5. WWEWD?

            But this is not the first instance of a new medium emerging. 

Once, when photography was coming into its own, Edward Weston recorded in his Daybooks:

I wrote an article, published this [1930] July with examples of my work in Camera Craft ….  I tempered my words, fearing the editor [Sigismund Blumann] might not stand up under full blast.

Get a taste of his “tempered” words from the article in question:

But I have started with art as subject matter, though I have been asked to write my view point on “Pictorial Photography.”  … [T]hat word “Pictorial” irritates me:  as I understand it the making of pictures.  Have we not had enough picture making—more or less refined “Calendar Art” by hundreds of thousands of painters and etchers?  Photography following this line, can only be a poor imitation of already bad art.  Great painters—and I have had fortunate contacts with several of the greatest in this country, or in the world—are keenly interested in, and have deep respect for photography when it is photography both in technique and viewpoint, when it does something they cannot do:  they only have contempt, and rightly so when it is an imitation painting.  And that is the trouble with most photography—just witness ninety per cent of the prints in innumerable salons—work done by those who if they had no camera would be third rate, or worse, painters.  No photographer can equal emotionally nor aesthetically the work of a fine painter, both having the same end in view—that is, the painter’s viewpoint.  Nor can the painter begin to equal the photographer in his particular field.

The camera then, used as a means of expression, must have inherent qualities either different or greater than those of any other medium, otherwise, it has no value at all …

The article proceeds to expound the “inherent qualities” of Weston’s camera, then turns imperative:

[L]earn to think photographically and not in terms of other mediums ….  Realize the limitations as well as possibilities of photography.

And the Daybooks entry about the article’s writing and publication tells how the article suffered ready irony upon its printing, and how Weston reacted to that provocation:

                        But seeing some unusually awful reproductions in the same issue by one [Nickolas] Boris, with a laudatory article by the editor, I spent an hour writing him my mind.  These cheap abortions which need no description other than their titles, “Prayer,” “Greek Slave,” “Orphans,” “Unlucky Day,” have nothing to do with Art, nor Life, nor Photography.  So I not very gently explained.

The editor even placed Weston’s article and an image called “Sister Arts” by Boris on facing pages.  I have not looked up Weston’s letter, but his entry in the Daybooks relapses into the rant two paragraphs later:

                        Stanley Wood is showing at Denny-Watrous:  his water colors are very fine,—and I can’t often respond to painting with my greater interest in photography—the most important medium of our day.  Now I am speaking more honestly my mind.  Too often I have tried to explain photography,—why it is important.  Old stuff!—necessary twenty years ago,—not now!  Photographers who still try to paint with the camera should be dismissed with this advice:  “Go buy a brush and paint box—you are not worthy nor strong enough to be a photographer.”  I like Stanley, and regret his wife blocks our contact.  She belongs to the wives’ union, and publicly disapproves of me.

            Consistent colours are a standard of other media, such as painting and printmaking, and—just as the standards of painting did not apply to photography—the standards of other media do not apply to digital drawing.  The uncertainty in colour is part of the “inherent qualities,” the “limitations as well as possibilities” of digital art, and consistent colours cannot be a standard of digital art.  The problem of erratic colours in digital drawings does not call for solution by choking the colours. 

It calls for solution with new standards for digital art.