Life is not perfect, so why should the photograph be?

[inoneeye]

<p>Chris, I too feel at conflict with the imagery that is, strikingly sharp. I recently sold an xpan, partially due to the too sharp optics of the lenses. I have often returned lenses after testing them because they were too sharp for my eye. Too clean, too sharp, sterilized, i often respond to photos with these words. taste of course. <br>

I often felt that audio cds seemed too clean, i realized that i was only missing the warmth and textures that vinyl offered. I still feel drawn to the sounds offered by vinyl when compared to cd.</p>

<p>Two of my personal favorite (well known) photographers, whose imagery would be greatly diminished if they were 'cleaned' (<i>provacative label</i>) up are Sudek and Moriyama. The poetry I feel from Sudeks approach would become sterilized if the optics and process he used were to maximize sharpness. I am obviously assuming that given the choice he would not choose to in fact maximize sharpness. Something that i believe Edward Weston was doing at the end of his life in Carmel. I did not respond to his later images as deeply as his earlier ones with his cheap lens finds. When i look at Daido Moriyamas work i have a nearly incomparable visceral response. I cannot imagine the critiques he would/has receive/d. So many of the older photographers i admire would be less significant for me if it were not for the limitations imposed either by choice or of limited technology of the day. This does not mean that there content was without merit. I choose to admire the photographer who masters the tool. This often includes the context of place and time. Optics today are fantastic yet i often prefer older lenses that many consider inferior, when clarity is the guide. <br>

When i see a very sharp image i often feel that there is a hyper real quality..... case by case of course. I simply don't see that sharp. Thankfully there is a choice. There are countless photographers who do not choose to, or care to.. polish it. They may just want to refine, careful to not polish away something of value. </p>

<p>btw Kris, are you talking about Josef Koudelka? do you shoot?</p>

 

<br />

 

[don_e]

<p>Koudelka? Ok. Nobody's told me to admire him, either.</p>

 

[aqualarue]

<p>Hey folks, I am not attacking, I am not judging your image making, I am not provoking. I am not being personal. I have had this kind of casual discussion here with a few other students of photography. There has never been a misunderstanding about the general nature of this topic that I began with. Some of us agree with each other, we do not deny the place that creative imagery has, nor de we attack the digital side of things and the creative possibilities that exsit for photographers to express themselves and to define their work.<br>

Some of the phrases I have used have been seized upon in isolation, Sharp images for example, for crying out loud folks I sharpen at least 80% of my photos to varying degrees. I employ channels and masks and luminance masks and density masks. but I also sit back and I think sometimes, do I do this because it is sub-conciously expected from me as a photographer? Honesty with myself is sometimes asking wether or not I do really do this for me, or for some future publisher that I think might not accept it because it does not meet with aesthetic tastes, rather I want to say something through it by Not thoroughly "cleaning" , I hit this situation a number of times. </p>

<p>I posted this question because it was not about being critical, it was about engaging my thoughts and responding with an argument (not to be provocative) but because I am questioning practises tha I see dominate the industry.</p>

<p>Now my view of the photographic industry is, without a doubt limited I'm sure, but it is the only access that I have and the only view that I see being trumpeted around. I would not dare to send some of my images to a magazine competition purely because I see the standards set by them are on, or seem to be on only one level, and the only articulated words that I can use to describe this level is with words such as "too clean, sanitised, nicley toned with highlights at 242 and shadows at 12 and midtones between 120 and 130. </p>

<p>So give me room to breathe please, I am learning, I am a student, I am naive to many things in the photographic world. And sorry Jeff, i did not look properly at your spelling. We always spell Jeff as Jeoff and I carried on addressing you without paying attention to the spelling. </p>

<p>regards<br>

Chris.</p>

[inoneeye]

<p>Chris, i thought it was a very interesting question, and certainly not worded as an attack. <br /> Provocative and critical can be good.</p>

[don_e]

<p>"...but I also sit back and I think sometimes, do I do this because it is sub-conciously expected from me as a photographer?"</p>

<p>Why refer to it as "subconscious"? It obviously isn't. You seem to be preternatually aware of it. Who would expect you to, anyway? Who are you answerable to? And if someone did, why should you care? Jeff and I both have noted the sloppiness of your writing. Why would you expect anyone to parse your snippets of text in a meaningful way?</p>

<p>"I have had this kind of casual discussion here with a few other students of photography."</p>

<p>Casual photo conversations is another forum. Expect the philosophy forum to parse your ideas in a critical way -- or hope it does, otherwise what is the point posting here? Jeff's advice to organize your thoughts better is worthwhile.</p>

