The technology has been shifting constantly since
1839. We can only expect that it will continue to shift. Everyone is a photographer now. Everyone carries a camera in their purse or pocket.
We make photographs in a different
way from the way we use to. But we make them for the same reasons. I would argue that a 19th century
Victorian family album has exactly the same purpose as the 200
pictures of your kid that you carry on your phone. I was working in the apparatus division
research laboratory.
My supervisor came to me one day and said, I want you to look at a new type of imager that
had just become available. Called charged couple device imager and that was the Fairchild CCD 201. I thought if I could build some sort of device that would capture an image, well that is called a
camera. I called it my baby because it made me cry a lot.
I always say that. What I was dealing with was something that could convert a light pattern to a charge pattern. I had to get that charge pattern off the device
really quickly, and store it somewhere. So I was going to try and make a digital
conversion device, and then store it in RAM.
I decided I needed a form of permanent storage
that didnt require batteries. That was easy, actually, because magnetic tape
on cassettes were being used for all kinds of reasons in the early days of computers. They were storing digital information. People always talk about building the camera.
More than half the effort, probably more than
half the effort, was building the playback unit. To make it suitable for a television signal because that was the only way to electronically look at an
image. This was all digital. Right from the output of the CCD all the way
through to the output to the TV set.
That was all digital everywhere in between. To give you a timeline of digital photography we have Steve Sasson in 1975 building the first
truly digital camera. In 1986 Eastman Kodak Company comes out
with the megapixel sensor. In 1987-88 Jim McGarvey builds tactical camera which evolves into the 1991 Kodak DCS.
It came in a rather hefty suitcase that contained
the camera and the storage device. The next year they are actually able to combine all those parts into one smaller body, the DCS 200. In 1994 the Apple Quicktake 100 is the consumer
camera. The first megapixel consumer camera is the
Kodak DC210 in 1999.
It is a very short timeline here, when you get into
it, maybe 20 years or so. Of course now everyone has either a smart phone
or a tablet with a camera built into it. The first digital camera I ever saw you had to load
a floppy disc into it. My mind was blown when I saw that.
What was this? You can put a picture on a computer now? There are generations of kids now that will never know what film is like, or what leafing through a
shoebox full of 4x6s from Moto Photo. Its things like that. It is just gone. Thats Talbot.
The man that invented the negative. Digital made the negative obsolete, and this is the
way we see images. It can be deleted by accident. It is not a physical thing.
We use to have the possibility that you might run across a photograph of your grandmother when she was eighteen years old, in the back of a
drawer that nobody knew about. Suddenly, you have this picture. That can be found later and interpreted. When you have a digital image, what is the thing
that you have? You have code or something.
Rarely do people print out their photographs
anymore. When we are seeing things ephemerally on a screen it becomes very much like everything else
we see on a screen. Our relationship to memory with regard to the
photographic image is changing and it will be really interesting to see where that
goes. It is surprising to most people when I tell them I
love digital.
I just love digital technology, and they will look at
me and think it is heresy. Artists have come to a point where many of them are saying, I feel like the machine is in control and I want to have my hands in this object. When the finished product is something other than a computer screen, it harkens back to the
day when photography was a craft. It is not just about the image, though image is king.
It is about the object itself, and you made that object..
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