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043 13 March 2004

The intense warmth of the environmental light, my perception and the camera's "method" are not synchronised. Tricky, hand held dealing with the lag time and relearning the pressing the shutter on a breath, but also thinking the camera can collect more data than is possible? Then again I have come to like this distorted colour array.

The latent image has now been replaced by data. The former alchemy of sunlight and silver, reminiscent of the chemical energy transfers that drive photosynthesis and life have passed into history. I had always delighted in the fact that the photons which triggered the cascade on the film emulsion, had had real physical contact with the portrait sitter. The relationship with the sitter and the latent image on the film was contingent, an acknowledgement that in making a photograph, the film takes something of the sitter with it.

These nineteenth century romantic ideas have been rapidly displaced by a new technical lexicon which describes how the focussed image is captured by a Charge Coupled Device, transferred via an Analogue to Digital Converter for storage on a device with available Random Access Memory. The concomitant implications of this new method, with respect to the photographic aesthetic, is that we are removing much obfuscation and coming closer to accepting that we are simply viewing patterns of coloured data.

And how "yello" and "color" have become prescriptive when working with digital images and code, how the classical paper sizes of 10 x 8 or 16 x 12 inches are being lost to the "A" class. Slowly the discrete medium of photography becomes enveloped by the more general language of digital capture devices.

liverpool 2004

 

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