Photographers don't see in black and white nor in color!

Although I believe that at one time humans possessed a primordial cultural memory - call it archetypal - and many less media-influenced cultures probably still demonstrate some degree of archetype within their visual art, I am interested in how, as a culture, we have been 'mediated' away from primordial archetypes.

 

Is the visual language we take for granted manufactured and marketted by our inundation within the various media, or is there indeed some basic, underlying visual language, native to the human psyche?

 

I recall reading that the early european settlers in Australia attempted to communicate the idea of a railroad track by drawing two lines on paper that receded into the distance. The native population was unable at first to grasp the meaning of the drawing, unable to correlate the composition with visual perspective, perhaps because it had never been defined before within their cultural context. Their drawing of a railroad track was two lines that stayed parallel. They had walked and walked the length of the track, and never found the place where the tracks converged to a point.

 

Is our current view of visual language - rules of composition, form, light, shade, color, etc. - a fixed absolute, or is it, too, evolving? Certainly, video production style is informed by fashion and avant garde photography; just look at the various offerings on VH1 and MTV, and how, since the '80's, video style has followed photography.

 

Is photography following anything, or is it leading?

Spot on Struan - what a great post

 

"For me, the best photographs are like poems or

music - they

work though allusions and half-remembered references as

much as

though head on depiction. Like poems and music they

often require a

background of shared knowledge or experience

before they resonate, but like

poems or music I occasionally

stumble over a new work that breaks every theory

I might have

about "what I like", and makes me very suspicious of any but the vaguest rules."

 

What Berger calls the "expressive photograph" - an expanded quotation from appearences that can contain its ambiguity and can give reason to it, drawing on all those "allusions and half-remembered references" The length of the quotations measured not in time (1/8th of a second or whatever)but by a greater extension of meaning.

 

All the ambiguities, echoes and resonances that are to be found in memory

Great thought Struan .

I believe that the rules that the masters have learned

throughtrials and errors must to be learned to make our life

easier and to exphand our vision .

However starting from the postulate that everybody is different

,from each other , with a unique past and psichology , an artist

has the duty in his artistic endevour to express his individuality .

As " artists who use a camera " as Struan says , we have an

array of different tools in our hands , and i am not speaking of

hardware , but our human software .

We have the knowlegdge of the rules of the thirds , we have the

Zone System , colors relationships, mastery of tilt , shifts ,

swings etc. .

We can decide , in order to express our individual sensitivity , to

choose all of these tools , only one , none at all .....

We have witnessed in the history of art , that the best artists

have been the ones who have expressed a view unexplored

before .

Leonardo , Michelangelo, Goya , picasso, Daly , Rodin ,

Giacometti , Klee , Pollock are just a few of them .

I remember the first time i saw one of the image that Avedon had

created , where a group of people whre portraied , compressed ,

some of them at the edges of the frame cropped . ( I think they

were members of the Wharol's factory ) .

It was against every compositional tradition , but it worked , it

worked great !

Do you want to take pictures of the Half Dome ?

By any means , please , but put your own vision , give me

something different , show me a picture tht belongs to you .

Personally in my work itend to be frustrated by chaothic

compositions , i like to see very few elements in my images ,

composition is not necessarily important , but i am looking for a

certain balance , not a fan of sharpness throughout the image (

althoughi reserve the right to change my mind ) ,

But all this comes after , first , when in front of a scene , i have to

say inside of myself : oh my God !.

Tools are not rules!

 

Tools may be chosen by the artist for a specific purpose. Rules may be broken by the artist if he or she choses to do so.

 

But you can only use a tool if you know how it works just as you cannot knowingly break a rule unless you are familiar with it!

 

Thanks for responding! This is a great thread!

<i>You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out

of focus.</i>  -Mark Twain

<blockquote><p>" If formal education has any bearing on the

arts at all, its purpose is to make critics, not artists. Its usual

effect is to cage the spirit in other people's ideas - the ideas of

poets and philosophers, which once were splendid insights into

the nature of life, but which people who have no insights of their

own have hardened into dogmas. It is the spirit we much work

with, and not the mind as such'."</p></blockquote>

 

<p>Robertson Davies, "A mixture of Frailties" </p>

Struan Gray, what a great name for a photographer! My own name means, "to do". I am not busting down the walls for students who would use them to cover themselves up, nor was I taught to stand on their edges so that I could see farther but this is what I attempt. Eventually one has to walk away from a thing to see it whole. One must understand the wall and what it affords. Bravo for you that you should instruct the uninitiated in the wrong way to use a wall (rule).

 

I studied human visual perception with James Cutting at Cornell for a littel while. The best of that was being introduced to the works of JJ Gibson. He spent the best part of his life trying to understand how it is that we see and understand the world at all. We definitely have some rules but they operate at many levels and all at once. We haven't time to put things together consciously and you are right we seldom have the words (though I think you are exceptional at it). I believe that the act of photography is best when we are operating in a similar manner but it may never get to that point for many a student. We are not "wired" to understand and internalize the making or viewing of photographs. Photographs as an extension of vision looses its mooring points pretty soon in long scheme of things. For those who love and need those mooring points let them have them. I can do without seeing another nude-on-a-rock myself, but then again, sometimes they surprise me.

 

I really enjoy this discussion. Thanks to all. I think more and feel more becasue of the input.

Thanks John, and Tim, and Domenico. "Struan" is a Norse loan

word in Scots Gaelic. It means "stream", in this case of

consciousness. Or something.

 

I teach Physics, not photography, but there is the same tendency

to bury oneself in the technical minuteae and investigate only the

topics that everyone else agrees are important . It's a bad habit,

but a hard one to shake, and one that is constantly reinforced by

the hard school of the market.

