The Artist’s Choice: Analog vs. Digital Photography in a Digital Era

Finding your way in the enormous field of Contemporary Photography can be daunting as the range of works is immense. Established Art Gallery ‘Van Campen & Rochtus’ specializes, amongst other contemporary disciplines, in this field and features multiple photographers. At their gallery two drastically different photographers, Kim De Molenaer and Tomoko Yasuda, are presented side by side.

Whilst the topic of whether photographers show the same characteristics of craftsmanship as an artist has been overly discussed, the choice of the photographer’s tools provide an interesting deviation. In the digital world we live in, everyone is able to take pictures, alter them and instantly spread them around. Contemporary photographers are currently caught up within a dichotomy, some artists are deciding to return to analog photography instead of digital photography. The works of Kim de Molenaer and Tomoko Yasuda illustrate these opposing views on photography.

_{Kim De Molenaer, Michalis.} 

The art of capturing light
Kim De Molenaer is an Antwerp born Belgian photographer who specializes in analog photography. Well-renowned Photographer Marc Lagrange, who was best known for his nude compositions, tutored him for over a decade. After running a studio in Antwerp, De Molenaer decided to open his own studio in Athens, Greece.

_{Kim De Molenaer, Atlas.} 

He was mesmerized by the sunlit country with its extremely bright natural light. De Molenaer’s photographs, mostly black and white, show a beautiful depth within their grey tones, caused by this intense lighting.

His work is reminiscent to the cinematography of ‘Roman Holiday’, starring Audrey Hepburn and has an overall nostalgic feel of the 1950s and 1960s in it. His photographs are a statement of true craftsmanship, he manages to handle the ‘tool’ – the analog camera – in such a way that his works are balanced, pure and highly enjoyable.

Playing with the idea of manipulation
On the other side of the spectrum, Van Campen & Rochtus features the young Japanese photographer Tomoko Yasuda, who mainly works digitally. She usually depicts out of focus women in her works. Yasuda creates a distance from her models and purposefully abstains from making a connection in multiple ways. Firstly, her models are photographed from the back or side, only showing their hair and a glimpse of their body. If their faces do show then their eyes are closed, making the photo’s impersonal but serene. The fact that Yasuda’s photos are slightly out of focus strengthens this effect.

    

_{Tomoko Yasuda, Flowers et petit secret & Tomoko Yasuda, Nu papillon - Silence.}

At first sight, Yasuda’s photos seem to have been digitally edited because of the ‘out-of-focus effect’ and the sporadic bright colours. She hereby refers to the recent digital movement towards manipulation of photos. However, if one takes a closer look it becomes clear that her photos are not digitally edited. This makes her work, next to being visually pleasant, interesting in the light of the current discussion, by playing with the idea of manipulation of photos.

There are pros and cons to both digital and analog photography. The analog photographer’s depiction of reality is more credible, his work shows craftsmanship and the artist stays closer to reality. The digital photographer however, has gained full control over his work by being able to control every single pixel of his work, which creates a distance with reality. As Jean Baudrillard stated so strikingly; 

“ It [the analogue photo] retains […] the suspense of the negative, that slight time-lag which allows the image to exist before the world […] disappears into the image, which they could not do in the computer-generated image, where the real has already disappeared. The photo preserves the moment of disappearance and thus the charm of the real, like that of a previous life.”  

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