If you hang out at the more high falutin’ photographic forums on the Internet, you will sooner or later (and usually sooner) encounter a variation on the theme that somehow film endows a piece of work some extra artistic value, and (the quite possibly true) sentiment that in the art-market that high value photographic art is usually analogue in nature (such as the work of Sally Mann) because somehow the process of working the analogue process adds some sort of artistic value to the final work.
Which is just so much horseshit of course – with the greatest respect to those who prefer to work in analogue methods.
There is a very fuzzy boundary between what is art and what is artisanship; whether or not an object has any artistic value, it can still have added value because of the work the craftsperson has put into a work – a hand knitted cardigan is worth more than a machine knitted one. Although I suppose I should note that if the person doing the knitting is your own granny, it’s a whole different ball-game (and it gets even weirder when your granny was also a professional hand knitter!).
There is no great harm in adding the value of the artisanship to the value of a piece of art; what is harmful is assuming that the artisanship contributes to the quality of the art. It isn’t so.
To use the photograph as an example, an image is sensational by provoking thought and emotion not because it is an 8×10 contact print, but because of the image. You could be looking at the original 8×10 contact print by the photographer, or looking at one of a thousand inkjet prints of a scan of the original film; the artistic value is the same (but not the financial value).
Similarly with any art work that can be reproduced – a painting that can be scanned and printed, a sculpture that can be scanned and manufactured using a CNC machine. Although the original may have the addition of an emotional attachment to the artist, any competent reproduction should still encapsulate the artistic vision that was crafted into the original.
Although far smaller than the original, doesn’t this reproduction of “The Scream” (borrowed from the Wikipedia article) still tell the same story as the original ?
As an another example, good literature is just as much art as the finest painting. Yet we do not question the value of reading from a reproduction – who insists on reading the original of The Ballad Of Reading Gaol and insists that reproductions (i.e. any book) has no value ?
If a reproduction can reproduce the artistic vision of the original, it implies that the true original art work is actually the artist’s vision and what we call the original, is just the first reproduction of the artist’s vision. The artist needs to be a competent craftsperson to reproduce that vision in the medium of their choice and may influence the original vision, but it is still a reproduction.
There is a belief that analogue techniques for reproducing artistic visions have a greater value than digital techniques. Why should this be?
In either case, the original vision is still the same; the artist has merely chosen to choose different crafts to reproduce that vision. And despite the critics beliefs, digital techniques still need a good craftsperson to execute those techniques. It may be that digital techniques are easier (although I believe it is more that they are more available) than analogue techniques.