From "Oakwood Cemetary"
One of the most common venues for photographic exposure (pun intended) these days is the Juried Exhibition. Buried in the prospectus fine print is the phrase, “Only work completed within the last two years is eligible…” If you submit art to juried shows (also known as “photo lotto” – but with smaller payouts) you see this phrase, or something like it, in every prospectus. What’s new Pussycat? What is your current work? The latest things you photographed or what you’ve currently working on? The dilemma for me is how digital photography and Photoshop have redefined “current work”.
Virtually all of my photographs fall into either a project or follow a theme. It takes quite a while for me to develop and complete a project. Sometimes the “raw material” for a project can span several years, or in my case, several decades of art making. I am finishing the work now so it is my latest work – even if it contains images from sometime in the last century. (That’s the twentieth century.)
If this digital stuff is supposed to give me instant results, then how come I have digital files that are more than two years old? Really, I do. The digerati tell us, “You can do more, faster, better work with digital cameras that with film.” Well, I guess so, but you couldn’t prove it by me. It seems to take just as much time to get a project completed digitally as it did with film. Maybe I can do the work faster, but maybe subconsciously I don’t want to complete this work because I haven’t thought about it, meditated upon it or worked on it long enough. I started photography when the craft took a lot of time and maybe I want that space taken up by the creative process of thoughtfully completing a project rather than rushing through just to get something done.