Thierry Maindrault’s Monthly Chronicle
In this summer holiday period, it seems to me appropriate to tame the new environmental atmosphere that smokes out our fad: Photography.
How are the different types of technology and the various systems of communication evolving to reach, to seduce and to satisfy the unconditional photographers?
Technically, there is not much to say despite the uninterrupted flow of innovations, each more essential than the other, which we are forbidden to ignore. The ball and chain at the photographer’s feet is indeed the torrent of supposedly essential novelties to work properly. However, the results of a photographic approach are always the same, with just a little bit of significant and permanent improvements in the quality of the renderings thanks to technological developments. But, nothing more, we are still reading the work on a support on which the image has been transferred. We can also always examine the result by transparency or project it in an ephemeral way on an often large support. Finally, the photographic bases remain strictly identical to those of the origins. Whatever the labyrinth chosen at the start of the process (collodion, photoshop, ferricyanide, gelatin, capture one, and hundreds of others), the entrance is engraved by light rays and the exit represents the reconstructed facsimile of an observation perfectly ephemeral. Whether the action is frozen in a cyclotron or in a so-called “soapbox” camera, the process always remains the same.