So This Is Progress?

We love to tell ourselves that the human race is making progress. This notion infests our discussions of technology, culture, religion, politics, human relations, and most anything that human beings find interesting. Indeed, we are so immersed in the sea of alleged progress that minor counter-revolutions have sprung up to decry everything from global trade to the loss of the “traditional” family farm / hardware store / vegetable stand / school system, ad infinitum.

But a lot of what gets peddled as “progress” isn’t. And it gets successfully peddled as such precisely because too few people have the necessary baseline knowledge to assess whether the new really is an improvement on the old. If you don’t understand something of Bach, then Rap will constitute music. If you’ve never seen Peter O’Toole in Becket, than Sean Penn is going to seem like the a fine actor. The yowlings of most current female R & B artists seem impressive until you hear Kiri Te Kanawa sing Gershwin. This isn’t just a matter of taste. Quality has some objective standards no matter how hard they are to discern. The broader point is that “progress” implies improvement compared to some former thing or state. If you do not understand the former, you cannot judge how progressive the latter.

I recently had a (literally) vivid reminder of this. For some thirty years I’ve been a serious black and white photographer, working with traditional silver materials in a wet (chemical) darkroom. On a whim, I recently bought a reasonably high-end “prosumer” grade digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR). This is a state-of-the art 10 megapixel camera with every bell and whistle a serious photographer could want, manufactured by one of the two dominant names in professional photography.

Moreover, I have an embarrassment of software riches with at least four different photo editors at my disposal, all running on a nice high-performance computer with a large screen, lots of memory, blah, blah, blah. (I even actually know how to use some useful part of each of these programs, a not inconsiderable accomplishment.)

So … off on holidays I went, shiny new toy in hand. I took more pictures in a week than I’d taken in the past year, simply because of the ease and facility of the new DSLR. I didn’t do this thoughtlessly though. Thirty years of making serious pictures teaches you a discipline of shooting that emphasizes economy and deliberation as you work. I translated this discipline into the new digital world and was, at least at first blush, pretty happy with what came home on film, er, I mean, memory card.

When I got the images into the computer, I began the process of gentle corrections. Again, the many years have taught me that fine photographs respond to small, subtle improvement, not being beat over the head with a CPU. But I noticed a curious thing. Notwithstanding the almost unlimited control over the image the computer affords me, I simply could not come close to the final picture quality I’ve come to regard as “normal”.

The reason is pretty simple. I ordinarily shoot with a couple film cameras that produce negatives 6cm x 6cm or 4″ x 5″ respectively. The amount of “information” that a piece of analog film in these sizes can hold (dynamic range, tonality, resolution, detail) far exceeds anything in the digital world until you get into the $40,000 stratosphere of pro gear. (Even there, I doubt that a Hasselblad H3D can touch a properly exposed 4×5 negative.) To turn a phrase from the custom car builders, “There ain’t no substitute for square inches.” My $1200 state-of-the art DSLR – a magnificently engineered and very well thought out tool – can’t produce images as objectively good as an old $100 used pro camera I bought on eBay recently. The “information space” of the two respective instruments is that different.

So … is the new camera “progress”. Well, maybe, at least in some dimensions. In looking at the results of the past several weeks, the camera seems to produce images that are comparable to a well engineered 35mm camera of yesteryear. I long ago abandoned 35mm for anything but amusement’s sake exactly because it could not hold the tonal fidelity and detail of the larger film negatives. But, small, easy to use cameras have a place in photojournalism, street shooting, sports, and casual hobby shooting. In these contexts, the new DSLR is a hands down improvement over its film brethren. A 10 megapixel image is, as I said, comparable to a decent 35mm negative, and the ability to easily manipulate it in the computer is orders-of-magnitude easier than doing it in the darkroom.

But I seek quality. I strive to make prints that are breathtaking (to me at least). By that measure the DSLR is a giant step backwards. As sophisticated as the light meter, auto focus, and optics are, they cannot compensate for the sheer lack of information captured on the CCD, at least by comparison to a well executed analog film negative. For the same reason that synthesizers and samplers did not replace Steinway pianos, digital photography – at least for the forseeable future – is not going to replace the traditional high end silver print. I can make that judgment because I know what was and thus can judge what is.

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as just an artifact of age: I’ve lived long enough now to have some context from then and now. But its deeper than mere age. It has to do with how we’re educated. It has to do with our culture. In the evolution of Western civilization, it became clear at some point that knowing “what was” was fundamentally important in the education of young minds. That’s why educational institutions came to teach liberal arts: History, Philosophy, Geography, Literature and all the rest were put in place to give the young student a crash course in context – so they’d know enough to develop a sense of what was bull and what was cow patties. But our educational system is in tatters. It has been polluted by politicians, cause monkeys, ideologues of all stripes, and people seeking to avoid real work.

The consequences are horrific, not the least of which is that everything is now “Unique”, “Awesome”, and “Real Progress” (Dude!). It’s why young adults can fill a 160 MB iPod and never have heard the Mozart Jupiter symphony. It’s why a good many people under 30 know all about Flickr but have never seen the ageless beauty of Rembrandt. It’s why people run in droves to the social networking web sites, sharing some of the most intimate details of their lives (and some of the most mundane) but cannot write a compelling personal letter as simple as a thank-you note. This is not about technology. It is about institutionalized ignorance. It is about the academy, parents, and the society at-large having totally failed our young because it was easier to give them what they wanted than what they needed.

Real progress springs from rich, fertile minds harnessed with the disciplines of learning, informed with a large base of knowledge, and animated with a passion for excellence. Real progress is dying. It is being replaced not by just the vulgar, but by the trite, the mundane, the uninteresting, the uninspired, the insipid, and the just plain stupid. Western culture gave us The Renaissance, The Reformation, and The Enlightenment. These three events conspired to give us Liberty. Our insipid stupidity will lead us back into a new Dark Ages and a new slavery. To be sure, it will be a digital Dark Age with lousy music, incoherent poetry, no real literature and … blurry pictures.