When it comes to getting a present for my mum for mother’s day, that old conundrum of - what do you get someone who has everything - comes to mind. So for a few years now I’ve been booking a day or a meal with her instead – a little mother/daughter excursion. This year we went to the Art Gallery of Victoria (Australia) for a bit of a browse and a gourmet lunch. One of the exhibitions at the gallery was a collection of contemporary Chinese photography.

 

I am of the vintage that I remember old fashioned film cameras. I even remember developing photos in art class in high school! I still have a handful of friends who use small digital cameras for the convenience, but claim that they have taken the art out of photography. Composition doesn’t matter anymore, they argue, since you can just point and shoot and crop it down later. No one spends time capturing a shot anymore or setting a scene.

 

The photographic artwork I saw on the weekend; however, really drove it home to me that criticizing digital photography in order to try and trump old school ways is arrogant and misinformed.

 

In one piece, that stretched about a dozen metres long, a naked figure ran and stumbled alongside the Red Wall in Beijing. He passes all sorts of characters, from poorly clothed merchants selling items from a bench, to a pair of drag queens, reflecting the broad cross section of people to be found in modern day Beijing. The image has been digitally mastered to look like one long seamless photograph but it is of course a series of photographs of the running nude man, joined together to create an illusion of perpetual motion. The naked figure’s white skin contracts against the striking crimson of the pretty yet looming wall behind him, drawing your eye to the action of the piece, while the other characters fade into the wall. It’s not until you look up close at the photograph that you see the crisp detail of all of those extra characters and their reaction to the man.

 

Another piece of artwork, my favourite in the collection, depicted eight scenes from the site of a mammoth hydro-electric building scheme which has displaced millions of people and destroyed a large area of natural habitat. The title of the piece is the Three Gorges by Chen Nong, shot in 2005-6. A group of the displaced locals are pictured in the photographs in paper uniforms that resemble those of the Terracotta Army from a distance, but when you look at one of the images at close range you can see that they are paper thin. The photographs are printed using the gelatin silver technique and then watercolour is used in a dull grey/blue color which gives the scene an eerie feel. Vast mountains of hi-rise buildings create a hazy wall in the background, with the displaced villagers starring at the audience from atop the rubble of the construction work. These prints might have been shot using analogue film or they might have been shot using digital photography. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. It’s stunning artwork either way.

 

It may be true that digital cameras can make people’s photography habits lazy, but surly those people would never have been interested to put the time in with the older type of camera anyway? These fights between old and new school photographers do the whole art form a disservice. Is it invalid to use water color on top of a print to enhance the photograph? It’s just as valid as using the post-shot options available for manipulation of digital files.