An Eye of the Past with A Tool of the Future

Jeffrey Smith's Photo Slideshow from Flickr.com

In photography, the most important clicking used to be done by the camera's shutters as the photograph was taken. However, with the advent of digital art, the clicking of a mouse may have superceded it. Many artists these days bypass the darkroom and hit Photoshop to "develop" their photographs. Jeffrey Smith, whose photos are currently hanging in the Coffee and Tea Room, is one of them. This fact isn't always apparent. Upon first glance, one may think that his photos are straight but look a little closer and you'll discover some blurring here, a dash of saturation there. Or you might be tricked the other way around. Sometimes pictures look enhanced when they're actually not (like in his "zoom and spin" pieces in the stream above).

Anyway, some people think digital photography is cheating because it lacks the manual dexterity of developing film. I tossed this statement at Smith, assuming he'd vehemently deny that digital art is cheating (considering that he is a digital artist). Surprisingly, he said:

I am in favor of digital photography simply because its cheaper and takes less time than film. I taught myself how to develop film and prints once and it was ridiculously time consuming. But I respect the people who are skilled with film much more than I respect digital photographers. I feel that someone who has taken the time to learn the very hard manual techniques of burning or dodging is much better skilled than someone who can simply edit it in photoshop. There are those purists out there who don't use any editing and I hope that I will eventually be able to do that.

So, even though Smith works digitally, he respects traditional photography more than digital photography. I don't take this response as a negative, rather, I'm actually more interested in Smith's work now than I was before because he's wrestling with the "ethics" of photography (as opposed to blindly accepting Photoshop as if it's always been around). For example, he thinks enhancing photos with Photoshop isn't cheating but he thinks collaging photographs with it is. He said:

I do use photoshop quite a bit, but its usually just for slight touchups. I try never to do more then add a little saturation and work on the levels. I took a digital photography class in High School, and it was a joke. Our teacher was literally telling us to copy moons into our photos and the like. And I hated it. That was definitely cheating, and I'm not sure where I draw the line. I guess I'll use photoshop to get the necessary picture that I want, but I hope to one day be able to not use it.

From this perspective, Smith makes his use of Photoshop seem like a crutch rather than a dignified tool. I don't accept his rationale here. I think he uses Photoshop because he likes the way it makes his pictures look. I don't think he uses it because the photos would be bad otherwise. Smith has a good eye. Just look at the Curves photo on his Flickr account (the 14th image from the end) and you'll see what I mean. In his best pictures at the Coffee and Tea Room, like in German Romanticist Novalis' writings, nature feels directly connected to the sublime.

Part of me wishes Smith would own Photoshop as a legitimate artistic tool. It, like a pencil or a brush, has capabilities and there are artistic ways of using it. If labor is the key problem here, there are many ways of working in Photoshop that are time-consuming and that take patience and skill. His particular method, slight enhancement, isn't one of these but if he decided that Photoshop was a primary interest of his rather than a begrudged pal, he could change this. What's so ethically different from collaging images in Photoshop and collaging magazines? Click and move isn't so far away from cut and paste and in terms of refinement, it's better.

Perhaps asking Smith to own Photoshop is asking him to be something he's not. He's interested in framing actual nature and longs to be in a dark room. He uses Photoshop casually to simulate dark room effects. Maybe this contradiction is what enlivens his work: an eye of the past with a tool of the future.

I've been kind of hard on Jeff (only because I expect a lot of him), so, I'll let him have the last word:

When you look at great photographers, and how they could get the perfect shot the first time its really amazing how well they understood composure and exposure and light balance and every single element of the photo. So if I want to get better at photography it seems logical that I should try to learn all those things too. Maybe its also because I'm kindof old school, and I don't think photography and other types of art mix well. I dont think it looks cool to use stupid effects on a photo and call it a photo. You can call it something else but not a photograph. Photoshop is great for all those multimedia design jobs, but manipulating a program and taking something and making it completely undiscernible and still calling it a photography just rubs me the wrong way. But perhaps it makes an interesting image. As you say, who's to argue?