ALEX SCHNEIDEMAN

This missive from an old colonial 'Black and White' house in a leafy Singapore suburb. I go running every morning in 80% humidity/90f heat and every morning I am accompanied a little of the way by the most vivid blue Kingfisher. The birdlife here is amazing and I can spend huge tracts of time just staring into the trees. There are monkeys here which scare everyone and local lore has it that you mustn't look them in the eyes because they find this directly offensive and will attack. There are the most amazing squirrels that jump huge distances from palm to palm. And the noise of the birdsong is beautiful and incessant broken only by the afternoon cicada contest. This morning during my run I passed an old Chinese lady who was collecting large, round, green fruit from a tree in her garden. I stopped to ask her what they were and she said they were green mangoes. She told me how to tell when they are ripe and gave me one. I was thrilled as I lumbered, sweating home with my swag.

In an attempt to detect a common thread connecting how galleries treat the 'problem' of digital printing here is my latest clipping. This one from the Troika Gallery, London.

Hi there, just to let you know I will be in Singapore from the 3rd to 15th May. 

I apologise if this causes you any inconvenience. I'll be back in the studio on the 16th May and getting straight back to work then so please send work through as normal and I will pick it up on my return.

Thank you for your patience,

Alex

Some images taken over Nova Scotia.

I recorded three very different kinds of music as I came across them in Central Park. I particularly love the last. See what you think.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY #2

This article was published in the Spring 2012 of SMACK magazine.

CONTINUOUS CHANGE 

A NEW WAY TO COMPARE DIGITAL 

AND ANALOGUE PHOTOGRAPHY 

ALEX SCHNEIDEMAN 

The Theory of Continuous Change as a Way of Describing the Distinctions between the Divergent Worlds of Analogue and Digital from a Photographic Perspective. 

There is a conversation that exists in photographic circles about the merits of film versus digital. It is not a subject to which you may have given much thought but it is one that I and many of my colleagues in photography have discussed at length and never concluded. I think the difficulty we have settling this disagreement is due to a failure to recognise the terms of the battle rather than a failure to recognise which is the better medium. I believe the argument should resolve on the subject of humanity and not on photography itself. The argument I have set out below could be applied to many different media where our increasingly digital life encroaches on our more intuitively chaotic, visceral, human nature. And finally, I have tried to come up with a definition (that of Continuous Change) which can be used to describe the fundamental differences between analogue and digital capture. 

THE BATTLEGROUND IS FOUND

In computer terms there is a difference between a transistor involved in the working of a microchip and the valve used in old fashioned radios and audio equipment. A computer chip uses a binary series of on/off commands to carry out its work, whereas an analogue transistor allows the expression of continuous change. This is best expressed by the divergence between the way the human brain and a computer chip works. A human brain processes in a state of continuous change using chemistry and billions of neural connections (CC) and so is able to intuitively adapt to various environments and tasks whereas a computer chip is binary and only capable of carrying out certain tasks (and reacting to particular environments) for which it was designed. The fundamental variation between film and digital capture is that film is an analogue process and the way it captures light comes from a process of continuous change whereas digital recording of light involves a binary process where aspects of each pixel are either on or off. 

To be clear about the media we are discussing; generally speaking film is a piece of see-through plastic with a thin coating of silver halide (SH) crystals (some films differ marginally). These crystals change when exposed to light in a non-binary, free-form way. That is to say, the crystals are neither ‘on’ nor ‘off ’, rather they are different the one from the other to an infinite degree as a result of the light that each crystal has been exposed to. In addition SH crystals are arranged at random across the film base. In the case of digital photography the sensor is a light sensitive plane which is ’x’ pixels wide by ’y’ pixels high x bit depth (this is what is known as ‘resolution’). Bit depth is described as the ability of a pixel to accurately represent colour and brightness on an increasingly accurate scale; 8bit, 16bit, 32bit and so on. In digital photography every aspect of the light recording plane is ascribed a location and a binary value. So the core difference between film and digital capture is that the structure of the light capture plane of film is random whereas the digital plane is ordered. 

The same rules apply to sound recording, which helps to illustrate this contrast. An area in which sound and light recording are directly analogous is what happens at the edge of light capture, i.e. what happens when light (or sound) peaks or troughs beyond the recordable levels of the film or sensor. In film there will be a continuous decline of reciprocity at either end of the scale until what levels of light there are will be unrecordable with a smooth, organic decline at either end of the scale. Digital sensors follow this curve too but at some point the recordable data will cut out. This is known as ‘clipping’. To help envisage this try to imagine a stream which runs over sand into the sea (which in this case represents noise or light ‘oblivion’ i.e. too much or too little to record). The ‘analogue’ stream will divert, change course, adapt as the sand and waves conspire to alter the terrain it flows over but the ‘digital’ stream may follow fine pathways but it will always chase the same runnels into the ocean. To sum up, in the analogue world either end of the recordable scale is arrived at with nuance and natural decline whereas those areas of oblivion are reached with a command “off!” in the case of digital. 

Following from this, a friend of mine who is a sound recordist, made the point that both analogue and digital sound capture have superficially comparable properties in the mid ranges but it is at the peaks (or troughs) of capture where the variations are most marked. When digital sound capture peaks out of recordable range it sounds fractured and unnatural but the peaks and troughs in an analogue recording can sound wonderfully weird and beautiful as evinced by countless contemporary musicians who “tune their amps to 11” to exploit this property. This is true of analogue (film) light capture where 

can all be beautiful because of the principle of ‘Continuous Change’. Because film records light with random silver halide crystals that do not follow a formalised binary recording process the many nuances of light and movement can be captured harmoniously creating organic tones and forms. Many of these qualities may not be readily visible to the human eye unless they are coaxed out of the mess of altered silver-halide crystals by a skilful technician. 

