Date posted: April 19, 2008

Photography: Point, Line, Field

The small film format and the compact camera made it possible for photographers to travel lightly and to photograph in challenging circumstances. It also changed the speed at which photos can be taken. How are the current technological innovations changing photography? Digital technology has made it easier to take and store large numbers of photos and to easily discard rejected images. I believe there is another perhaps more fundamental potential for change.

As a photographer you can put all your effort into taking one photo. You may take several shots to select the One, but the goal is to make one portrait, landscape or still life. Many photographers still work like this: Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky, Robert Polidori, Annie Leibovitz, Anton Corbijn and countless others, working in fashion, portrait and landscape photography.

The single, singular or monumental photo is often taken with a large format camera and enlarged to the size of a poster or billboard. It may feature on the cover of a magazine, a cd or a calendar. The One photo has to tell it all as in the One defining portrait. Edward Burtynsky may make a selection of several photos of the same subject, but not of the same location. Fashion photographers may make several photos for an editorial, but in each photo the model wears different clothes and often takes on a different pose.

You can also create a series. This is how many street and documentary photographers work: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Alex Webb, Bernd and Hilla Becher to name but a few. Photo series are often presented in sequence on a wall or in a book or as one work, as in the case of Bernd and Hilla Becher. It is the series that tells a story and the photographer felt that only a series could express what he or she wanted to say.

A typical photo series is Stephan Schacher’s Plates and Dishes, a journey through North-America during which he documented the menu he ate at a roadside diner and the person behind the counter. Other typical photo series are Crossings Photographs from the US - Mexico Border by Alex Webb and economist turned photographer Sebastião Salgado’s photographic essays.

And then you can create a database with image tags that allows you to browse criss-cross through an image archive. A tag is basically the theme of a series, but since any one photo can have several tags, the same photo can be part of different series. With a database you can thus recreate the multiple dimensions of an object, location or event.

In going from a single photo to a series and a database, we have moved from a point, to a line, to a field or a multidimensional space.

Of course each subsequent stage was already implicated in the previous stage, but only fully manifested itself with the advent of new technology. Anselm Adams’ photos of Yosemite National Park constitute a series and his archive is a database. With the help of a catalogue or an index it has always been possible to search an archive. Database technology only made it easier just as the compact camera made it easier to create a series. As the examples I gave show, the boundaries are not absolute either, but I do believe there is a difference. This difference may express itself in working method, themes, the price of the work, how and where it is presented etc.

How does the transition from series to database influence photography? It’s probably to early to tell. When last year I migrated my web archive, which is a selection from my full archive, to a database structure with tags, I realized that I could also take photos with the database and the tags in the back of my mind. I also noticed tags or themes bubbling up in my mind as I was walking the streets of Hanoi. I could select a single tag, markets, neon signs or walls, or combination of tags, Hanoi Balloon Vendors or India Street Vendors and create an exhibition or photo book from that. But I actually find it interesting to feed the database and explore other ways of unlocking and presenting its contents.