Digital?

This term at uni, our project involves looking at colour, and learning the various complexities of colour analogue photography, so as such, I've been shooting lots and lots of colour film with my Hasselblad.

Traditionally, when using colour film, I've always had to get it processed at a local lab (Snappy Snaps in Glasgow usually), and never printed anything - just scanned the images into my computer and used that as a basis on which to decide if I thought they were worthy of display or not.

However, I'm now able to process my own film at the Art School, and even better - make colour darkroom prints. This has opened my eyes in a massive way to the real potential of film, and the special things it can do. It appears the biggest shortfall in my workflow at the moment is bringing material from the analogue world into the digital.

This is one of my biggest problem areas - how to show analogue work in an increasingly digital-centred world. There are many great "success stories" of people who exhibit their work to a very vast audience via flickr, and get a lot of attention for their work that they otherwise possibly wouldn't have been able to gain.

My problem is that I'm primarily an analogue photographer these days, and that without a means to digitise images well, I am very possibly losing out on a great deal of exposure for my work. What I think looks great on an anolgue print, very rarely seems to translate well into a digital file.

On one hand, there are the nuts-and-bolts problems. With the scanner I have, colours are inconsistent and usually all over the place. In the image above, even with a large amount of colour correction in Photoshop, the colours are nowhere near the colours shown in the prints I've made. Then there's sharpness and detail - most of this is lost due to the inability of my film holders to keep the negatives flat while being scanned.

Secondly, and I think the most problematic aspect, is that often images that work well in a print lose a lot of their qualities when translated to a 600x600px view on a website. Digital viewing, it seems to me, requires a totally different style of photograph - subtlety of tone has to make way for high-saturation colours, and small details have to be ignored in favour of bold compositions.

One of the big problems of being an analogue worker, is that displaying photographs to the world at large is an altogether more difficult affair, and has to take place in an altogether more formal environment. One would firstly have to find a willing gallery in which to display work - pretty difficult without a "name" or at least some appropriate credentials to show.

Then there's the far more rigid framework in which the images are shown. Where flickr allows me to upload pretty much anything I like in any order at any time, showing in a gallery generally requires a predetermined set of related images to be shown in a fixed location for a fixed amount of time. Galleries also severly restrict the geographical coverage of work too - if I was to show prints at an exhibition in Glasgow for example, there'd be no way for friends of mine in places like New Zealand or the USA to view images without a very expensive air fare.

In writing this, I came up with a strange idea - the idea of a constantly changing and evolving gallery, perhaps something like a physical manifestation of flickr. A place where photographers would have space to show a couple of images, in any format they liked, changing at any time. Of course, this wouldn't quite have the full freedom and accessiblity of the internet, there'd still have to be some degree of curatorial control, otherwise the whole thing would just descend into anarchy. I think my idea definitely has a few holes at the moment, but it's given me something kinda fun to have a think about...

Getting There

Now into my third week of term two, and things aren't quite where I'd like them to be... that's not to say it's all bad though. The good news is, I can now develop and print in colour, which makes me happy - it's something I've wanted to learn for a long time. Admittedly, most of the tricky parts are taken care of by machines, but I still enjoy making the prints in the darkroom.

I'm not too keen on the colour paper though - I'm using Fuji Crystal Archive, as it's apparently the most easy to get regular supplies of. It has that weird plastic feel much like cheap inkjet and resin-coated black and white papers, definitely not too keen. The much nicer feel of fibre-based paper is just one of the many things drawing me back to black and white.

I'm still no further with choosing an aim for this term's work. It seems that with everything I read, and every artist's work that I look at, I just seem to be adding layer upon layer of confusing directions that I'd like to take my work in. I guess all I really need to do now is sit down and try and consolidate these messy thoughts into some kind of coherent form that I can make a body of work based on.

Researching can be dangerous in some ways. I had an idea for some work based on the telephone network equipment that I used to work with on a daily basis. The equipment comes in many shapes, sizes, colours, and degrees of flashy LED illumination, and there's definitely some interesting stuff to be found in telephone exchanges, not to mention their great significance as great unrecognised hubs of social interaction. I'd pre-visualised some of the images I had in mind - what I had wanted to feature in the pictures, and how I wanted them to look. With this idea in mind, you can only imagine how it felt when I discovered Lewis Baltz had made a set of almost perfectly identical images in the early 1990s... Damn!

I have to wonder how things might've turned out had I not discovered this Baltz body of work. I wonder about whether I could've confidently forged ahead unknowing, and produced work I was genuinely happy with; whether I could've exhibited the work without anybody ever noticing, or whether I'd even get the chance to hear viewers making the snide "he's just ripping off Baltz" comments. Mysteries indeed. Either way, I'm not sure I can feel confident in going ahead and making that set of images knowing there's something so close to my intentions already out there.

As it stands, I've cobbled together a couple of things that I might look into. One that's standing forward in my mind is the idea of the Scottish colour palette. I'd been looking at Joel Meyerowitz's Cape Light series, along with the work of Stephen Shore (among others) and really getting this feel for a very American type of light. I'd noticed this in New Zealand too - that the light had a very different quality about it. Scottish light is something special though, never does light get so incredibly flat and featureless. It has an incredible ability to absolutely suck the life and colour out of any given scene.

At first, this was of great frustration for me as a photographer in my early days. I was a big fan of high-saturation film, especially Kodak 160VC, and it made for some really crappy looking pictures when the light was flat. Trying to push out tons of contrast on overcast days just led to some really disappointing images. I almost wouldn't bother leaving the house some days if the skies were cloudy. On a recent trip up through the north-west of Scotland, I started beginning to appreciate this flat light as something very fundamental to the Scottish way of life.

Being Scottish is something I quite often have problems with. On one hand, I do find a lot of the landscapes, places and people very inspiring; but on the other hand, there's nothing that pisses me off quite like stupid nationalism (Scottish or otherwise), and the last thing I would want to do would be to take postcard shots of beautiful mountains and for anyone to get this idea that I was a full-blown proud Scot, because I'm most certainly not that.