Araki on digital cameras and dry brightness
In the Spring 2006 issue of Plus Eighty One (an absolutely brilliant Japanese art/fashion/photo magazine) they have a great little bit from Araki in regard to his thoughts on digital cameras.
+81:What is your stand on digital cameras?
Araki: “Humidity and Darkness are very important elements in photography, so you have to be careful with digital cameras because they sort of kill those elements, I say.
I, too, use them, sort of recording things in everyday life for fun, though. Photography needs to be sentimental. That dry brightness that digital cameras create, that’s not sentimental at all. Colors created with three primary colors have a very simple impact, but there’s melancholy at the same time. Colors don’t turn out the way you want them to be, but that’s what’s so good about them. Perfect colors are not to be researched like that.Digital cameras easily ignore those sorts of delicate senses and feelings of Japanese coloring. To be extreme you look at black and say, it’s red. That’s art. Creating ripples among people is what art does and it’s the destiny of art, but before all that you have to feel the ripple in yourself.
It’s not exciting because there are stupid guys that ignore that, trying to figure out how to recreate the real colors. They say “If you use this digital camera, you can take a picture in the dark”. The dark should stay dark. You can’t really see that much, and you don’t really want to see that much anyway.

The comment says more about Araki than the medium, so it is of limited value. Plus he may change his mind tomorrow. Anyway, should not read too much into it. Think about it, when people switched from Daguerreotypes to film, or large format to 35mm, probably similar things were said. It changes nothing.
Comment by Dirk — 10/1/2007 @ 1:52 pm
Dirk, you ought to read “Photography Until Now” by Szarkowski (I have a copy, but saw another for sale at Dorama in Shimokitazawa). Everything changes and nothing changes.
Comment by John — 10/1/2007 @ 10:24 pm
http://www.canon.com/scsa/newcosmos/gallery/2006/report/index.html
wasting time thinking about photography instead of doing work - more araki on digital, but i’m sure you’ve seen this already.
Comment by rachael — 10/12/2007 @ 4:08 pm