I'm not actually a Luddite. A Luddite was originally a follower of a guy named Ludd, or Luddy or something, who protested the introduction of industrial machines that took the place of people in England. Machines such as automatic looms and spinning machines and such. They complained that not only did such machinery put them out of work, but produced cheap, shoddy goods. Truth is the machinery produced goods cheaply because of the reduction of manual labor, but the goods, cloth in this case, were uniformly good. Mostly "Luddite" has come to mean one who doesn't accept change.

So I'm not exactly a Luddite. I'm on a computer, think fuel injection beats carburetors any day, and do not believe any machine will ever replace a person whose job it is to think.

But I do have a problem with blindly accepting "labor saving devices" as truth in advertising. Until the introduction of the blender (or any of the trade name blenders) I never blended anything. The very invention of the device created a task that, for me, didn't exist before. If I'd had a need to blend things before, and it involved spending an hour cutting up carrots and bananas, then mashing them, then whipping them with a spoon, the blender would have been a godsend. But I didn't.

Similarly, my Ex got me a coffee machine for a birthday or Christmas years ago that not only allowed me to make filter coffee, but had an espresso machine at the other end. I like espresso, but had always been happy to buy it at a coffee house. Now I felt obligated to make it. Another new task, with enough fuss, bother and cleaning up that it hardly seemed worth it in order to drink espresso at home. Back before 1953 or so, it would have been inconceivable that groups of people would sit in living rooms for hours with their eyes plastered to a glowing tube. Except for radio, which allowed multi-tasking, entertainment was something one went out for or did without.

And vacuum cleaners made possible the "wall-to-wall" carpet. Think about this. Without the vacuum cleaner, it probably would have been unlikely that people would nail fuzzy fabric to their floors, where gravity is sure to capture forever every bit of dust and dirt brought into a home. The invention of the vacuum cleaner created the task of vacuuming permanent carpets. Prior to that, there was sweeping, and of course, beating carpets (outside - actually letting gravity assist in the effort).

On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of cars. I've done horses, and while they are a great (and expensive and time-consuming) hobby, compared to cars, they are much more work. I also use so many things that do save labor and the products of such devices that I would never wish to go back even twenty years in technology. But it is valuable to examine each so-called labor saving device to see if it really saves work, or if it, like most products concerned with hiding unpleasant odors, is creating it's own market by inventing the "unpleasantness."

So much for the general rant - on to photography.

Photography itself was revolutionary. Painters thought that it would put them out of business. And as most painters were attempting to record life, that fear makes sense. At that time, both were labor-intensive, and neither was completely appreciated for its own unique strengths. Painting went on to Impressionism, and photography was used to record, and later, tried to become more like painting through Pictorialism. But on its introduction, because both painting and photography made flat images, their roles were confused. Photography itself might have been looked upon as a labor-saving device. Back then someone like me might have rejected it as "too easy" or as creating labor where none existed before. Most artists thought photography was a gimmick.

With the introduction by Rollei of the roll film camera, photography became much easier. Multiple photographs could be made with less work than one plate photograph. Along with the convenience came, quite predictably, less attention to each exposure. Burn film - one will probably be good. Roll film also made it possible for Kodak to put a Brownie in every home, effectively splitting photography into two streams. One stream remained involved with photography as an art form, while the other made pictures of family and vacations and recorded events in their lives. (There were others using photography for scientific and other sundry uses, but we'll ignore them for now.) The popularizing of photography assured that images would play a profound part in our culture. Art-photographers, of course, thought roll-film was just a gimmick. Others, raised on roll-film, used it to make art.

Miniature format (Leica?) made cameras smaller, even less intrusive, and gave them even more exposures in which to assure a good image. As usual they weren't taken seriously by artists at first. The use of 35mm motion picture film to allow up to 50 exposures per roll had military and scientific implications, of course, but once again put off the artists who thought it just another gimmick. And a gimmick that produced lower quality images, at that. Except for some adventurous folks who saw the potential to make another kind of photograph, or those who were raised using miniature format.

Light meters, and auto exposure came along. Light meters were used to assure that the maximum detail was available in each exposure. Automating the light meter into a camera was an act of pure genius. Especially in the early cameras, inventing a way for a very weak analog current to control timing of a mechanical function (release of the second curtain) in a non-linear way, was simply awesome. Photographically, this meant that for most uses the person with such a camera was saved even the effort of moving a lever from a picture of the sun to a picture of clouds. Of course, for the artist, it was just another gimmick. Except for those that insisted that detail fill every corner of the print, or those that had never known photography without a meter and went on to make their art taking advantage of the technology.

