It is not the death but the transformation of photography. I recently read an Ansel Adams biography and there were a couple of places where he expressed great interest in the possibilities of digital photography, something that he'd never really seen as it was still in the very earliest stages when he died.

The capturing of images will be with us forever, has been with us since someone first took charcoal to a cave wall. The great images will stand the test of time. The ability to use the tools available to bring out the image is the key test.

"oh, your pictures are so good! You must have a really good camera!"

"hmmm, and your lasagna is really good, so you must have a really good set of pots and pans."

Dear Jennifer,

Funny you should ask, I recently wrote on this subject with relevance to Brandon's Ansel Adam's reference.

Ansel Adams is Evil

Dear Ms. McLaughlin,

While in Looking Glass ordering 8 X 10 black and white prints from you, I was given a flyer announcing “’has digital photography killed ansel adams? The future of black & white photography’ a lecture by Andrea McLaughlin” by the clerk.

Having been amazed by the production of your prints, I had asked another clerk at another time if a device had been devised and used by your employees whereby a printing machine incorporated the densitometer, for example, to measure all areas of the negative to create a print that not only burned the edges but evened the exposure overall?

He said he didn’t think so just that you were good at what you do.

Sometime ago, when I was printing a lot of images myself, I used a woman to print a couple and I was not impressed with her work.

So, given the chemical processes, the burning and dodging, paper choices, turn-around times, third-parties’ potential loss of negatives, the fact that a densitometer-driven enlarger has not been invented, for starters, represents why digital photography hasn’t killed Ansel Adams, but it is part of an argument I would like to propose that addresses the issue you have mentioned.

In essence, you propose that there is a future for black & white photography.

You qualify black & white photography has having two outputs: Digital or as implied with the life and times of Ansel Adams, film-based.

So, the debate could take the form of one about film vs. digital photography, specifically black & white, or it could just envision the future of black & white photography.

I would like to address the issue quickly.

Photography will always be about reality. What is outside the lens is far more important than how that reality is captured.

The issue is composition. It is not about manipulation except in proportion to that manipulation, which is reflective of a reality that is believed to be based in reality.

Photography, whether black & white or color, has as it’s presumptive basis the fact that employed in carrying it out was a capture of reality, light reflected off properties.

It isn’t so much about pin-holes or Carl Zeiss lenses, but about the registration of light memorized and printed.

Ansel Adams was an eye looking through a lens. He was a technician who exposed light to paper passing through negatives he had produced by peering through the lens of a camera and opening and closing the shutter.

He carried the camera to a vista. He covered his head and pulled the trigger.

As a photographer, who uses a digital camera to shoot both black and white and color, I take pride in found images. I do not manipulate the images. I do not crop them. But, I rely on the technology of the camera – Sony Mavica, Carl Zeiss-lens, 4.0 Megapixel-based, to capture what my eye sees.

I never much cared for the problems with exposure, such as areas in the frame of a print, as with your photo on the flier, just below the hand with the watch that because it is lighter than say the people at the bottom middle or those around the left side, you get a sense that the print is weighted toward the left, as if the person on the ladder was pulling visually the image to the left. The eye is drawn to the left. In the end, my eye rests on the gentleman’s left shoe as it presses the ladder peg. (See: berkeleypubliclibrary.org/syste....pdf).

Photography is about what the photographer sees, not about the failure of his tools or the photographer’s failure to know how his tools will fail him. There is a science of prediction, a scientific knowledge of photography that is all well and good, like, “So, what lens did you use?” “What paper?” “What Camera?” “How long did it take you to burn and dodge that image?” But none of these questions address the image.

Ansel Adams is dead. He has been dead a long time and perhaps digital photography killed him, but of course while I still have black and white negatives and you exist, I will keep you alive unless of course you elect to kill me, “digitally”-speaking.

It is always a question of tools when the sought outcome is the same. But when the outcome is the same, we choose the lesser of evils.

Mario Savioni

it will be the death of film but not image creation

photography is but painting with a different tool that emphasis on a different image quality...

photography could NEVER stand as a defacto rep of truth as a historical document...

one has to realise that photography is but a SLICE of reality and SHOULD NEVER and CAN NEVER hope to represent truth and thus it can never be a historical document without supporting commentary

I don't rely on the technology of my camera to capture what my eye sees. I try to use the technology of the camera to create an image of what my mind envisions.

Truth is mutable, if there is an inconvenient twig between me and what I want to shoot, I'll remove the twig. I'd rather do it before I shoot than in photoshop, just because it'll be a better image that way. A photo as a historical document is just as valid as scholarly book -- either one can only tell the truth as the creator of it perceives the truth. Lange's migrant tableau is Truth, a snap shot without some forethought might be very interesting, but like a book with slipshod editing, it's only truth, does not have the impact.

As for standing as a historical document, today at work, across the room from me, a woman was searching through microfiche rolls. The machine was going clatter-clatter-ca-chunk as she spun back and forth through the roll. How long is that piece of celluoid going to last? how long will a magnetic image last? Both need technology to survive and stand the test of time. I expect that digital will long outlast any kind of paper based media. But only as long as both our civilization lasts. Both need regular reproduction to continue on, and the greatest and most important will be preserved. One hopes.