You press the button; We do the rest

My purpose built darkroom in Houston.

George Eastman, a business man, not an artist, not a scientist but a true capitalist is the person who transformed photography.  Sure we can look at Louis Daguerre or Henry Fox Talbot as the scientist and hobbyists that were the fathers of photography to see an influence.  But if these two men were the fathers, Eastman was the neighborhood bully that transformed photography into what it is today.

As a photographer, one question continues to come up. Were the changes ushered in by Eastman good for photography?  Let me explain.

"You press the button; We do the rest" was the slogan that Eastman used to explain the amazing transformation that he brought to photography.  Imagine that prior to his industrialization of the dry plate process, photography was all wet plate, forcing the photographer to adapt tot he limitations of their tools, keeping them close to their darkroom (a wet plate dries in 10-15 minutes and must be exposed before it does). It was cumbersome and dirty.

Eastman changed that by finding a repeatable way to make consistent dry plates that could be sold.  This then took him to the advent of the film backed emulsion simplifying the process further.  So you could buy a camera, preloaded with film, shoot a bunch of pictures and then mail the camera back to be processed, printed and refilled with more film.

But this simplicity, democratized a process so that anyone with the spare income could take pictures of their very own.  The problem is that photographers were attempting to define this as an art form, and as all of us know, art should be hard, artists should be few and talented.  By reducing photography to the push of a button, eliminated any hope of these early photographers to define their art in the same way painting, sculptures and music composition was defined.  

Today, with the advent of Digital Photography (also a legacy Kodak the company that Eastman founded) we have been ushered into a new era where the photographic process has been simplified even further. Has this impacted the quality of art which is produced?  Well now we get into the subjective discussion, but in my view it has impacted the quality of art a great deal.  It has improved it.

And this is what makes my perspective of film and digital photography different than most I have seen.  Film photographers like myself, typically bemuse the artificial quality, speed over substance and convenience over art.  I see something very different.  What I  see is a tool, usually a cell phone these days, that is converting everyone into an artist.  This tool allows us to tap into our imagination and create new photographs.  

Is everyone who wields a smart phone with a camera an artist?  No, but they have the tools to leverage their imagination to make new work and some of this work challenges the way we see the world and this, at its very core, is art.  Does every photograph matter?  No, but they never did.  Are we dumbing down the artistic medium of photography?  No.  If you think making art with a camera phone is easy, try it yourself.  We are just giving everyone the opportunity to create and this is an essential part of art.  Create, something individual, challenge the way we see ourselves and the world around us.  

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