Photography is a language. Composition is utilized by 'speakers' to more effectively communicate. Form, color, space, etc. are elements of composition.An emphasis on form may be some type of species archetypal resonance, or could be more culturally bound. We in western cultural tradition tend to convert forms, whether of a mountain, human body or even peppers, into icons. Space is an element we too often ignore in photography, but its importance can be seen in other languages. Japanese gardens utilize interaction of space and form to create illusions. Cool Jazz performers recognized importance of musical space - listen to Ahmad Jamal's Poinciana. In photography, we use space to capture the mood of a foggy, misty morning. In landscapes, space may help capture the ambient light or even the sense of place.

So far very interesting and philosophical discussion.

 

My own observation of what appeals to me the most in a print has two levels. The first is the image grabs my attention from a distance, ie, from across the room. This requires some larger compositional elements that draw my eye into the image. Once I get up close the second level is to stimulate my eye/brain with smaller compositional elements within the whole. If an image can stimulate me at both far and near, I will not get bored with it, and it can stay on the wall for a long time. Visual brain stimulation at some level is required.

 

I must be very graphically oriented. I am not as stimulated by more painterly forms. My eye drifts around and off the image if not compelled by the dynamics of the forms in the image.

 

This is to note that people vary a lot on what interests them visually. I liken it to tastes in music. I think we tend to forget that different people have different tastes from our own. I've noticed that in the criticisms on these critique forums.

 

When photographing I just do what appeals to me.

Something in this thread has gotten me thinking about the difference between say, an "Ansel Adamsesque" landscape which many many people like and admire, and a "Feiningeresque" abstract which is not well known outside diehard photographers. In this thread it seems that the emphasis has been on "we" meant as "me". "I think", "what I learned", "what I see". And this is exactly what photography, art in general, has given us. The varied catalog of many different styles, genre, that has something for everyone. Too self important photographers put down work "they" deem uninteresting or common. Landscape is the whipping child of photographic discussion group s now. It was pictorialism at one time. The "I think rules subjegate a photographer to a narrow set way of thinking", is short sighted in itself. I have seen too many photographers who in the first hours of their careers knew little of compositional tools and their work showed it. As they became familiar with the "rules" their work became much better. The "rules" allowed them to expand, in a meaningful way, their vision. I see too often the refrain, "break the rules." Why? The rules are nothing more than a framework from which the work can take off and become as expressive as need be. Just to try and break the rules does nothing but put the work into that classification. Just as previsualization does. I see a lot of work where the rules have been broken, and the work suffers. For me, the scene can be about color, or form, or texture or even function. Or about light itself. A group of trees, a bunch of flowers, or an idea in my head. The ideas in my head are what I am concentrating on now. I ran a thread a while back asking if you were a recorder of scenes, or a maker of ideas. Kim Weston is a maker of ideas. Edward Weston was a recorder of scenes. Robert-Parke Harrison is a maker of ideas, while Karsch is a recorder of scenes. Where does this line of reasoning put Feininger? Sommers? Shelby Lee Adams? Bill Brandt? Man-Ray? Bravo? Capa? Do these photographers break the rules? Yet all are much collected, admired, and copied. Of those here, who does new and unique work? Nudes on a rock? Do any of you create and photograph ideas? Who breaks the rules consistently? Who uses the rules but yet makes new, interesting, and nonconventional works?

I think that dichotomy is a false one, and even as a spectrum it is

a rather limited way of looking at photographers. My favourite

photographs at present are the ones that look documentary but

contain more depth for the observant and thinking viewer.

Doesn't make for neat pins on the map.

 

I mentioned landscapes because there are a lot of them about.

Sure, ninety percent of anything will be crap, but the depressing

thing about much landscape photography is that it is the same

crap time after time. Even Yosemite seems to have lost out to

Fragile Arch, and a single perspective on Fragile Arch at that.

When did you last see an image taken of the surface of a slot

canyon? Why the Matterhorn and not Stetind?

 

Scrub that last one - the pastries are infinitely better in Zermatt.

 

Photography as expressed in the mainstream photographic

world has become a process of collecting brand names.

Instead of using your camera to express the things you see and

how you see them yourself, you use it to validate your position as

one of the crowd. Nike trainers, Prada handbag, wet leaf on

rock.

 

Why does it take an 'artist' to show the road at the bottom of El

Capitan?

A P.S. I'm sure that one of the reasons I find landscape

photography so limited is that the conventional Romantic view of

landscape simply doesn't resonate with me. I sit at the bottom of

a mountain that is supposed to make me feel awed, humble,

frightened and and holy, and I just start thinking how much fun it

would be to pop up that ridge there and traverse over to that peak

there, and spend the night on that tottering block there.

Landscapes are home to me.

 

The Tate had what by all accounts was an excellent exhibition

last year, based on the Hudson School and their inheritors. I

missed the show, but it generated a lot of interesting comments

and essays. The teacher's pack on this page is worth a read for

its insights into the psychology of landsapes:

 

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/americansublime/

 

When I read it I had to consciously remind myself that this was

about paintings made 150 years ago, and not photographs

made last week.

That's one of my points Struan. Landscapes may not resonate with you, but they do with many others. They do with me because like you I love to climb and explore. Not much "street" photography thrills my soul though because I don't live it. People don't interest me as a non social being. I enjoy many PJ efforts but what I see on the net isn't the quality I like. Every genre has it's adherents. I like still life. I like the creation of it. The imagination of the photographer. There are those who like abstract. That is what I like about photography. It has something for everyone. I find little that hasn't been done to death. I find very little that is cutting edge. And I spend hours lookimng through the net and galleries looking for unique images. Every day. I think my viewpoint is as valid as any. I have always wanted to get together a large group from here and discuss questions like this. Per's free workshops are unique and a wonderful place for this type discussion.

And I salute Feininger.<div></div>