5 ms·

Why Do We Believe in Photographs?

26 points by prismatic 6y ago

psychomugs 5y ago
Within my design research reading group, we often have discussions about how to best represent our works, either as traditional text-oriented research papers or more visual as pictorials. Everything will be a paraphrase of the original work, but we always agree that visual mediums are underrepresented and somewhat looked down upon as less legitimate. I think visual literacy as a complement to textual literacy is the missing ingredient; while we're all exposed to analyzing written and spoken mediums at some point in our education, seldom are we taught how to interpret, question, and synthesize visual mediums.
zabzonk 5y ago
I don't know about "belief", but one of the most moving experiences in my life was when in a darkroom I first developed a photograph - the beauty of the glistening image (not of anything remotely interesting, or indeed in focus) coming out of the developer bath really made me go "wow", and it's a thrill that never left me until (for various reasons) I stopped being involved in photography. It's bit sad that few, if any, young people today will experience darkrooms, fiddling with the enlarger, the smell of the stop bath, the irritation of spending a lot of effort and expense (silver costs!) on something that looked lovely coming out of the developer, but looks pretty crap in harsh daylight.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I'd get a similar thrill designing a circuit, building it, and then first applying power to it and watching it come alive.
  - NL807 5y ago
    Alive with smoke sometimes. fml
  - OJFord 5y ago
    PCB development process is not dissimilar. Just less common among hobbysists thsse days I think, it being cheaper and quicker to CAD & CAM aaS than it was. Or perhaps not, what am I saying, that's even more true of modern photography. (I chemical-etched PCBs at school, but don't see why I'd bother now. CNC milling is slightly appealing, if just for convenience over bread or strip board (it's already in CAD anyway these days), but I think home etching isn't enough better or cheaper to be a consideration any more.)
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Somehow modern electronics has advanced to the point where it doesn't seem as much fun anymore. Or perhaps it's just 'cuz I'm older.
      - OJFord 5y ago
        All the old stuff is still there! I don't mean to presume but I notice often this kind of divide happens where EEs don't like the software side, because it could 'just' be done in hardware I suppose, and is boring because computers. I get that; but I sorry of enjoy each independently I suppose. (I technically graduated EE but to be honest mostly studied CS and work in software.) I've been enjoying sort of rediscovering my childhood passion of electronics recently I suppose. You can still use through-hole discretes on veroboard if you want to, nobody forces you to order a professionally made board with a BGA pad and little else for your whole design on an FPGA. Will we ever not be able to get 555 and 74x ICs? (As an aside, I'm sure there were the same conversations happening when ICs (or solid state transistors at all) became available!)
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    I think photography is a bit different. I had a (Phillips?) breadboard toy back in the mid 60s which gave you some transistors, capacitors, resistors and such, and allowed you to build simple things like amplifiers, moisture detectors, and so on. But it never really taught me anything about electronics. Whereas when I got my hands on a camera, I immediately got a pretty good idea about optics, and when I started developing my own photos I had a pretty good understanding of the chemistry involved. But perhaps that's just me - I'm more a chemistry person. After my O-level results came out (1969) my physics teacher came up to me and said "I cannot believe you have passed!", whereas my chemistry teacher said "I was expecting a better result than that!" Make of that what you will.
- etblg 5y ago
  Film photography is such a beautiful and romantic process, with some ingenious technical solutions to make it all work, and still hold up pretty well with the end result compared to digital photography. It's also a huge pain in the ass compared to digital, but damn I'm going to be sad if it ever gets completely phased out.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    I'd say it is far superior to digital - have any digital photographs come up to comparison with those of Adams, Arbus, Frank or Weston, to name but a few? There is something about the physicality of a silver-based photo that digital cannot come near. But, as you say, it is a huge pain in the ass (one of the reasons I gave up on it) - something like oil painting. Which is probably why we are not doing grand masters these days.
    - anta40 5y ago
      Far superior to digital? I saw an exhibition a few years ago where big prints were displayed. Some were taken with 4x5 films, and some with digital medium format (most likely Phase One). I'd say I had a hard time figuring out if a particular print was shot on film or digital.
      - zabzonk 5y ago
        Colour or B&W?
- solipsism 5y ago
  Meh. Nostalgia is a very strong emotion (so strong that I will pay a price for making this comment), but it's ultimately empty. It doesn't point to any global value, it's all personal aesthetic value. I feel sad that my children won't have the experience of going into Blockbuster on a Friday to pick out a movie. That doesn't mean there's anything actually special about that. My children will feel nostalgic about other things.
B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
Because they mimic our visual input, which we're used to rely on for survival? Just a guess. > global culture has been shifting from an essentially linguistic culture to a predominantly imagistic one Cue McLuhan writing about 'hot' and 'cold' media in the 1960s, i.e. the Understanding Media book.
scotty79 5y ago
Photographs somehow manipulate memories. If you try to remember some event the most memories you'll have will be about the details or moments that you have taken pictures of.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
I was thinking recently about how amazing it is that we can constantly re-experience funny and wonderful memories of our children as they age. Their entire young lives are documented, so they can also see things they definitely didn’t remember from a year or two ago. I wonder how this affects their view of themselves...
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
  Fundamentally. To expand on this thought - how we take photos has completely changed over the last 15 years. With practically unlimited photo capacity and everyone having a camera in their pockets at all times, we don’t take photos like we used to. We don’t often pose in the same way, we assemble albums less often, and we don’t take the same types of photos. It’s not even a matter of having a lot of material but the type of material being accumulated.
gverrilla 5y ago
useless thoughts

