were spent in my father's darkroom, listening to opera on a dim shortwave radio and watching images form under the enlarger lens.

One of my job titles included PHOTOGRAPHER but as a military photographer and combat medic I never saw any combat, for which I am grateful. I have always captured images whenever possible, based on that childhood aesthetic, genetic lessons in composition and form. Do such experiences lend credence to my words? Quien focking sabe?

I am not like a camera. I am a camera.

Jueves 31 March 2005: _{(San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico)}
I have a theory about cameras, photons and scenic locales. (Hear me out.) Light is composed of photons, wee little packets of energy that spew from stars and fires and light bulbs, and that bounce off everything, and that are captured by eyeballs and photo film and digital sensors.

At especially scenic places (like the Golden Gate Bridge and Grand Canyon and Mt Fuji and Sumidero), many many cameras capture many many photons. I believe that such places can easily suffer from PHOTON DEPLETION.

But like water seeking the lowest level, photons will flow in from elsewhere, lowering the photon levels everywhere. Will a photon-environmental crisis result? We need more research. Can I get a grant?

If a picture is worth 1000 words, what is silence worth?