TWO SIGNATURES REQUIRED

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PRIOR TO THE 21st CENTURY, THE AVERAGE PHOTOGRAPHER produced his/her/their work on one platform at a time. For many whose creative energy was rooted in analog, film was the tablet on which the work was “written”. That meant that, for the most part, the look of that medium was the underlying visual “signature” of whatever was recorded on it. Go back even farther, and mediums like tintypes or daguerreotypes, with their respective looks and limits, defined what we now regard as an “old time” image. Each process conferred a certain look upon whatever the photographer captured. When you were born, the recording medium you worked in dictated, to a degree, what your pictures would look like.

A faux tintype selfie, delivered via an app. The conception and the platform work hand-in-hand.

Fast-forward to the present, in which digital technology has completely liberated the photographer, opening up a broad swath of choices for the visual signature that you choose for a given picture. Want to render your subject in a way that reflects Victorian tech? Want to deliberately limit things like light sensitivity, texture, dynamic range? Pick a period, pick a look. It’s yours at the touch of a button or the flick of an app. What a spectacular arsenal is at our command, all in an instant.

I have absolutely no practical experience in the processing of film of any kind, but then, I have no need to learn it, unless I desire to master that tech for my own hobbyist amusement. With even modest equipment, I can absolutely simulate the various emulsions of a variety of film types, replicating how they were developed by those who grew up natively with those orientations. This is like being able to write both left and right handed. My eye is one personal signature for the pictures I hope to create, and the look of a given era or medium is a second signature. My choice of platform acts as a co-signer for my choice of approach.

The greatest blessing of the current age in photography is that we have developed gear that simplifies the mechanical process of capturing a frame to such a degree that more effort can now be directed to our vision, and less on how our machinery will execute it. When you conceive of a great idea, you are affixing your signature to the result, while the platform you choose to deliver that work signs off on it as well. Amazing.