There is also a discussion to be had about the comparable ability of one medium over another to accurately render colour this being contrasted by film’s chemical approach and digital’s channeled colour process but as I want to describe my theory of CC for the purposes of art and not pure science I am not going to go into those arguments here. Indeed all that can be said about black and white film can be said about colour film versus digi just as well with the one caveat that various films (just as monochrome films) have different response rates to colours which rather ‘locks’ a certain look into the qualities of the film which digi does not. 

PRINTING AND ‘CONTINUOUS CHANGE’ 

If you shoot on black and white film and print as a silver-gelatin print then you will create a print that represents light being captured in a state of continuous change which extends through the whole process - from shot to print. If, on the other hand, you shoot on film and print digitally then one of the three required processes (exposure, scan & print) will have CC properties but the following two will have binary properties. What this means to the final print is that the resulting printout from a straight digital capture may appear to be smoother but will be devoid of any of the sometimes imperceptible qualities of an exposure captured on organic, infinitely changeable film. I believe that there are qualities in film that we don’t pick up on consciously but which our brains draw on when we view these images. Indeed it has been said that the quality achievable from scanning film is limited to the quality of the best scanners available. Who knows what amazing depths of CC we will be able to discover in analogue images in the future? 

WHERE ANALOGUE & DIGITAL MEET 

When a film exposure is digitised in a film scanner it follows that the best scan possible is achievable with the best equipment and the best technique. However, the limitations of digital capture still apply and can impair naturally rendered detail in the peaks and troughs however there will be much of the ’feel’ of film in the resulting image which will convey the chemical or analogue nature of the organic medium. For this reason alone scanning film is very valuable because, despite the digital limitations (as already discussed) much of the native quality (especially tonal curves and response rates of the film to the colour spectrum) is transferrable to a digital file. 

In a way Continuous Change is merely a way of explaining the distinctions between analogue and digital capture - both methods have their benefits and drawbacks; the ability of digital photography to shoot in low-light, the versatility of varying ISO and the ready adaptability of the files make it a technically superior method of photography in many ways. But the ‘warmth’ or ‘presence’ that is apparent in film owes everything to the analogue capture of light which we ‘analogue’ humans respond to viscerally. If success in business was compared to success in art we would find it hard to marry the ingredients necessary for either. There maybe some crossover but on the whole either standard requires different efforts. The debate over film versus digital follows the same logic... It’s very hard to fall in love with a number and art (because that is what we’re discussing here after all) is about love and its about seeing ourselves reflected in the medium - we messy, beautiful, unpredictable human beings. 

In an attempt to log my thoughts on the subject of art and photography I am going to list them here in an occasional (as they come to me) series.

The purpose of inscribing these comes from an innate desire to render thoughts as something more tangible (it's the materialist in me) and to see if, over time, these add up to something or if from them an average sense might be perceived.

 #1 WHEN ART IS PHOTOGRAPHY

Think of a camera - any camera. Does it look like an artists tool? As beautiful as a camera can be (think Leica, Rolleiflex, Fuji X10) they are are all machines. Cameras are assemblages of complex design and technique which, when all parts work together; shutter, lens, light meter etc) produce a 'dead' image. The image rendered (either digitally or on film) needs to be reworked in some way by the photographer or other technician before it can be printed or put on a screen and stake its claim to be a 'work of art'. 

I believe that this is the reason photography is so misunderstood by the art regarding public. In the end - a photographic image is created by a machine albeit with an interventionist human touch. This reduces the value of the resulting image in the mind of many viewers because they discount that aspect of the artwork which they perceive to have been machine made and therefore the default quality of the image. Of course this perception is true in a sense - but I believe that it adheres more strongly in the 'Old World' than it does in the 'New World' where photographic arts have occupied a greater proportion of the collective cultural consciousness of the country. For example the US is a mere fledgling nation (compared to the UK) but film and photography have helped to define its culture to a much greater proportion of the time of its existence than Old Time England. This means that the perception of value in the craft of the traditional arts retains a greater value in the hearts and minds of the Old World than it does in those of, say, the States where the technical aspect of photography is taken for granted and greater value is placed on the individual expression manifest in any given photographic artwork.

The exceptions to the rule of cultural acceptance are Germany and France. These two countries have a wide appreciation for the photographic arts and my theory to explain this is that both of these countries were invaded in the 20th century and had to reappraise so much about their societal structure and culture just as film and the photographic arts were really coming to the fore. In addition to this both countries fostered a progressive artistic movement in the early 20th century that set the tone for stills and moving photography. In Germany there was the Bauhaus movement and in France there was the surrealist scene in Paris which gave birth to some of the greatest photographers such as Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson (preceded by Lartigue and Atget amongst others). And of course the US had such contemporary greats as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Weegee et al. I can't think of a great British photographer of the era (please don't call Lee Miller a 'Great' - she wasn't). George Rodger, a founder of Magnum, stands out but there wasn't the same scene in London as you would have discovered n Paris or Weimar before WW2.

Although this last point is a digression (one which I'd like to expand in another post) I think that you can't attempt to explain the variety of acceptances of photography without examining the cultural differences of the viewers of this art form. 

Cartier-Bresson was an adherent to his own theory of the 'decisive moment' - an approach that worked for him but every photographer must make a direct call on their creative core every time they click the shutter just as a painter or sculpture or poet must make with each of their own creative acts. I consider photography worthy of the term art when that connection to the creative consciousness has been made by the artist just as it is or should be in any medium. Whether a shot was taken with the most gorgeous Leica or on a camera phone the principle is immutable and universal - if an artist made the artwork then it is art regardless of the mechanics of production. 

Alex Schneideman London,

April 2012

Listen with headphones if possible.