Fred Ritchin’s After Photography

 "An analog photographer in the field, unsure whether the pictures on the undeveloped film are any good, who pushes herself to take more, possibly better photographs, is working in a more instinctive, exploratory, and probably more "present" way than the digital photographer who sees the results immediately and right away decides whether to reshoot or not influenced by the initial results. The image mediates the experience in the field. As photographer Paolo Woods told the New York Times about the digital: "You tend to be satisfied a lot more quickly but when you're shooting with film, you never know what you've got, and you push on and eventually it's the last image that's the good one." "

I deeply agree with this quote. When I take pictures with a film camera, I do not know what kind of picture I will get until the film is developed, so I adjust all settings carefully and take each picture. When I take a picture with a digital camera, I try to take a picture uncarefully. So, I delete lots of pictures. However, with a film camera, I observe the subject carefully before taking the picture.

"Digital photographs, frequently made while peering at the camera's back, concretize the central paradigm of the screen. Veteran press photographers, for example, refer to digital colleagues as "chimping" (said to be derived from the actions of a chimpanzee), given that they can frequently be seen looking down at the screen and pressing lots of buttons, even in the middle of an event-although that may be preferable to what analog press photographers have long been called: shooters."

This paragraph is interesting to me. People who shoot analog are looking through a viewfinder, whereas people who shoot digital are looking at the screen. I think this is a change in the value of photography and that people now look at the screen so that they can check the images they have taken quickly. I, however, wanted to take pictures through the viewfinder. I think it is more polite and takes better pictures that way.

"People will better understand that a large percentage of photographs pretending to depict something significant are showing only its simulation, often created by the photograph's subjects themselves. The more powerful a subject is, the more he will control the simulation, while weaker and poorer people are often photographed to conform to generic but frequently less flattering imagery. A photograph that attempts to get at the complexity of individuals is considerably more rare. (A group of young Swiss photojournalists once told me that the goal of a portrait is to make the subject look nice.)"

This paragraph was a little difficult to understand. My view of photography has changed dramatically as I now understand that even though a photo may appear to capture something important, it is often the result of the subject's creation. I also realized that many photographs often convey superficial images and rarely convey what is on the inside.