Lemon, Alstromeria and Frost, © Michael Maurer Smith 1991

Like most photographers, I have made the transition from film to digital—at first grudgingly—but now I accept the inevitability and embrace the new creative opportunities it brings. However, I lament some of the changes.

Since a digital image file is comprised of code, it is infinitely alterable. Using programs like Photoshop, the photographer can adjust the file to suit his or her preferences no matter how outrageous. Colors can be changed, items removed or added, hue, and saturation adjusted, and multiple special effects applied. However, this is not really photography. It is illustration—the intentional building of an image over time based on personal preferences, adding and subtracting from the image to suit the maker’s taste. In contrast, traditional photography is predicated on capturing a single moment and not the building, rebuilding and altering of that image over a period of hours, days or weeks.

Of course, digital photography can be practiced like traditional film-based photography. However, this requires the photographer to commit to a set of self-imposed limitations—often based upon a code of ethics, like those of the National Press Photographers Association or the North American Nature Photographers Association.

However, most digital photographers find the illustrative possibilities irresistible and this is evident in the popularity of the high dynamic range technique, and other reality-enhancing techniques commonly seen on photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

The result is a world inundated with billions of photo-like illustrations and fewer and fewer straight photographs. Since just about everyone with a digital camera and a computer has altered their own image files many assume that every photograph they see is similarly altered and enhanced. Consequently, photojournalism is close to dead, and no one trusts a photograph anymore.

© Michael Maurer Smith 2009

Christina’s world is smaller today and so is ours. The painter Andrew Wyeth has died at age 91.

He and Norman Rockwell were the artists who most influenced me as a high school student in 1968. Both men could draw beautifully and I aspired to such virtuosity.

Later, as an Art student at Michigan State University, I learned neither man was highly esteemed among the art-world cognoscenti. At that time Abstract Expressionism’s popularity was declining, Pop Art was popular, and Happenings were happening. Representational painting was relegated to a cultural backwater.

Rockwell was dismissed as just an illustrator—a brush for hire—which he was. However, Wyeth was problematic. His work sold in galleries for substantial prices and he didn’t do commissioned covers for magazines. He had a loyal following and significant critical recognition. He was controversial.

Some will dismiss Wyeth’s oeuvre as a triumph of technique over meaning. And he may be dismissed as someone whose real art was crafting his reputation as an iconoclast. However, I believe that anyone who takes the time to really examine his work will find it compelling and transcendent. They will be transported to new places of feeling and affinity through his brooding palette of burnt umber, raw sienna, mustard yellows, greys and grey-greens. His renderings of the milky white overcast New England sky, and of people suspended between inhaling and exhaling—vacant, lonely and mysterious, will compel understandings at once undeniable and ineffable. He was a superb craftsman and a genuine artist.  

© Michael Maurer Smith 2009