{"id":1435,"date":"2011-10-21T20:32:17","date_gmt":"2011-10-21T20:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1435"},"modified":"2011-10-28T07:47:41","modified_gmt":"2011-10-28T07:47:41","slug":"ritchin-on-raw-file","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1435","title":{"rendered":"Ritchin On Raw File"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fred Ritchin<\/strong> has a long and distinguished career in photography as an editor, writer, curator and more – and some of the details are at the head of his interview by Peter Brook<\/em> on Wired<\/em>‘s Raw File<\/em> blog post Raw Meet: Fred Ritchin Redefines Digital Photography.<\/a><\/p>\n

Like everything by Ritchin it is worth reading, even if sometimes just to provoke you into disputing or qualifying what he says.<\/p>\n

So while I think in some ways he is right on the ball, when he comes out with a sweeping statement like:<\/p>\n

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‘We look at landscapes of idyllic and unlikely places, but we don\u0092t look at landscapes of environmental destruction. ‘<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I rather wonder who is the we he is talking to; perhaps not anyone who has been to shows of the work of photographers such as Burtynsky and others who have built careers on their (admittedly sometimes rather beautiful and idealised) images of environmental carnage around the world.<\/p>\n

And these pictures – unlike the work of many in earlier years such as the ‘New Topographics’ of the 1970s have been fairly widely reproduced in mainstream media. So while Ritchin is undoubtedly right when he talks about an increasing divorce between photographs in the media and reality, it is not the kind of decree absolute that his sound bites suggest.<\/p>\n

In my own small way, I’ve been photographing the post-industrial landscape since the late 1970s, with some examples on web sites including London’s Industrial Heritage<\/a> and Urban Landscapes,<\/a> and the Lea Valley<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9Dagenham – Channel Tunnel Rail Link under construction<\/small><\/p>\n

Of course, most people who saw them at the time thought I was crazy when I was taking these pictures, which has made them rarer and more valuable now.<\/p>\n

Ritchin argues that digital has made photographs different, into a manipulable medium that be considered as digital information and melded by the media to serve their particular purposes.\u00a0 In fact, as he says, he isn’t really talking about photographs but about media images:<\/p>\n

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the first step is to abandon the idea we\u0092re looking at photographs. We\u0092re looking at entry points to information and to the world in which the image was made.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But what Ritchin is talking about is not really photography, but how the commercial media organisations make use of photography.<\/p>\n

I’ve spent a lot of time this week looking through the work that I took in the first ten or so years as a photographer using film. What I do now certainly has changed fairly dramatically, and the major reason for this is certainly a matter of the changes in technology that have ocurred.<\/p>\n

There are two main factors, and neither is the switch from film to digital in cameras, which has I think made relatively little difference. If I now shoot on film, I am working in a digital industry (and in a person digital practice) and the first stage after developing the negative is to scan and turn those film images into a digital format.<\/p>\n

The major change in my practice has been the introduction of automation in cameras – auto exposure and particularly autofocus. Many of the pictures that I tried and failed to make would with a modern camera have been in focus and correctly exposed.\u00a0 Whether on film or digital.<\/p>\n

Digital would have made a difference in terms of quality, and in particular for the many images that I took in low light. Those on colour film would have been more accurate, though that would not necesseraly have been an improvent.<\/p>\n

Digital does have a few other minor advantages – so many of what would have been my best pictures on film seemed to have been only partly recorded, or spoilt by light leaks on the film leader or film end\u00a0 (particularly when I loaded film in casettes from bulk.) It’s great too that I can check immediately for correct exposure and things like people , though I often forget to do so.<\/p>\n

But essentially the change from film to digital has been of no great significance so far as my photography is concerned. Hardly surprising since the important things take place in my mind and not in my camera.<\/p>\n

The digital revolution has of course changed my life – in photography as well as in other ways. For around 8 years I earned most of my living from writing on the web, and apart from that things like this blog and my various web sites and on-line photo libraries have completely altered how I get my work to an audience and found a new audience around the world.<\/p>\n

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