<p>Your several recent threads are not unique; the questions you think you have raised are a common theme here, too often presented in a sloppy and casual way. In no instance I can recall in the last three years has anyone raising the question responded to a request for a link to images as examples of what they refer to. Why is that? I think it is because they think they are offerring a hypothetical, but instead they personalize it as if it refers to actually existing photographs and actually existing photographers, but they ignore any request for simple evidence of their argument.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>For example:</p>

<p>"I do this because it is sub-conciously expected from me as a photographer?"</p>

<p>Why the passive voice? Why are you splitting yourself up into several agents holding a casual conversation among your selves?</p>

<p> </p>

[longrider]

<p>The first question which needs to be answered is what is perfect?<br>

for me,if an image touches me in a way,if it moves my soul,it is perfect,if it has moodit is perfect..it must show feelings for me,a special moment in life..those things make it perfect for me..but perfect might mean something else for someone else.<br>

So coming back to your question, a photograph can never be perfect in genral cuz perfect might not mean the same for anyone,it can be perfect for an individual but that is where it stops i think.<br>

For me it is enough if it touches me and fascinates me and speaks to my sense of beauty...but is it perfect then,someone else might say it is not...lol.</p>

[Spearhead]

<p>FWIW, the last "European photography magazine" I purchased is Gente di Fotografia, published in Sicily. There is nothing in it that meets the criteria of "strikingly sharp"or "generally cleaned up" although, as you would expect for any good photograph, it is well composed. (Why anyone would want badly composed photographs is beyond me.) So it's hard to understand what you talking about. As Don E and I have both pointed out, this is not critical thinking, it's random potshots. Spend some time reading and thinking about a well-composed, sharp, and cleaned up post that is not filled with strawmen and comments about images that don't appear to exist.</p>

<p>Gente di Fotografia has a website. I can't read most of it, but there are <a href="http://www.gentedifotografia.it/portfolio.aspx">some photos there</a> .</p>

 

[Spearhead]

<p>And more FWIW, Ellen von Unwerth was regularly published in Vogue for many years, as big and slick a magazine as you can get. A typical EvU photo from Vogue can be found<a href="http://www.ocaiw.com/images/catalog/foto/203big.jpg"> here. </a> Now tell me, how does your premise fit? </p>

[mrraz]

<p><a href="../photodb/folder?folder_id=830669">My people portfolio</a> has examples of a variety processing, but with the exception of my angelic grandson ;<) there is little of what I consider overly processed. Most of it falls into the street category from my perspective.<br>

How does this sit with you Chris? I think there's a lot of blemished reality there.</p>

[aqualarue]

<p>Well well well, Don and Jeff. I had no idea that I was in the presence of masters. save your unreasonable attitude for the university, please. Or maybe you should have added pre-conditions to posting on this forum, I thought it was about the freedom to discuss at street level, consumer level, learning level, the level where most people talk and converse without the need to parse their every phrase. I was conversing on a conversational level and did not expect to have to provide empirical evidence about what is commonly 'felt' by - Mmm ...some, (Sorry, dare I refer to that 'other' forum' that I am not allowed to mention here)?</p>

<p>You have, both of you, either failed to come down from your Royal perches and been able to actually listen to me, prejudiced by your academic need for me to provide you with a truly complex philosophical and photographically mature argument, or I have failed to speak in a manner which befits the vocabulary of this forum. </p>

<p>Whatever you think, you have missed the point, the subject's simplicity overly complicated by your own exacting standards. And I really must asay that just a few of your statements (not all - i like to remain fair) are clearly sloppy in that they reveal an absence of fair and just consideration about how the human concious and perception works.</p>

<p>PS, I forgive you though, It's christmas.</p>

[don_e]

<p>" I have failed to speak in a manner which befits the vocabulary of this forum."</p>

<p>You refuse to write normal English sentences. You write like a drunk slurring his words and is offended when he is asked to speak clearly. I'm told that the upper classes have a taste for bad grammar. Is that what you are demonstrating?</p>

<p> </p>

[aqualarue]

<p>O Don, what is the matter with you? You do not know me, I do not know you. have you lost your reason here along with the plot, so much so that you are stooping to childish outbursts? Attacking me personally because I have failed to reason in a manner which does not meet with some Critique type of orthodoxy, all i have done is to try and reason my way through what seems to have become a minefield where I am doing my hardest to remain impersonal. Why are you insistent that I am somehow of an upper-class grammatical failure of a lesser breed? Why have you resorted to personalising that which was never about 'photographers or their persdonal definitions of their own image making? </p>

