back to the pixels

I remember discovering grain. Obviously, I was no pioneer or scientist, but in my world there had been, up until then, photographs or photographs which looked a bit blurred. I started processing and printing before I was ten and had a darkroom by fourteen, so the discovery of grain must have come by the age of nine years: I've always found it difficult to start something new without understanding something of how it works, and film works with grain.

The beauty of the way in which it tended to be used was that it appeared to absorb subject and object into the same space - somehow, a grainy picture is more accessible, more transparent than one in which the grain is invisible. This worked well for hard subjects. The word most often used is gritty, but it would seem likely that this usage arose from the coincident similarity to the the word grainy.

It's hard to tell how much of this attitude is learned and how much came unbidden. There is of course a strong pragmatic reason for visible grain: the faster the film, the more pronounced the grain. Shooting difficult, fleeting subjects often means low light, and low light means high speed (or flash, but that's for another day.) It doesn't take long before the mind automatically applies the equation grainy picture = interesting subject - useless as a shooting equation, but useful for interpretation.

This is not an attitude generally applied to digital imagery. It's as if the whole arena is in the hands of photographic puritan dullards. They abhor visible pixels, hence the dismissive description, noise. But the pixel is the basic brick of the photograph, and to be embarrassed by its presence is like a painter being embarrassed by his brush strokes.

It's therefore interesting to visit Annie Leibowitz's current show, Pilgrimage, at Hamilton's Gallery. Many of the pictures were taken with a point-and-shoot. I asked the slime-ball in residence whether Leibowitz had printed them herself. "No" he sneered, "They're all printed by master-printer David Adamson." I asked whether he was primarily a wet print master or digital. "Obviously, wet originally, but they do everything now."

Wrong, slime-ball. Adamson moved directly from lithography to digital. Such a lack of interest in an important part of the process characterises much of this end of the photographic market. It's hard to tell from a first look at the prints how much noise reduction and sharpening (both of which destroy pixels) has been used, but I suspect that even the master printer is toeing the line of using "at least some sharpening and noise reduction."

I am about to go there again to examine further. Meanwhile, this is shot which I believe benefits from being shown entirely without the two pixel manglers. This is, of course a reduced version, so has some inevitable mangling. More (or less) detail later.