Kitsch vs. Beauty

As a landscape photographer you sometimes have to decide whether you

take a picture that lets things look just good, romantic, beautiful

and intact though it might have its ugly sides. There is a borderline,

and crossing it means to produce kitsch.

 

What do think? What are the typical signs of kitsch? What do you use,

what do you avoid?

The meanings of kitsch I found are these:</p>

<ol>

<li>Sentimentality or vulgar, often pretentious bad taste, especially in the arts: <i>When money tries to buy beauty it tends to purchase a kind of courteous kitsch</i> (William H. Gass).</li>

<li>An example or examples of kitsch.</li>

</ol>

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I'm not sure that I would view landscapes as kitsch, except perhaps an extremely poorly composed one... Now cliche, that's something I see all the time, but I don't think that's what you are getting at.

Nature presents beauty in many forms. When I'm working on a landscape I try to find the compositions that accentuate the details people would usually overlook. My mission is to show people what they are missing.

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Sometimes that involves including some bad with the good, but in those cases I try to find an angle that minimizes the bad so the beauty shines through. I think it's like a glamour shot without cloning out pimples. An average person would still find the model beautiful even with a small red dot on her nose.

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For example, in <a href= http://www.photo.net/photo/3110274>this shot</a> there is a bit of glare on a car windshield in the parking lot, but I think it is overwhelmingly outgunned by the lines and brilliant lighting. It's all about balance.

As someone who has been living in Germany for the past 25 years and is still struggling to grasp all the nuances of the language, I would venture to say this: kitsch (in arts) is something that pretends to be refined, elegant or stilish, but actually originates from very simple, low-level (although not necessarily bad) tastes. You could think of it as roughly corresponding to "snob" as regards humans. In the specific case of landscape photography, kitsch has nothing to do with the photos including some ugly aspects. Rather, kitsch is, say, the type of photos (castles, gardens, etc.) that were used in the past for chocolate boxes, and that you can still find on ijg puzzles. What make these kitsch is not the choice of the subject or the way it is treated, but rather the pretention of them being "good" photos. Millions of people take exactly the same photos for their own purposes, but these are not kitsch; are simply photos of no particular artistic value.

IMHO, the most spread and malignant kitsch in landscape photography is oversaturated colors which one sees in every album or calendar. Common mantra is "Polarize, warm with 81A+B+C, use "original" Velvia, than play with photoshop". Boring.

The first color photos I saw of the slot canyons were fine. Now they're kitsch. Wave after wave of unending photos of orangey rocks and a single pool of light. Velvia. 20mm lens. Polarizer. The only difference now is more folks are shooting digital instead of Velvia and pumping up the saturation in Photoshop.

 

I try to avoid color photography of landscapes altogether. Mostly I shoot b&w film. Sure, it's just as easy to fall into cliched traps, but I seem to be able to dance around those traps most of the time. Lacking color I'm forced to pay more attention to shapes and lighting.

 

The debates over whether Loretta Lux is an artist or purveyor of kitsch are a bit more challenging.

Good question. I appreciate Bonsignore?s take on kitsch, and am not entirely sure of its place in landscape photography. Given that, here?s what I hope to avoid in my future landscapes:

 

Unimaginative compositions of covered bridges, waterfalls, coastlines and mountains.

 

The clich鿠single object placed in the bullseye for the sake of flexing creative knowledge and ?breaking the rules.?

 

Anything ?romantic.?

 

I like mystery, violence, fog, weather, raging clouds and storms, colors on fire - nature at its wildest and most treacherous. You can keep your peaceful streams and lullaby scenics.

I have no idea why all my punctuation has turned into question marks. Most annoying. Sorry.

Discussions refering to what is 'kitsch' and what is not tend to end up elitist and condescending. Kitsch is in the eye of the beholder, just as beauty is. Perhaps the 'versus' juxtaposition is kitsch in its own right.

 

I do agree that over saturation is the quickest route to making a photo take on a kitschy feel. I do not agree that various compositional approaches need automatically apply for kitsch citizenship. :p

Dear Dark,

 

I wish you had been more specific about what you mean by kitsch or what you see as the "ugly" sides to a picture. If you are talking about colors that are too saturated for your taste, one solution might be to switch to a less saturated film (or raise your ISO setting if you shoot digital). Another would be to open the image in your software (such as PhotoShop) and convert it to black and white or perhaps simulated infrared. If you understand how to add a New Adjustment Layer in PhotoShop, you can do some playing around with that. If by "ugly sides" you mean things in a landscape photo that are man-made, I have been known to alter the landscape with the PhotoShop Healing Brush tool, not to mention the Marquee tool.

