The humiliation of the vignette

What is it with this abolishion of vignetting? ( is the 'perfectly OK Van Act of 1943' to blame?)

With the arrival of 35mm digital full frame sensors (FFS) there have been nothing but bad reports recieved concerning the tendency of fast lenses to produce vignetting (darkening at the edges) at wider apertures. Wherefore this across the board objection to vignetting?

I appreciate that its unwanted presence may betray potential technical limitations of the camera equipment and that due to the frantic paddling for first place in the digital race on the frothy waters of innovation, the discarding of any hint that alludes to 'old' technology is de rigeur, even if only amongst consumers and not the manufacturers (whom I'm sure nonetheless encourage such unbridled nitpicking) but surely technical perfection, or the lack of it , is not everything in matters photographic? The presence of vignetting is, I would argue, not always as unwanted as so prolifically reported.

Historically the visual vignette had an accepted and established role in the mediums of both painting and photography, yet suddenly the respect it once held has been unceremoniously flushed away and it is now abhorred as being synonymous with nothing more than manufacturing imperfection and it's stripped of its artistic merit like a dishonoured soldier of his medals.

I hardly think it should be construed as symptomatic of recidivist leanings or of straw clinging Leica enthusiasm to proclaim the positive virtues of vignetting or to argue for its reinstatement as meritorious, but you would think from the damning it gets that it never had nor will ever again have any purpose except perhaps to shame its perpetrators; to dismiss those that indulge in it's use as either plain ignorant or as digital reprobates.

Deliberate vignetting is a tool as worthy as any other artistic device and should not have the context for which it was better known and better recieved, prior to the digital revolution, dismissed out of hand with nary a backward glance in the shoestring-tripping headlong lunge for the aggrandisment of technology over vision

It is as though those that employ the vignette, by association align themselves with the less well equipped, with the less well endowed; with those who cannot afford or who cannot appreciate the latest and greatest; with those who are politely, if patronisingly, humiliated by the technerati who excise such evidences of impropriety without a second thought as to their value outside of their blinkered pixel peeping. It is as if the once noble vignette now attracts only humiliation, but it is those that would denigrate it that should be ashamed, for they illustrate the darkness at their very own periphery by their tunnel vision.

Speak for yourself...

'Let the photographs speak for themselves', some say; others add 'but do we understand the language?'. Perhaps all photographers are to some extent multilingual in this regard but what might be the native 'photographic' tongue to one, may still be gobbledygook to another.

There is always the potential for disparity between what signification is intended and what is assumed by the reader, dependant for the majority at least, on convention. When photographic convention is placed under semiological scrutiny and the question of metaphor, symbol or visual pun is introduced in order to explore artistic or existential meaning, then I think it is worth writing something to elucidate which language speaks through these images and to illustrate the terrain one hopes at least to be steeped in.

To this end I tentatively present my Bloggus Ferum, ('wild blog') as yet ragtag and unformed but which like the nebulous gaseous forms in outer space which are all the while conforming to unseen forces, I hope it will also eventually coalesce into a recognisable aspect.