You may have noticed in the last post that the images that accompanied it had been manipulated to a certain extent. Just a little tweaking, but the black and white pictures, for example, had been run through a film grain/spectral response reproduction program, and had a border added to them to suggest darkroom printing. The colour photographs just had the border added.
I went through a phase of adding film borders to my digital images, thinking, I suppose, that it would make the images themselves more interesting. I was wrong, of course, and I’ve since learnt that it’s the photograph itself that counts. The question remains, however, as to whether attempting to replicate analogue processes has any validity, aesthetically.
The reason that I’ve been taken with this particular look is down to a wedding photographer whose blog I follow, Jeff Ascough. He’s pretty well renowned, and is somewhat famous for his reportage photography. He used to shoot his weddings with a couple of Leicas. This is, firstly, very cool, and, secondly, gave his work a certain look, which I would imagine has become something of a trademark. He now shoots digital, but goes to quite some lengths to reproduce the look of film, with sets of custom actions to approximate the tonal range, using higher isos than is necessary to introduce an element of noise, and borders to give the look of hand prints. It strikes me that this is a perfectly valid use of the technology, and his care of the images certainly shines through.
Similarly, I have a project on the go where I have combined different formats of film, and used more than one digital camera. I feel pretty happy with emulating black and white film here to give some consistency across the project, simply so that the viewer is not jarred by the aesthetic differences between photographs, which I feel would distract from the experience.
But what about changing things just for the individual image? I did it with my nightime shot here, and actually I think that the border is over the top. It detracts from the shot, and offers little to enhance it. I did it as a shortcut to approximate the look of street photography(i.e. the look of film from a 35 mm rangefinder), and it strikes me as cheating, as trying to give the photograph an impact which it should be able to earn on it’s merits, not by standing on the shoulders of other, similarly presented photographs.
Take exhibit A, above. I’ve added a much less in-your-face border, and used a grain-replication program (It’s hard to see at this size. Take a look at the grey area in the house window in the background – you may be able to see it there.). Let’s be honest, I’ve added little to the photograph, have I? My feeling is, oddly, that the addition of grain adds something of some significance, in the way that tweaking curves would, but the border crosses the boundary into artifice. Perhaps it’s a matter of subtlety; the former is not something that you would notice, but, like a good film soundtrack, makes all the difference. The latter is overt, making a statement, and as such announces itself, drowning out something of the image.
However, if I were to print a negative in the darkroom with a sloppy border, I’d feel completely justified. So what’s the difference? And what about the image from this post? The border there is created from the full area of which my film scanner is capable, which exceeds the boundaries of the frame on the left and rioght. I find myself wishing it had a similar effect at the top and bottom, as well. So what if I artificially added a film border, perhaps scanner from another frame, to this image? Would that be legitimate?
It’s something of a minefield, but in the final analysis, I suspect it’s only important in that pursuing these effects it is likely only to detract from my taking of images themselves. It’s often a little too easy (as I suspect it always has been) to allow ourselves to be swayed from what is good by what is fashionable, new or gimmicky. I’ll try and stick with good.