<p>All i have done is to try and desperately reason. Reason is not philosophical or empirical enough for you in this matter so it seems. You have not allowed for the fact that I am seeking and questioning the mode of photography which is daily presented to the average consumer, that leads to a subconcious teaching about what an acceptable image should look like. Never mind the professionals, the masters of history and photographic practise, these people are not known by the average man on the street, their work is not accessible to the general public. Ask 100 members of the general public who Henri Cartier Bresson is, how many do you think will know who he is. Give 5 Martin Parr images to each of these members of the public, they will not react to them as though they were not professional or thoughtful or meaninful images, the public at large has an idea of how a photo should be, take them to a gallery where photos of a drain pipe and a rubbish dump, along with a lamp post and an empty sky hang, they will walk out and prefer to visit the gallery with swans and pictures of flowers close up. this is because the public does not understand the "Other" language of photography, that language that requires a thoughtful and meditative stance, rather than to be expected to be entertained by the image and to have arrived at the meaning within 10 seconds.<br>

You know Don, i really want to thrash this one out, but I think maybe? it is time to stop. You want evidence, Buy a subscription from the top 5 photographic magazines that are available in England. They are good magazines, I do NOT mock them, I was brought up on them, i was brought up on the cleanliness, and maybe this was a word I should never have used in the first place. But I did not mean, by that, that cloning and dodging and burning were wrong etc etc, i meant it in a conceptual manner to be understood within a context that I erroneously believed was clear.</p>

<p>I accept fault and blame for being unable to provide you with the evidence that you require, I imagined that you would know what I was talking about since one or two others have clearly understood this. You may well have a certain way of thinking that I can not appreciate. Again that would be my problem.</p>

<p>By the way, i am not upper class, I have been an international truck driver for many years, and before that I worked as a forklift driver. Any education I might have is self learned. I write (now that has got to be a joke for you right now), and found photography an excellent medium to convey things that I am busy working on. Enough said, just thought you might like to know a wee bit about me.</p>

<p>kind Regards</p>

<p>Chris.</p>

[don_e]

<p>"Attacking me personally because I have failed to reason in a manner which does not meet with some Critique type of orthodoxy, all i have done is to try and reason my way through what seems to have become a minefield where I am doing my hardest to remain impersonal."</p>

<p>I don't know how you reason as you have not written well enough to communicate with anyone besides maybe your mates. I have asked you for examples illustrating whatever you are attempting to communicate, but you provide none. I've even linked to one of my images. You reply mine are a bit too clean for your tastes. I ask what that means, thinking, now we've got some meat to chew on, but you don't reply. So, we still don't know what you are referring to.</p>

<p>"I was brought up on them, i was brought up on the cleanliness, and maybe this was a word I should never have used in the first place. But I did not mean, by that, that cloning and dodging and burning were wrong etc etc, i meant it in a conceptual manner to be understood within a context that I erroneously believed was clear."</p>

<p>Why would you think it was clear when you are being asked to clarify your meaning?</p>

<p>"By the way, i am not upper class..."</p>

<p>You do not have to be to "demonstrate" it.</p>

 

[aqualarue]

<p>Don, you said:<br>

I think mine are kinda nice. What would be too nice? How would I make them nicer so that they were too nice? It's like the girl on the left here... <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.photo.net/photo/8377733">http://www.photo.net/photo/8377733 </a><br />...I think it is really nice the way she's glancing admiringly at the man passing to her left. And probably the girl on her right is laughing about it. Well, this can all be seen better in the print, but it is surely a plenum of niceness.</p>

<p>Then I said: Kind regards to you all - Chris. Oh and Don, i like your images. Maybe a wee on the clean side for my tastes.</p>

<p>Because you were sarcastic in your multiple use of the word - 'nice' I decided to respond light-heartedly BUT with a compliment in the main clause, and my humour in the sub-clause. does that answer your question?<br>

Don said: I have asked you for examples illustrating whatever you are attempting to communicate, but you provide none. Don, I have provided my reasoning twice by making references to my evidence; namely the volume of magazines that are accessible and to be bought by the general public, and have tried to clarify this in my last post. And please stop making references to upper class, it's nice, but I admit that I can not hope to ever enter into this category. Or maybe you would now be kind enough to demonstrate how I demonstrate an upper class mentality.<br>

The kind regards ending does not seem to work so I will end simply with... Chris.</p>

<p><br /></p>

[don_e]

<p>So, let us try again. You wrote: "I thought I would start a new topic of discussion, merely seeking to engage in an area of documentary/street/people photography..."</p>

<p>When you say photos can be too clean, too nice, and some other 'toos', how can that apply to the areas you wish to discuss? On the street, in order to meet the criteria of not too this or that, should one pass on getting a shot because it doesn't reflect those criteria? Should one's documentary photography be driven by aesthetic concepts -- a kind of 'art documentary' or 'art street photography' -- rather than accuracy in capturing a moment?</p>

