- I listened to an interview with Robert Dimery yesterday as he talked about the re-release of the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Mainstreet. Critics claim there are many technical problems with the album and that although it’s certainly not their best album, it’s one of their most significant.
(Arguably, wouldn’t that make it their best?)
Dimery agreed with the technical critiques but said that wasn’t the point. Sure, Exile is not a strong studio album; it’s simply pure rock-n-roll. It’s visceral. We feel the music. The pulsating rawness overwhelms us. Our ears mash into guitars and voices as we let go into melodic noise. Dimery left off his commentary wondering what the clean perfection of digital recording has brought to rock and if the crisp mastered tones can ever come close to evoking such an animalistic, emotional response as the rawness found in Exile on Mainstreet.
A publicity shot for “Exile on Main Street,’’ which got mixed reviews upon its release in 1972. (Norman Seeff)
And this got me thinking. Thinking about photography. What has digital technology brought to the art of photography? Sure, it’s been great for commercial use and has elevated the family snap shot into an online visual that we can email to each other in less than a second. But does a crisp high-res digital image have the same visceral impact as a sloppy old polaroid, let’s say, or perhaps a hand-crafted, salted paper print?
- After listening to what Dimery had to say about Exile on Mainstreet I found myself digging deeper into the history of the photo-based image and came across Luminous Lint, “the ultimate resource for those interested in Fine Photography”. On this site there are detailed sections dedicated to the lost arts of the 19th century and houses libraries of images of all kinds (digital included) of images that have significance to our sense of visual history. These low-fi techniques are from where photography originated and are still being used by a handful of photographers today. The art of hand crafting the photographic image is still alive!
Anon. Spirit fakery n.d
How did I get from the Stones’ re-release of Exile on Mainstreet to an online library of 19th Century photo techniques? Simple: it’s the intersection of romance and nostalgia and technology. And in loose terms that’s the essence of what fuels me to carry on my (often ridiculous) decisions with my photography. Like shooting live bands with a pinhole camera.
Dialogue