Pretensious Pretentions

I have often read the Leica-infused writings of Erwin Puts but a recent post on his site has me thinking I’m done there. He argues that because the workflow in digital is different from the processes involved in silver halide films that digital is not photography.

Baloney.

If that’s true, then all those Tri-X shooting masters who switched to Kodachromes stopped being photographers, too, since no one ever did a K-14 process in their cellar.

Call it art, call it journalism, call it precision technical writing, but photography is, at its core, the capturing of a moment and the sharing of it with others. Regardless of the processes involved, a great photograph lets someone who wasn’t somewhere experience that moment in some (limited) way. That’s it.

The boxes of my father’s slides which surround me in my office, waiting to be scanned, are photography as much as the leftover prints from my college newspaper days and the digitized images of my step-kids’ first day of school.

How do I know the latter is true? Because I sent them to their grandfather and his one word response was, “Priceless!”