A mistake, a crack

Hélène Binet [far left] speaking at POST PRESS. (Ellis Woodman)

I don’t want to say that there’s not amazing work coming from digital photography, because that would be wrong. Wolfgang Tillmans said the problem of digital versus analogue is not if the light touches a sensor or touches photographic film. It is Photoshop. That’s what makes everything look too much the same. When I started to photograph in the late eighties and nineties I could open a magazine and, without reading, I knew who was the photographer. Now I have difficulty. The signature, the authorship of the photographer is disappearing. I don’t know why we need photographs of architecture that don’t have shadows, don’t have colours, don’t have depth. I remember Casabella photoshopping all the rubbish that I left in front of the house of an architect in Sicily. When I had asked her, the architect, Maria Giuseppina Grazio Canizzo, had said: no, I want to leave that rubbish, this is the area. So I gave Casabella the transparency and they photoshopped it because they said she was messy. But to enter a picture, we need a mistake, a crack, something that says “Let’s go in.” Photographs now tend to remain at a distance. Authorship is possible, but it’s harder to create your own sound or signature, something other than a product that everybody can make just by learning a program.

Hélène Binet was speaking at Looking at Pictures, a conference of architectural photographers held at POST PRESS on Saturday 4th July.