The Photo Line

The CONTACT Photography Festival is now going on in Toronto. It runs all May at various locations around the city. And of course they have a Flickr pool. Now, the Flickr pool isn't necessarily the works shown throughout the city, but more aimed at the photos of those who attend, and some Blackberry pics from a few artists.

But I wonder when you stop calling a photograph a photograph. The majority of what's done today is digital, and most digital photos get some post-processing done. Post isn't something new to the world of photography, as colour adjustments, contrast, brightness, and image tweaking and editing was done for decades in the darkroom. The process has just become easier and less physical. So I don't have an issue with someone adjusting the colours to match their memory of the scene, or to create a hyper-real spectrum.

But what about when you start adding more effects? When you alter the photo to look like a mosaic or stained glass? What about a Fresco effect or a digital alteration of the canvas? At what point has the image gone from being a photograph to something more akin to a painting? When you start wondering if a picture is actually a moment frozen in time or the artist's interpretation of that moment, does its base medium change? Does the lack of a physical development process alter our perspective of the medium? Is this, once again, an example of McLuhan's medium being the message?

If so, is it not strangely quaint that it is photography that brings this to light? McLuhan's theories are often applied to television, the Internet, and other "new" media, but here is one of the most familiar forms of visual expression entering the fray due to the modern tools available. Somehow, I think Marshall would approve.