~ Jonathan Ment Photography
There was a billboard facing the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn Heights years ago boasting that more photos were taken every day on iPhone than by any other means. At least that’s how I remember it.
As a working photographer, I know there are differences between the family photos, selfies and snaps that fill most cell phones and the portraits, group shots, ceremonies and other images I capture.
After photographing a rental for AirBnB or VRBO, I will go back to view the listing with the photos that I’ve taken. At times, the owners will add their own snapshots and it isn’t hard to tell the difference. They stick out like sore thumbs. (It’s always better to invite me back, folks).
The snapshots folks share on Facebook the evening of , or day after a wedding don’t resemble the photos I deliver a few days later.
These differences don’t make amateur photography less valuable. They’re part of the story of any event. There’s a place for everything, for sure. – With exceptions.
Back in my newspaper days, when the daily paper I worked for was pushing to shift work from photographers to writers, supplying them with a digital camera that resembled a clock radio more than anything you would recognize today, one astute scribe made a point of returning to the newsroom with pictures of feet only. “They never asked me again,” she said. Nowadays, of course, thanks to cell phones, we are all a bit better than that.
For a while I carried both a very capable pocket-sized camera and a “smart phone.” No more. When traveling for pleasure, even I occasionally leave the cameras behind and settle for the cell. But I’m not photographing portraits on those trips. The images I collect are more for fun than distribution.
What am I driving at here? We sometimes take photography for granted. It’s easy today. So easy, that little thought has to be given to it.
This was not always the case.
When photography was coming of age in the 19th Century, or perhaps to be more accurate modern photography, the process was not so simple. Equipment was big, bulky and fragile. Processes varied and were somewhat scientific.
Improvements that allowed for sharper, more detailed negatives also introduced additional peril.
Wet glass plate negatives, an invention attributed to Frederick Scoff Archer in 1851, were in use through the 1880s. Things simplified somewhat with the dry glass process in use through the 1920s, but were still based on fragile glass.
Cameras were big and bulky and carried by beasts of burden – not in pockets.
Anyone alive who ever toiled in a darkroom ‘developing’ the negatives and ‘fixing’ the prints (and I have) had it easy by comparison, I assure you.
Through October 2023 at Olana State Historic Site, the artist-designed landscape and home of Frederic Church, there is an exhibit of over 50 photographs collected by Church, one of the most successful artists of the 1800s – who in addition to acres of land, art, books, furniture and more, collected photographs.
The collection, in the New York State archives, contains more than 5,000 images – closer to 2,000 travel photographs spanning the continents among them.
Images include sites Church visited and places he did not. The prints run the gamut of his era’s photographic technologies and span a roster of known and unknown makers. Many are not yet attributed and most have never been seen by the general public – though some of the places they portray have and still exist today – like Petra in southern Jordan.
The exhibit, titled Terraforming: Olana’s Historic Photography Collection Unearthed is on display through Oct. 29. Tickets are required to enter the house, but there are also six enlargements out in the landscape (and parking lot!) which is free to explore from 8 a.m. to sunset every day of the year. For more information visit Olana.org.
Need something photographed? You can email, or text: 845 430 4030 to get started, or even dial that phone to chat! I look forward to hearing from you!
~ Thanks as always for reading.
Jonathan Ment, Photographer
Jonathan Ment Photography 