Subject of Abstract Photographs

I have recently been making abstract photographs. These are real subjects,

sharp focused and unmanipulated except for normal darkroom adjustments such as

contrast, exposure and dodging and burning where appropriate. Each image is

also printed full frame.

 

My questions are, why do people viewing these always ask of what I made the

photograph? Why does it seem important for them to know?

 

I had initially thought this might be due to the nature of photography being

used often as a recorder of events. A friend, an abstract painter, told me she

gets similar questions on her work so the issue might not be limited to

photography.<div></div>

That's nice Mark. What is it a picture of ?

 

(oh i just crack myself up sometimes ;-)

People will always ask themselves or others what it is they are looking at. Sometimes they don't know. Maybe a truely abstract mind would tell you what it is you photographed without being asked....

 

Cheers.

obviously people want pictures to be "of" things/places/whatever. and some of them just can't possibly accept a picture that is not... <b>of</b>.

<br><br>

 

i fiddled with this once myself, only to ask myself (repeatedly); why create abstracts, with a medium that is by nature everything but abstract...??? not that it solved anything, i still get the urge now and then... ,-)

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Is this a serious question? By presenting a subject this way you're basically daring them to figure it out. It's a puzzle. We spend every second of every day of our lives looking at things and figuring out what they are.

I don't think this is restricted to photography. We spent a couple of hours today at a fantastic exhibition of Kandinsky's paintings at the Tate Modern and my wife spent most of her time looking for recognisable objects amongst the abstraction. Sadly of course the artist wasn't there to be asked, and the titles gave no clues at all, so there was the opportunity to be uncontestably correct.

Absraction is a great tool, but people want to know how they relate to what they see. Seeing is not always believeing, so they will always ask!

 

Cheers.

<i>Absraction is a great tool, but people want to know how they relate to what they see.</i><p>

My wife is abstract, lofty, ethreal. I was distressed during the first several years, then I went deaf.<p>

But about the picture above: I understand it. It's plain as day. Am I damaged?

Most people do not have the artistic education needed to appreciate pictures, or any other art for that matter, that is not immediately recognizable as something common and everyday. They cannot understand why we make pictures of just one part of a flower so that all you can see are the lines, curves, or other elements but not the whole flower. The same goes for light, positive and negative space, composition, line, form, etc. They have no understanding of the power involved in small details becuase they never learned to recognize it. If it is not overwhelming to the point of nausea, they cannot 'get' it.

 

It's not a new problem. When he first showed them in the US, Picasso's works went virtualy unnoticed and those that were noticed were derided by the press and the public. It takes understanding to have appreciation, and education to have understanding, therefore, many people here (US) don't appreciate much except the latest TV shows.

 

That's my theory anyway...

 

- Randy

A question: What do you expect people's reaction should be to the example that you've shown? My first reaction was that it looked kind of cool and I wondered if it were a close up of a plant part. How should I have reacted? Is there deeper meaning to this photo?

 

I think the reason most try to guess the object is that they know it is a photo of something occuring in life, rather than created in the imagination, as it would be from a painter or sculptor. I'm surprised that your abstract painter friend gets the same question.

I appreciate everyones thoughts.

 

There is no great meaning in this image just a natural occurance of a pattern that could be many other things. I find it interesting that so many non man-made things can look similar.

 

I will add that it is not of something living.

The genre is possible the image here can be criticized...

 

I would say that it proves that B&W photography is functional...like a print made in a Physics lab when photo paper was first being invented.

 

Hmm, I would rather have a sharp macro of a patterned carpet. What would be the purpose of it not being sharp ? It's not a hidden identity, not a fading entity, not a speeding particle,...

I believe most of us live in a visual world that we must resolve in objective terms in order to serve us in our pragmatic lives. The inability to identify what we are seeing creates stress: we need to know is it friend or foe; it it male or female; is it a coral snake or king snake. As a society, we generally expect the same of a two-dimensional representation: what is this a painting of; what is this a photograph of?

 

A painting can be an objective representation or an abstraction. The general public may be satisfied that a painting can be abstract because it is created from the mind of the painter, but may still want to know what object the painter had in mind.

 

But the history of photography is traditionally pereived to be only of objective representation. Dageurrotypes had the potential to replace paintings as recordings of historical events. Photojournalism must not distort the facts of an event. Kodak Brownie cameras provided an easily identifiable objective representation. Today's point-and-shoot picture takers are generally satisfied with their I-was-here shots.

 

I think, then, that Mark provided the basic answer to his own question: "I had initially thought this might be due to the nature of photography being used often as a recorder of events." Non-objective abstraction isn't what the casual viewer expects or accepts from a photograph.

I agree with the "puzzle" response.

It's like a guessing game. You want to know if you guessed correctly at what you were

looking at.

 

nice photo, btw.... what is it? LOL kidding, you don't have to answer.

As was mentioned above, I think its nothing more than a simple issue of curiosity not necessarily ignorance or lack of education. When we see something new or something that is portrayed in a perculiar manner it's natural to be inquisitive. If someone bothers to ask you what you photographed, I would say you made a pretty effective image. After all, it grabbed their attention.

I too think that it's a natural reaction to anything we don't understand. Our minds have evolved, as Ocean implies, to solve puzzles.<div></div>

Pico, you are by no means damaged, maybe the photo in all it's abstract beauty means different things to different people.

 

Cheers.

I don't care about subject matter in abstract photography. I would trust the competent photographer to go and get the subject matter they need to make the photograph they have to make. Subject matter is just another ingredient like film, lens, paper and so on. The end result, the photograph, is an artefact rather than a record of a pre-existing reality.

Andy, I agree and I reckon it looks a bit like a macro of the snake skin that www.cameraleather.com sell ro recover old bodies! I do like it though and thinking of purchasing the pink lizard skin for my Pentax LX, I hate to wear black....

 

Marius, I beg to differ but in my thinking a photograph is indeed a record of something, someone, somewhere, sometime. It's not just a print. That's why Mark gets people asking him, 'jeez dude, wtf is that?'. Anyhow, it's water under the bridge.

 

Cheers.<div></div>

I think you need something more abstract than snake skin for a Pentax, Ben. Perhaps something in glass...<div></div>

There are optical devices that allow us to measure a precise sequence of eye movements as we explore a picture space. Unfortuantely we have no similar tools that can measure how the mind attempts to process an image. Do you consider the "what", "why", "how", "when", or "where" first?

 

For what it's worth, I think that roughly 90% of the images under the "abstract/one year" TRP search are mislabeled.<div></div>

Getting back to the original question, since abstractions are abstractions of something, people want to understand the original association between the reality and the abstraction. Abstraction is an artistic and intellectual process that is worth sharing, not simply the abstraction in and of itself.

Not necessarily. In fact, I would say that what it is is often beside the point.

 

How would you approach Rothko?

I would approach Rothko with great reverence. Rothko reduced painting to perhaps the ultimate abstraction, just placing pigment on a flat surface.

 

I can and have spent hours in the Rothko Chapel meditating on the paintings he did for it.

 

http://www.rothkochapel.org/history.htm

I'm not sure that Rothko could have created abstractions without being influenced by the history of abstraction. Maybe Rothko was influenced by the Impressionists or the Cubists who were certainly abstracting from reality. I agree that an abstraction may have its own aesthetics, but I am trying to speculate on Mark's initial question. Why people might want to know the source of an abstraction. I enjoy his abstract, but it is also a photograph, unless he's deceiving us with something made out of Photoshop, or a pencil drawing or painting that he scanned in. Most photographs begin with a subject in reality. His photograph is an abstraction of something. It's not simply an abstraction.