Ahoy, ahoy!

Reading break is over and March in Sackville has come in like a lion with another vicious dump of snow last night…I find it hard to believe that I have been writing this blog for five months now!  I feel like I have learned so much about my own ability to reflect on artists, movements and pieces.  I hope my entries have shown steady improvement in both content and clarification for my readers!

Today we’ve moved into photography.  I always love looking at photography that came before digital.  You can really tell that these artists had to work hard at their craft in order to perfect it.  I took a photography class once and I remember how difficult of a time I had getting my images to turn out just right in the wash.  I remember the frustration I would feel after unclipping several dried prints and examining them in the light only to realize that one was too dark, the other too light.  Sometimes I had not timed the exposure properly, other times there were fatal cross processed images.  Sometimes the film itself was the problem, and my apertures were set incorrectly.  And then it would be back to the drawing board, to pore over scribbled notes about how I went about developing and processing the first time around, in order to identify the mistake.  However, I had a lot of fun in that class and learned so much with that old camera of my dad’s.  But, at the end of the day, it seemed so much easier to just use a digital camera and then fix my mistakes later on the computer.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think digital photography can be art.  Not by any means.  I know people who are digital photographers, and there is immense amounts of work involved.  it’s just a different kind of work.  I think that these two types of photography are very different, and both ought to be respected equally.  However, when I see old professional photographs, I can’t help but want to stare at them for much longer than digital prints.  They are often more beautiful to me than digital work, and usually more intriguing.  I find that most of my encounters with digital photography are focused on landscape.  Digital is an amazing way to capture blazing orange sunsets and the crystal perfection of the sea in the Mediterannean.  But black and white photography like Michel Lambeth and George Zimbel’s works seem to be more about stories and ideas, rather than the image itself.

That’s all!

Brit