Yes, but is it art? (Nikon Z6 | Nikkor 50mm 1.8S

“Technology is stripping us of our connection to human trial and error. Human connection is no longer necessary. We have become encased in a soft, fluffy protective shield from the very things that gave our ancestors the grit to endure and propagate. Our reliance on technology is propagating a society of soft, untested, pantywaists.” ~ Warren Zenna

Group think

I’ve mentioned before how online photography groups test my patience. Since falling under the influence of company advertising and online reviews of Nikon’s new Z series cameras, I joined another Facebook group dedicated to the latest addition to mirrorless systems. It’s been quite a ride with all the usual obsessing over kit.

On the upside, I often benefit from the knowledge of fellow photographers who are more familiar with features of the camera (I chose the Z6 for its superior video functions). Just the other day, I received help with a vexing (user) error caused by worsening myopia. Damn those tiny icons!

At the start, I should admit I’m as much of a technophile as the next snaphappy camera buff, with this corollary: I care about gear only to the extent that I might choose a reliable tool and understand it well enough that it more-or-less disappears into craft.

Start with fresh eyes, not necessarily new gear

But so many enthusiasts seem solely focussed, if you will, on technology, asking questions like “What is the best set-up for landscape.”

This is the wrong way to approach photography — putting “set up” first. The prime question when planning any kind of photograph should be what effect/interpretation do I want to pursue? This is what us old timers call “previsualization.”

When you have “seen” the image, then, and only then, should technical considerations intrude. With practice, this process becomes intuitive. Photography has always been a blend of art and science. The fetishization of gear puts the cart before the horse, degrading the art.

If you practice the art, then technical restrictions should not stand in the way of realizing your vision. You will see with the “eyes” you have and still bring back something — possibly something new and revelatory.

Just as the painter must practice, practice to perfect her brush strokes, her draughting, and colour blending, until the tools themselves disappear, leaving only the artist’s vision on the canvas, so the camera must recede to reveal the photographer’s intent — keeping in mind that the in-camera exposure is only the beginning of the journey towards a finished print.

Incidentally, I wonder if there are painter’s groups where enthusiasts post endless pictures of their brushes, tubes of pigment, and canvas?

“Now, if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness that you’ll think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real!” ~David Lynch, filmmaker

Tiny screens and attention deficit

Which brings us to another bane of what is called photography today — the rise of the ubiquitous backlit screen (often no more than 135mm wide) and the fall of the fine print.

When it comes to still photography, a screen, especially a tiny screen, leads away from contemplation and depth, into the millisecond glance and addiction to the promise of the next better thing — a superficial appraisal, before swiping onward in the endless search for the end of the rainbow … rendered in HDR.

It is true to say what we humans call art — photography, painting, sculpture, film — is a counterfeit that can never hope to match the real world. I contemplated the conceits of art four decades ago, in  a poem written on Vancouver Island, where I now make my home.

“Forgive me that I must explain
the immutable and essential meaning of the blue clouds.”

But I digress.

Navigating the wilderness

“Landscape” is anything you want it to be. Landscape has no field of view. Photography as a whole has no set focal length. A photo — the somewhat limited depiction of a “landscape” — is bound by imagination, not gear.

I think of the modern sailor who has not studied navigation but relies on GPS to find his way on the open ocean. What happens if the battery fails?

The modern photographer person with a camera, I think, is often lost at sea, engulfed by the latest technology: face tracking, eye auto-focus. And if the firmware update doesn’t perform to their demands (or whatever some YouTube celebrity has told them to expect) they threaten to sell their toys and leave.

I don’t want to turn this into a generational war, but my unscientific social media survey of impatient whiners usually reveals a Millennial camera enthusiast lurking behind threats to ditch their Brand Z and buy a Brand X, because “the camera focussed on my daughter’s eyelash instead of her eye.” Actual quote.

Goodness knows what such a person would do behind an 11×14 view camera with only a loupe and hand/eye coordination to refine focus. That camera, modernized with Siri or Alexa, might advise (in the accent of choice) “I’m sorry, you’re in charge.”

Like the technologically hobbled seafarer, the “photographer” who has never learnt the foundational nuts and bolts of photography is adrift when the machine learning comes loose.

To use yet another metaphor, this dyslexic would be lost without a calculator. I (along with most people these days) reach for my phone app, or the plastic wizamajig on my desk to figure out how much I overspent on camera gear this month.

I realize, due to my compensatory tendency to analyze every other aspect of my existence, that my innumeracy robs me of the conceptual ground behind the arithmetic. Ironically, I now rely on such mathematical genius’ to make my photographs.

Lazy cats and neutered wimps

Writing this post, I went looking for other (concurrent) views on what I consider to be the “stupdidification” of homo sapiens in the technological age. I soon came across a story that, while lacking in double blind controls, nonetheless coincided with my observations that common sense and self-reliance grounded in sound knowledge (as opposed to random “information”) has been supplanted by helplessness and whiny demands for everything to be served up on a silver memory card … make that two, because you never know when technology will betray. We also live in the age of irony.

A relevant story comes from a (reluctant) cat owner, who noticed that providing an automatic kibble dispenser turned the animal into a feline eunuch, a creature who could no longer be arsed to respond to vestigial hunting instincts by bringing down apartment-dwelling soft toys. If that wasn’t bad enough, his kids, previously tasked with cat maintenance, devolved into “lazy blobs of couch beef.” 

This unwitting experiment in behavioural psychology convinced author Warren Zenna that Modern Tech Has Turned Us into a Bunch of Neutered Wimps. 

People whose only experience making photographs has been shaped by modern algorithms have, like Zenna’s Cat, lost the hunting instinct (especially when shitty auto-focus hunts). Like Pavlov’s Dog, they salivate at the mere mention of “firmware update,” conditioned by Internet imprinting to anticipate “better living through science” rather than initiative, problem-solving, and action.

For years after auto-this-and-that arrived on the shelves, I shunned newfangled attractions, preferring fully manual cameras … finally yielding (in 1981) to a Nikon FM that required a battery to run the internal exposure meter, but nothing else. Even so, in 1983, I bought a fully-manual 1960 Mamiyaflex, which soon became my favourite camera.

I love what modern camera technicians and the technology they develop have given us. As I experience more “Dersu Uzala moments” in my dotage, I applaud the genius’ that help my old eyes track and focus on my prey. But I count my lucky stars (through prescription lenses) that I retain a solid grounding in all things manual.

I’ve been making photographs for more than 5 decades. I worked as a commercial photographer for more than 3 decades, shooting with everything from 11×14 view cameras down to 110 (remember that?). I began my adventure in photography with a 127 Kodak Brownie.

These days, I’ve happily retired to occasional blogging, selling “vintage” prints from my personal archive and flogging a bit of stock.

Our photographic hobby or profession meets, as it always has, at the intersection of art and technology. But since the “digital revolution” and the rise of social media, photography risks becoming more about technology (and “getting likes”) than art.

I’ve joined several of the aforementioned “groups,” focused, if you will, on different camera systems and they all share one thing: more photos of gear than photographs made with the gear.

At its best, our devotion to craft can offer a flicker of the divine. Art is not truth, but it can point to truth. The tools of art making are inanimate, and while their design and engineering may represent another form of art, their ultimate purpose can only be realized in the hands of a practitioner at once familiar and detached. Therein lies the Zen.