26 points by prismatic 6y ago

Within my design research reading group, we often have discussions about how to best represent our works, either as traditional text-oriented research papers or more visual as pictorials. Everything will be a paraphrase of the original work, but we always agree that visual mediums are underrepresented and somewhat looked down upon as less legitimate. I think visual literacy as a complement to textual literacy is the missing ingredient; while we're all exposed to analyzing written and spoken mediums at some point in our education, seldom are we taught how to interpret, question, and synthesize visual mediums.

zabzonk 5y ago

I don't know about "belief", but one of the most moving experiences in my life was when in a darkroom I first developed a photograph - the beauty of the glistening image (not of anything remotely interesting, or indeed in focus) coming out of the developer bath really made me go "wow", and it's a thrill that never left me until (for various reasons) I stopped being involved in photography. It's bit sad that few, if any, young people today will experience darkrooms, fiddling with the enlarger, the smell of the stop bath, the irritation of spending a lot of effort and expense (silver costs!) on something that looked lovely coming out of the developer, but looks pretty crap in harsh daylight.

WalterBright 5y ago
I'd get a similar thrill designing a circuit, building it, and then first applying power to it and watching it come alive.
- NL807 5y ago
  Alive with smoke sometimes. fml
- OJFord 5y ago
  PCB development process is not dissimilar. Just less common among hobbysists thsse days I think, it being cheaper and quicker to CAD & CAM aaS than it was. Or perhaps not, what am I saying, that's even more true of modern photography. (I chemical-etched PCBs at school, but don't see why I'd bother now. CNC milling is slightly appealing, if just for convenience over bread or strip board (it's already in CAD anyway these days), but I think home etching isn't enough better or cheaper to be a consideration any more.)
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Somehow modern electronics has advanced to the point where it doesn't seem as much fun anymore. Or perhaps it's just 'cuz I'm older.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      All the old stuff is still there! I don't mean to presume but I notice often this kind of divide happens where EEs don't like the software side, because it could 'just' be done in hardware I suppose, and is boring because computers. I get that; but I sorry of enjoy each independently I suppose. (I technically graduated EE but to be honest mostly studied CS and work in software.) I've been enjoying sort of rediscovering my childhood passion of electronics recently I suppose. You can still use through-hole discretes on veroboard if you want to, nobody forces you to order a professionally made board with a BGA pad and little else for your whole design on an FPGA. Will we ever not be able to get 555 and 74x ICs? (As an aside, I'm sure there were the same conversations happening when ICs (or solid state transistors at all) became available!)
- zabzonk 5y ago
  I think photography is a bit different. I had a (Phillips?) breadboard toy back in the mid 60s which gave you some transistors, capacitors, resistors and such, and allowed you to build simple things like amplifiers, moisture detectors, and so on. But it never really taught me anything about electronics. Whereas when I got my hands on a camera, I immediately got a pretty good idea about optics, and when I started developing my own photos I had a pretty good understanding of the chemistry involved. But perhaps that's just me - I'm more a chemistry person. After my O-level results came out (1969) my physics teacher came up to me and said "I cannot believe you have passed!", whereas my chemistry teacher said "I was expecting a better result than that!" Make of that what you will.
etblg 5y ago
Film photography is such a beautiful and romantic process, with some ingenious technical solutions to make it all work, and still hold up pretty well with the end result compared to digital photography. It's also a huge pain in the ass compared to digital, but damn I'm going to be sad if it ever gets completely phased out.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  I'd say it is far superior to digital - have any digital photographs come up to comparison with those of Adams, Arbus, Frank or Weston, to name but a few? There is something about the physicality of a silver-based photo that digital cannot come near. But, as you say, it is a huge pain in the ass (one of the reasons I gave up on it) - something like oil painting. Which is probably why we are not doing grand masters these days.
  - anta40 5y ago
    Far superior to digital? I saw an exhibition a few years ago where big prints were displayed. Some were taken with 4x5 films, and some with digital medium format (most likely Phase One). I'd say I had a hard time figuring out if a particular print was shot on film or digital.
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      Colour or B&W?
solipsism 5y ago
Meh. Nostalgia is a very strong emotion (so strong that I will pay a price for making this comment), but it's ultimately empty. It doesn't point to any global value, it's all personal aesthetic value. I feel sad that my children won't have the experience of going into Blockbuster on a Friday to pick out a movie. That doesn't mean there's anything actually special about that. My children will feel nostalgic about other things.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago

Because they mimic our visual input, which we're used to rely on for survival? Just a guess. > global culture has been shifting from an essentially linguistic culture to a predominantly imagistic one Cue McLuhan writing about 'hot' and 'cold' media in the 1960s, i.e. the Understanding Media book.

scotty79 5y ago

Photographs somehow manipulate memories. If you try to remember some event the most memories you'll have will be about the details or moments that you have taken pictures of.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I was thinking recently about how amazing it is that we can constantly re-experience funny and wonderful memories of our children as they age. Their entire young lives are documented, so they can also see things they definitely didn’t remember from a year or two ago. I wonder how this affects their view of themselves...

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
Fundamentally. To expand on this thought - how we take photos has completely changed over the last 15 years. With practically unlimited photo capacity and everyone having a camera in their pockets at all times, we don’t take photos like we used to. We don’t often pose in the same way, we assemble albums less often, and we don’t take the same types of photos. It’s not even a matter of having a lot of material but the type of material being accumulated.

gverrilla 5y ago

useless thoughts