nathancarter wrote in post #18135748
Because our standards have risen. Those images are a great reminder of yesteryear, but today's image consumers demand sharper focus, less noise, less motion blur, better color rendering, and images produced in increasingly difficult shooting situations.
Let's make an analogy to cars. When the cars of the 60's and 70's came out, people loved them. They'd usually get you to work on time (but sweating due to no A/C), you might be able to pick up some AM radio stations if the clouds were right, and there was plenty of room in the back seat for you and your best girl. Today's cars are safer, quieter, more reliable, last longer, and are more fuel efficient. The cars of yesteryear would get you to your destination, sure - but you'd get 11mpg, coat the world in smog, and in a head-on collision the steering column would go through your spine. Aside from nostalgia, today's cars are better on all accounts.
Flawed analogy, aside from the fact that I’d take a ‘57 Corvette (or Bel Air or Thunderbird) almost over anything today...art doesn’t have to worry about safety standards or fuel efficiency...on the contrary. Oh, and on the issue of 'reliability,' my 1934 and 1958 lenses and 1969 camera have proven remarkably reliable, as they will for the rest of my life...say that for digital anything.
Now, I’m going to concede that for some professionals, they will encounter a clientele raised on HD this and that, whereby emphasis on sharpness and clarity may be inflated...I would assume magazine editors are particularly anal. And sure, drones can sneak into areas once inaccessible. But this, of course, does not represent the overall photographic spectrum.
So when looking at photography overall, I must state that I frankly don’t give a good goddamn what people are demanding today...you mean, the same people who have put the Kardashians at the top of our modern culture hierarchy? No, no, our standards have not risen...on the contrary.
Less noise? The only “consumers” who fastidiously give a crap about that are us photography geeks...not to mention that I love film grain. Best color photographers (as in actually using color as a powerful aesthetic tool) stretch back decades, despite advancements in accurate rendering.
Imagines shot from difficult shooting situations...OK, yeah, Capa on Omaha Beach was a piece of cake.
Really, when you reduce past photography as somehow inferior artifacts that thrive mainly off nostalgia and nothing more, then you have invariably reduced the value of all art to chronological fate, dismissing aesthetic, influence, and creativity.
Just to be clear, I don’t like a Rembrandt because his work is nostalgic, and shall we discuss written works from the past?
And by the way, the first time I became aware of Ansel Adams was when his photos (posters & calendars) began to pepper the cubicles of American office workers in the early 1990s. I didn’t know who he was, and it would be more than a decade later, when I actually ‘got into’ photography, that I learned about him.
To my surprise, his photos were NOT from the 1980s, as in contemporary work (remember, this is the early 1990s). No nostalgia factor, and no nostalgia factor when listening to Miles Davis...nothing quaint and anodyne, and certainly nothing, absolutely nothing, inferior compared with today’s offerings.
At various times on different sites, I’ve heard people proudly take iconoclastic positions against the ‘masters,’ and on some level, this is good; nothing is beyond reproach, particularly in a subjective dynamic. But efforts to prove something better, something that relegates those old boring retreads back into the dark recesses of history, have yet to eventuate, so I remain completely unconvinced that our standards are higher.
Said all I need...I'm out, at least for now.
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