In the film Videodrome the changes that the characters are subjected to makes them into "The New flesh".
Since I started to work with Digital imaging and digital photography I realized that at a base level photography is going thru a rapid mutation similar to the one in the film- Videodrome, I find myself coming to terms with this change by coining the term “The New Grain”. A quantum shift in concept and fundamental structures; that on the surface level obscures the changes below in the core DNA of what film is, and the internal process of photography mechanically and artistically.

On the surface Photography still entails light being focused on a light sensitive material in order to create an image.

Internally the very nature of what constitutes the negative and for that matter how the finished image is produced and presented to the world has merged immense portions of the traditional photographic process and while on the surface retains the concepts inherent in those process does so only in a virtual way so as to maintain the analog tools and understanding of the working process.

The negative as a multi dimensional structure having both physical presence and containing a fixed potential of a moment after being developed.
The blank potential the blank negative contains waiting for that latent image to be embedded by photons impacting into its surface the range of effects and visual textural language that each individual type of film stock contains waiting to be exploited by the photographer.

All are now combined into “The New grain” of this Uber negative that is at once negative and the positive and the finished image all at the same time, the alpha and omega of the concept.
It is all potential negative stocks in the ability to gather light and how the potential textures inherent in those stocks can be reproduced virtually allowing for a range of visual dialogue that is unprecedented.

Many languages in the visual library of film are developed in the seminal use of a look and feel that becomes the depiction of an era or type of event.
Gorgeous fluid liquid details of color and silver gray presence of the large format photography of the 40’s and 50’s
The grain and blur of impossible color of rock photography of the 60’s and 70’s.
The contrasty 400ASA black and white 35mm and color imagery of the reporters of the 60’s, the intimate you are there quality the low light grain imparts to the viewer.

All these words in the language of imagery evoke memory and the presence of events and times.

What now?
The language has been cut loose from the medium that contained and shaped it, no longer the choice of material that informs the artist and the audience but now the choice of concept and mise en scene.

What now? as the material of the process no longer flavors or defines the process or our visceral response to it.
A material that literally defined how we culturally responded on an emotional level is now passé and disconnected from any relevance as time passes.
And like the concept of grooves in a record, generations can no longer define listening to music as ever having been related to large black disks and phonograph needles, how soon will the next generation forget how the textures of emulsion formed our cultural point of reference as to place and time and feeling and an artistic process.

Welcome to “The New Grain”
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