Teaching Photography Without Darkrooms

Among the film reels, canisters, negative-holders, and other ephemera lining

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the photography-equipment center at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts sit 15 point-and-shoot digital cameras. They're some of the center's most commonly checked-out items.

A few blocks away, at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the equipment room stocks four digital cameras -- high-quality Olympus models that allow students to adjust apertures and shutter speeds manually. The cameras are sufficiently in demand -- and sufficiently complicated -- that only advanced photography students are permitted to use them.

Digital cameras have not yet displaced their traditional counterparts as the tools of choice in either photography department, but they are advancing every year. And other digital equipment -- for scanning, manipulating, and printing images -- has already become nearly indispensable to photography professionals and professors. As the technology improves, institutions like NYU and Cooper Union find themselves trying to incorporate it into photography training without sacrificing the integrity of their curriculums -- or their budgets.

"We're at an amazing moment," says Robert Rindler, dean of Cooper Union's School of Art. "One of the main challenges we face is in keeping a balance of traditional media and technology."

That's not easy. Like professors at most colleges with photography programs, faculty members at NYU and Cooper Union agree they must offer at least some training in digital equipment -- to hold the interest of students growing more savvy with technology and to prepare them for a job market that stresses digital skills. But professors at NYU point out that computers and digital cameras are costly and grow obsolete with discouraging speed. And at Cooper Union, administrators worry that emphasizing digital technology may distract photography students from concept and composition, principles that still lie at the heart of their craft.

The concerns with which NYU and Cooper Union are grappling -- issues of cost, craft, and technology -- face photography programs across the country. Although there are no statistics detailing the extent of colleges' investment in digital photography, most professors agree that how they integrate the technology into their programs will significantly shape the future of their field. In many professional fields, such as photojournalism, digital photography is de rigueur, but most artistic photographers still shoot on traditional film.

NYU's initial foray into digital photography now seems quaint. More than a decade ago, the university opened its digital laboratory with one Macintosh computer running one program, Adobe Photoshop 2.0. Now, the university boasts an 11-computer lab in which machines are equipped with scanners and printers. Photoshop -- version 7.0 -- is joined by a battalion of other programs: Adobe Illustrator, for advanced graphics work; Quark, for laying out photographic books; as well as more-esoteric utilities and software.

NYU has made digital equipment a priority: In recent years, half of its photography-equipment budget of about $20,000 a year has been earmarked for computers and digital cameras.

Struggling to Keep Up

Still, staying close to the cutting edge is a struggle, according to Karl Peterson, technical director of the university's photography department. The main obstacle, he says, is the cost of digital equipment, which is still prohibitive in many cases.

NYU was able to establish such a sizable collection of point-and-shoot digital cameras only because many have been given to the university by Sony in the past two years, Mr. Peterson says. The photography department would like to add advanced models, but at a cost of at least $3,000 apiece, the cameras are too expensive.

Photography professors are hard pressed to justify such lavish investments because even top-of-the-line equipment is likely to become obsolete within two to four years. NYU buys two or three new computers annually for the photography lab, and most of its scanners and printers are replaced after three or four years.

In a separate lab devoted to advanced photography equipment, Mr. Peterson points to a video-editing station that symbolizes the perils of aspiring to the cutting edge. The station is anchored by a computer storing 160 gigabytes of memory -- a rare feature four years ago, when the machine was purchased, but fairly standard now. "That was $12,000 when we bought it," he says of the computer. "Now, of course, you can get it for $500 or $600."

A piece of darkroom equipment, by contrast, "doesn't go obsolete very quickly," says Mr. Peterson, eyeing a row of enlargers that the university bought five years ago. "And it doesn't require a huge amount of maintenance." A computer, he says, is more likely to suffer minor malfunctions that require technicians' time and attention.

Just as conventional darkrooms need a host of chemicals and supplies to function, digital labs require more than annual hardware purchases. At NYU, software upgrades are proving costly, in part because the department plans to update its computers -- almost all Macs, which are widely considered superior to PC's for photo-editing -- with OS X, the new version of the Macintosh operating system. A new 20-machine license for Quark Xpress set the university back $2,000 -- a discounted price, but still a big chunk of the photography department's budget.

Institutions that build digital labs from scratch have the advantage of working with uniform computers, but they must make strong financial commitments to get the equipment running. For example, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, in Washington, has constructed a 15-computer lab in the past three years, largely to accommodate its new photojournalism major. The bill for the digital workstations and cameras has reached almost $100,000.

Cost isn't the only reason that many institutions are tentative about embracing digital equipment. Cooper Union does not expect to purchase more digital cameras for at least a year and a half, according to Christine Osinski, a professor of photography. By that time, she says, the cameras will have made a huge leap: New computer chips will allow them to process color information in three layers, as traditional cameras do. With the new technology, digital color photographs will meet analog standards of nuance and clarity.

In the meantime, many students -- at Cooper Union and elsewhere -- use digital cameras as they would have used Polaroids or point-and-shoots a few years ago: to experiment with lighting and framing effects before taking their final pictures with film.