Kitsch really means trash. The original meaning was cheap art that appealed to low brow taste. In the past 25 or so years, many people have taken a second look at kitsch items and found them to be artistic in their own right. Paint-by-number paintings for example.

 

I'm not sure how you can define "what are the typical signs of kitsch?" Cliche yes, kitsch I don't think so. How does the "ugly side" make it kitsch?

 

Personally, I like ugly when used appropriately. Lots of times it's far more interesting to look at than beautiful which can become boring rather rapidly.

 

Please define the borderline further. I'm totally unaware of any borderline in photography. Photos are either interesting or boring. That's the only borderline I can recognize.

Lex: thanks for the Loretta Lux link. Do you like it? I very much do not. Very unnatural look for children. They look too old and wise and miserable and already ruined. Whether her work is kitsch or not, the girl knows how to get herself seen. I was most impressed by that!

Oops, I didn't mean thanks for the link. I meant I looked her up and found a link. I'm a spazz today.........

Steve, kitsch is certainly not trash. It's art for hipsters. Temporary, maybe. Trendy, definitely. Trash? Nope.

 

Gloria, knowing what Loretta Lux is up to with her photography (or assuming we know) makes it easier to come to terms with. She's coming from an artistic background outside conventional photography. It's just another way to express her personal aesthetic.

 

I don't claim to personally know what she's up to. But she's very clever and very beautiful, in a cool, touch-me-not sort of way. A compelling complexity.

Lex, the word "kitsch" is derived from a German word meaning trash. The trash meaning was applied by highbrow art connoisseurs in the 1920's who viewed lowbrow art being "trash" and labeled it "kitsch" as a derogatory "in" art term of the time.

 

Kitsch as legitimate art today is a completely different matter. I was speaking of the original meaning and application of the word - not what's fashionable or trendy today in art appreciation.

Thanks Lex: I need to be more flexible and I didn't mean to beat her up. It's cool, I guess, in a creep-you-out sort of way.

I dug out my German / English dictionary. It appears I was wrong, but in context the meaning is not all that different.

 

The direct translation of kitsch from German to English means "junk."

 

So, the lowbrow art being referenced as kitsch is junk not trash. Hope that makes a difference....

Webster's Third International Dictionary (the unabridged one) defines kitsch as "Artistic or literary material held to be of low quality, often produced to appeal to popular taste, and marked especially by sentimentalism, sensationalism, and slickness." It gives two sources of the origin, one the German word kitschen which it says means to slap (a work of art) together, and German dialect where it says it means to scrape up mud from the street.

 

The first of three definitions given by the Third Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is "art or artwork characterized by sentimental, often pretentious bad taste."

 

The Quintessential Dictionary by I. Moyer Hunsberger defines it as "Art, literature, etc of a pretentious but shallow kind, calculated to have an immediate popular appeal."

Considering that making artwork from found materials has a tradition dating back to the beginning of the 20th century and that some of it has been elevated in critical esteem there's no shame in one of the definitions of "kitsch".

 

The force of popular culture has redefined the term anyway so the etymology is irrelevant. Language, like art, is a malleable thing, whether or not we approve.

 

During the 19th century a coy sexual component became a staple of that era's potboilers and melodramas, which culminated in Bram Stoker's "Dracula". Similar flirtations with kitschy sexuality appeared in lushly colored paintings of fathers leading their virgin daughters across bridges toward marriage. Swords and similar phallic references were everpresent. It was considered fine art by the bourgeoise, kitsch during the jaded Bauhaus era (ironically, since Bauhaus was typified by elements that employed the use of materials that seemed "found" from the growing industrial influence), and now, again, fine art by some aficionados.

 

Lux is clever enough in her austerity to appreciate not only the distinctions of the varied definitions of kitsch, but astute enough to know how to capitalize on it. Her outdoor backgrounds - essentially landscapes - are photographed separately from her photos of children. Each component is digitally tweaked just enough to present a heightened sense of reality. But some of her landscapes alone, without the human models, would stand alone if she wanted to present them that way.

Lex: I liked your previous phrase, "a compelling complexity."

My journalism instructors told me that my predilection for alliteration and onomatopoeia were not often among my more admirable qualities.

 

You can only imagine how difficult it was for me to resist using either in this post. ;>

I checked my dictionary and it claims that "kitsch" is a painting of the last supper in velvet with a neon halo over Jesus' head. But if the seller is working out of a sidewalk stand near a gas station, then it's camp.