The world of photography is awash in projects and collections in which cumbersome processes are front and center. This guy takes wet plate photographs of pig's noses, this guy found a huge stash of glass plate negatives inside a piggy bank he bought at auction in Iowa, and on and on. Everything from collections of improbable found material, through cumbersome darkroom processes, to simply I shoot film.
The common thread here, from where I sit, is that all of these things are essentially trivial to fake. Given the sheer number of them, it stands to reason that at least some of them are fake.
Is the Vivian Maier archive fake? Probably not. That one is old enough and got enough traction that, probably, enough people have actually seen some negatives and someone would have said something. That said. John Maloof continues to hold the actual collection remarkably close to the chest. I do not think that one can apply to study the whole archive, even today.
But this is surely the most public of all of them. This is the one that would require the largest conspiracy to cover up, and even there it's probably a dozen people you'd have to have subverted. As any pirate knows, though, that is 11 too many.
Most of these things are really just one person, who is pushing out medium resolution JPEGs onto the web.
What astonishes me is that we have yet, as far as I know, to have seen a Big Scandal in which so-and-so's whatever-it-was is revealed to have been fake all along.
I assume that it's simply because people are not looking very hard, and most people don't even know what to look for.
Is there big money in it? Why would anyone bother constructing a fake world unless they could cash in. It would be easier to just get a job, wouldn't it?
ReplyDeleteOccasionally there is decent money in it. At the very least it's a lot easier to sell mediocre photos if you can persuade people you made them the hard way.
DeletePlus, people do a lot of ridiculous stuff for exposure.
Frankly, anyone who makes a big noise about shooting film, and then scans the negatives for use in Photoshop, rather than working the prints one by one in the stinky old darkroom is making a big noise about nothing, and is essentially faking it, whether or not they go the extra yard of mocking up the look of "alt-processes".
ReplyDeleteTo scan genuine "wet" prints for Web use is obviously uncontroversial, but to print them digitally (presumably doing the necessary tweaks to match the "look" of the original darkroom print) just to save labouring over every damn print is semi-fraudulent.
Do I care? No... As one who has been there, I no more wish the darkroom on anybody than I wish them to return to washing clothes in the nearest river. A look is just a look, and to insist on the "authenticity" of the means used to achieve it is IMHO a deeply conservative instinct.
Mike
Although it's also true that I laugh in the face of those who run a photo through a "watercolour" filter, print it on canvas or textured paper, and sell it as "art". Ha!
ReplyDeleteMike
if they CAN actually sell it tho...
Delete[stone seal]
I still shoot film after ~50 years of shooting it. Does that make me a bad person?
ReplyDelete