But even when the new color technology becomes standard, premier institutions are unlikely to abandon their traditional darkrooms because black-and-white digital photography cannot match the quality of its analog counterpart. "With 35-millimeter photography, unless you buy an $8,000 camera and don't print anything larger than 11 by 14, you'll be able to tell the difference," says Andy Grundberg, chairman of the photography department at the Corcoran.

More Than the Cameras

The cameras themselves represent only a small piece of the technological puzzle, according to Stephen Frailey, dean of undergraduate photography at the School of Visual Arts, in New York City. The school recently overhauled its photography program, putting a greater emphasis on digital equipment. Mr. Frailey argues that for most students, taking photographs with digital cameras is much less important than using computers to manipulate and print photographs they shot with film and scanned once the negatives were developed.

On those counts, digital technology has arrived as a worthy alternative to darkroom work. For years, computer printers lagged behind the darkroom in their treatment of large and black-and-white prints, but they have improved considerably of late. It can be difficult for an untrained eye to distinguish between darkroom prints and those from archival-quality printers at institutions like NYU and the School of Visual Arts. "From what I've seen, digital prints are almost superior to conventional prints," says Mr. Frailey.

The School of Visual Arts requires students to take three courses in digital imaging, using programs like Photoshop to scan, manipulate, retouch, and print still photographs. NYU now requires two such courses of its first-year photography students. The Corcoran is considering making its introductory digital-imaging course, currently offered to nonmajors, mandatory for all photography students.

For a project in NYU's "Imaging 2" course, the eight enrolled students have compiled books of digitally altered photographic self-portraits. One student created patterns with scanned images of her socks; another scanned his various identification cards and juxtaposed them with grids representing the 256 most-common colors in each image.

Most students take to the projects with aplomb, but none say they would sacrifice the darkroom for the digital lab. They speak of darkrooms in the romantic tones of young artists fascinated by ineffable moments and happy accidents. In digital-print labs, "you just don't get the serendipity you do with regular printing," says Jennifer Ornelas-Ross, a sophomore.

Ms. Ornelas-Ross, whose background is in painting, is dubious about the computer labs for another reason: "You don't have to worry about a painting getting erased," she says. Her fears are not unfounded. As students try to exhibit their projects in the class, some have difficulty opening their photographic books on the classroom computer; one student's work turns up missing altogether.

Computer malfunctions can easily bewilder students uninitiated in digital manipulation, according to Catherine Fallon, a professor of photography at NYU who leads sections of the university's two required digital-imaging courses. "You come in thinking you're a photo major, and you've taken photos for four, six, eight years," she says. "And with the digital stuff it's your first semester. It's like learning a second language."

Ms. Fallon finds a paradox in her students' reticence toward the digital equipment. "The majority of the faculty, I think, shoot in traditional format and print digitally, but for some reason a lot of the students want to work only in the darkroom," she says.

Ms. Fallon and Mr. Grundberg say that many students applying to their institutions now create portfolios online or on CD-ROM's, but that many others have never even toyed with digital-imaging equipment.

A Widening Gap

The result is a widening gap in experience that can be difficult to surmount: Professors do not want technology training to eclipse important discussions of theory and style, but they can ill afford to leave inexperienced students without a safety net. At Cooper Union, some professors conduct extracurricular crash courses in necessary software; the School of Visual Arts is considering holding aptitude tests that would helpplace students in the proper digital-imaging courses.

"We've got to revamp our thinking about how we're introducing kids to photography," says Mr. Grundberg. "Does it make more sense to have them learning for the first time in the darkroom or to have them in front of a computer screen?"

The Corcoran's photography facilities will relocate within five years, upon the completion of an addition to its building. The institution will probably keep its traditional darkrooms, but use them largely to teach students how to make cyanotypes, silver prints, and other "processes that have no contemporary functionality," according to Mr. Grundberg.

"We're pretty committed to giving students access to all technologies," he says, "but it seems clear that, increasingly, students are going to demand the ease of digital image-making."

Meanwhile, Cooper Union is weighing its ambivalence about cutting-edge technology against students' increasing interest in digital equipment. Mr. Rindler argues that his institution must stay wary of "techno-seduction" and remain sensitive to "who's controlling whom -- is the artist using the medium or vice versa?" He and Ms. Osinski hope to sprinkle bits of digital-technology training throughout Cooper Union's photography courses, encouraging students to view the technology as a useful tool, rather than an end unto itself.

For now, the college uses digital technology to meet specific and occasional needs -- and, in at least one instance, to bridge the gap between contemporary practice and the roots of photography. Ms. Osinski says that computers have revolutionized her class in alternative printing techniques, which focuses on imitations of arcane processes like cyanotyping and platinum printing.

When she taught the class exclusively in darkrooms, platinum prints took several hours -- and a lot of frustration -- to complete. Now, with image-editing software and ink-jet printers, images that perfectly replicate the aesthetics of the old platinum printing processes can be made in about half an hour.

"One student said, 'You know, this is really kind of odd. We have all this high-tech stuff, and you'd never know we're using it,'" Ms. Osinski relates. "It's great. It's very exciting."