For a "Natural Light" studio I'm seeing a lot of lamps there...
That aside I needed to keep reminding myself as I read the article that this is about photography as art, aping the style of old photographs.
But those old photos don't necessarily look the way they do because the photographers of that time were after a certain aesthetic, they were simply the best photographs it was possible to make at that time.
A lot of effort and resources go into reproducing the sound of music recordings from, say, the 1960s -- even though the music producers in the 1960s would probably have loved to have had today's technology instead!
That was what I was trying to get across. This yearning and fetishization of "simpler" times and ways of doing things, as though there is something inherently noble and valuable about these practices, purely because they are historical.
And yet there won't quite ever be a Beatles or an Elvis again, will there?
It can be very hard to beat the zietgiest of an age at their own game. There is something special in that, which we try to measure up to, but still can't quite reproduce exactly even with better technology.
Will there ever be a eugene atget or a walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange that beat them at their own game?
Until you provide some criteria that would allow us to evaluate "beat them at their own game" for a particular body of photographs …
Eugene Atget or Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange were doing their thing in their now -- so beating them at their own game would be doing your thing in your now.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
That aside I needed to keep reminding myself as I read the article that this is about photography as art, aping the style of old photographs. But those old photos don't necessarily look the way they do because the photographers of that time were after a certain aesthetic, they were simply the best photographs it was possible to make at that time.