(I didn’t dare call the piece “unlimited enlargement” but that’s what it is really about). One of the benefits of my lovely new camera is there is no real limit to the detail I can extract from a high quality jpeg that’s in focus. This means really that in some sort of pictures, the primary compositional activity is cropping. This is a thesis which cries out for illustration, which I will come back and supply with links when I have a moment. Just now I would simply observe what a wilderness of interpretation one enters when asking “How many pictures are there on this screen?”
In some sense this is a question that goes back to darkrooms, but digital photography has made it far more urgent, for two reasons. One is the astonishing quality of detail obvious in even the smallest “print”. I am sure there is objectively more detail in a good 35mm slide than in a 6MB jpg. You won’t spot it on a light box, though. The image there is just so much smaller than what you see on screen.
The second, of course, is the ease of cropping and recropping. And the way ion which one can generate a whole series of alternat crops with very little effort.
I know I should be thinking about popes and reform and the UK media and… but this is fun, and it’s something I’m a little obsessed by just at the moment.
Of late, when I’m stuck in one of those longueurs of daily life when normally I’d count the brickwork or empty out my pockets in search of bus tickets to read, I pull out the camera and start scanning around the pictures I’ve taken at 10x. That’s the most the thing will do on its internal screen, and even then there are only four stages between 1x and full blast.
Even so, it’s almost fractal in its attraction. You can go scurrying down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, pulling out all sorts of pictures that stand in their own right. Given that a picture is something that you create by seeing an image and making plain what you see, then cropping a wide field to frame something isn’t that far removed from standing, noticing and taking the picture in the first place.
Wonder if we’re going to see a surge of extracted images from other people’s pictures, akin to music sampling. Also wonder where we’re going to be in ten years’ time with the technology, if we can fill a 20 megapixel field with the light from a pinhole lens and process it to pretend to be much more expensive.
I’m sure a Frenchman’s thought all this through a hundred years ago. All I have to do is find him.
R