When autofocus was invented (Pentax?) it made possible the use of longer lenses without having to manually focus. Short lenses with small apertures had always been used by cheap cameras as a way to avoid having to provide a focusing mechanism, but to make it work with longer lenses required some serious genius and a lot of mechanical and optical evolution. Finally, except for composition and actually releasing the shutter, anyone wanting to make a photograph really didn't have to do anything. I thought this was a gimmick. My complaint was, and still is to some extent, that the photographer doesn't have complete control of where the point of focus will be. Technology has somewhat fixed that by providing focus lock so the point can be chosen and the image recomposed prior to exposure (this presumes a perfect sphere section focal surface - something that doesn't exist, even in theory). Multi-point autofocus exists as well. And while autofocus remains slower than manual for many uses, it is clearly the way to go for others. Especially when depth of focus is great enough to coverage of the subject. There remain weaknesses in use with tissue-thin depth of focus, and especially in the delay from pressing the shutter release to exposure (remember the "decisive moment"), but in all it's here to stay, and artists are using it.

Next are digital cameras. They have been going through some growing pains. Most photographers still agree that the resolution from any digital camera isn't adequate for serious (print) work, but with the introduction of multi-meg images from popularly priced equipment it's getting close enough for practical purposes. And many are using the characteristics of digital images to make art that can't be made with film. My guess is that as photography didn't obsolete painting, digital photography won't replace film, but will simply augment the visual arts. And that's as it should be.

There is a problem with the visual arts and the way they're shown, however. Digital images shown digitally, on the web or otherwise, make sense. Digital images shown on paper works fine too, provided the characteristics of digital images are wanted. Film images shown digitally simply can't show the detail or the intent of the artist, unless they are being done specifically for digital display. Digital display of film images is much like photographic display of oil paintings. They give a general idea of what the art looks lke but can't be appreciated as intended by the artist. Oil paintings shown digitally are so far from the original that only a shadow is left. I'd guess that sculpture shown digitally is even further removed, but as the web is pervasive, I'd expect that having more people view, but appreciate less, is the tradeoff that's being made.

Artists create work for a particular type of display. As a film photographer can certainly make images specifically for digital viewing, I'd expect by extension that a painter or even a sculptor could, though I doubt many of those guys even think about it.

Working the other way around, digital images are frequently made specifically for print display - some emphasizing the digital nature, and some not. Drawn and painted works are frequently made for printed display, though as with the digital and film images done for magazine illustration, they are either "commercial art" or not claimed to be art at all.

On a slightly different topic, I'm finally getting near the end of Jacque Barzun's Dawn to Decadence, a fine book about the history of Western culture over the last five centuries. Among the self-referential notes he has made on the study of history itself is one that paraphrased says, "Art, when still aggressively trying to displace former art, is exciting and dynamic. Once it has become accepted it gets boring."

He probably meant boring to the art viewer, rather than to the artist, but the note itself hit very close to home for me.Change is exciting to me, as long as I'm the one doing it. I'm more of a Luddite when someone else is doing it, saying, "can't they just leave well enough alone?" But if I'm the one doing it, it's exciting. When I first started showing my night photographs on the web, they met with huge amounts of skepticism as they weren't like what anyone else on the web was doing. Since then many photographers have dabbled in similar styles, some doing very nice work. Others have simply accepted the style as another of the many styles of editorial fashion or art photography. Now that the night work has become accepted (pretty much), I find it boring. I've known this for awhile, but didn't realize it's part of a recognized pattern. I pretty much went through the same thing with the club photography, except that it never really met with any resistance. It's boring now - that is the images don't do anything for me. I still like being in the middle of all the music and dancing and drinking and life.

I think this is another aspect of change. Change is resisted if it's imposed from the outside, but enjoyed if it's self-made. Once change is accepted, it can be better judged for the qualities it has, rather than just as a novelty. But too, once it's been accepted, if it doesn't have actual value, it eventually dies.

Awhile back someone posting in response to something I'd written on the web praising the new for its own sake, pointed out that just because something's new, that doesn't mean it's good. I'd entirely missed that in the writing. Of course new doesn't mean better. Not of itself. Progress only results from something either created new, or things integrated in a new way. But of itself, newness is absolutely not sufficient to be better. The wall-to-wall carpet is an excellent example of new being merely stupid. Maybe there are other examples within photography that will become known to us only after sufficient time has passed to adequately judge the results.

-Don

P.S. My recommendations for:

Best photographic thing of the 20th Century - miniature format (35mm)
Worst photographic thing of the 20th Century - PC connectors
Best new thing of the 20th Century - automobiles (OK, technically 19th century)
Worst new thing of the 20th Century - wall-to-wall carpeting