Science & Tech Quote by John Sexton

Sexton’s line reads like a peace treaty drafted in the middle of photography’s longest culture war: the recurring panic that a new process will cheapen the medium, erase craft, or flatten seeing into mere convenience. By stacking formats and materials side by side - color, black and white, platinum, palladium, digital - he turns what’s often framed as a moral hierarchy into a menu. The rhetorical trick is deliberate: “any procedure” centers method without worshipping it, then immediately demotes method by tying it to a single standard that matters, “allows photographers to express themselves.”

The subtext is pedagogical. Sexton, closely associated with large-format and darkroom tradition, isn’t abandoning the old religion so much as refusing its gatekeeping. Mentioning platinum and palladium signals allegiance to painstaking, archival craft; adding digital technology is the outreach. He’s telling students (and purists) that legitimacy doesn’t come from the chemistry, the paper, or the sensor, but from intentional choices that serve a vision. That’s a pragmatic kind of pluralism: technique as vocabulary, not ideology.

Contextually, this lands in an era when photography programs and institutions were forced to adapt to digital workflows while still defending the value of analog discipline. Sexton offers a way through the stalemate: keep the rigor, drop the snobbery. The quote works because it sounds generous while quietly insisting on standards - not of process, but of purpose.