<p>I would argue that aesthetic concepts should not drive documentary because one ends up with photos of a concept -- a 'proof of concept' demonstration -- instead of a document related to the moment of exposure.</p>

<p> </p>

[Spearhead]

<blockquote>

<p>Don, I have provided my reasoning twice by making references to my evidence; namely the volume of magazines</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>This is not the kind of example that proves anything. Give some specific examples of photographs. I pointed out that the only European photography magazine I have in my home has photos that are hardly "clean" or "nice." You ignore this because it does not fit your faulty thesis.<br>

<br /> You have proved nothing regarding your claims with vague references to magazines and you haven't been able to make a comprehensible point, from what I see. I don't think we have a clear picture at all of what a "clean" street/documentary photo is. Nor do I know of any "top 5 photographic magazines" that are running street/documentary photos regularly. </p>

<p>You really need to prove that there is something here rather than just making idle chatter.</p>

[aqualarue]

<p>Don, I agree with you here. I meant precisiely that. A document related to and a true representation of the character of the moment. An accurate representation of the moment. Now I am unable to upload photos at this moment because I have to finnish scanning and editing in photoshop in order to balance out where my scanner falls short. Your images are good by the way, I actually like them.<br>

But to get back to your comment, I wonder whether that accurate representation of the moment can be swamped by the desire to clean up to a certain standard in say photoshop. I have seen photos of the gulf war, for example, (and I am genuinely sorry that I can not recover the links,it was a year ago), where what disgusted me most was the sanitation of the image, what should have been a moment to reflect was disturbed (in my opinion) by the obvious corrections and too clean atmosphere of the scene. I mean there were quite a number of them. I like james Natchwey's images, but an overall impression, after viewing so many of the suffering images, was that this is too clean, too well framed, as if he seemed to be slightly favouring the artistic side. His images are strikingly impressive, and that was precisely my problem, I was hit more with the artistic composure than with the reality of the moment.</p>

<p>regards<br>

Chris</p>

<p>Your comment about Proof of concept; </p>

 

[jtk]

<p>Philip Seymour Hoffman (actor in "Capote" and "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" etc) seems on point here, regarding "perfection" vs "reality", discussing his role in "Doubt" in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine:</p>

<p>He's averse to "right, wrong, black, white" and embraces "messiness."</p>

<p>"To feel confident that you can wake up and live your day and be proud instead of living in what's really true, which is the whole mess that the world is (in)." "...being a human on this earth is a complicated messy thing." "I, personally, am uncomfortable with that messiness, just as I acknowledge its absolute necessity." "I only want to do things that I'm passionate about."</p>

[don_e]

<p>Natchwey is very good. One reason I request examples is that in other discussions of the sort "How can I get this (color, contrast, skin tone etc) in photoshop?" and the poster links to what they want to achieve. Quite often the answer is: a softbox and a good makeup artist. Nothing to do with photoshopping. If you are looking at photojournalism in a magazine or newspaper, there are odds that any corrections were done by the editorial people and not the photographer who likely mailed the film or uploaded the digital files. If you mean an exhibit by a photojournalist, then they have made, or have had made, prints. One has to consider the output: prints for exhibit and likely sales, rather than news.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>"I wonder whether that accurate representation of the moment can be swamped by the desire to clean up to a certain standard in say photoshop."</p>

<p>When I print the photo I linked to, I can guarantee I will crop it and work the values to enhance what I imagine the photo should look like. Shooting from the hip like that because I recognize that there is a good photo right in front of me doesn't mean I am in the best position for the photo I see, or that I have the best camera or lens for it, or the best light. I don't see why I shouldn't do that, if that is "cleaning up". There is nothing sacred about what supposedly 'comes right out of the camera', and a photo bears no simple one-to-one relationship with the moment. It is up to the photographer to complete the process, and only the photographer knows what is accurate and what is not.</p>

<p> </p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

I think this is more an issue of chosing to photograph with an impressionist / pictorialist view or an hyper-realist view, and everything

inbetween those ' extremes '. Life is not perfect...but it isn't imperfect either. It just ' is '. So why not let a photograph just ' be ' ?

[don_e]

<p>Just be what? What is the purpose of making the exposure? A print? If I let an exposure just be, I don't have a print. In order to get a print I have to do stuff to it. If it is either film or raw data, I don't have any image at all yet, just what I imagine.</p>

<p> </p>

[htarragon]

<p>The following is a link to a blog with photos by Garry Winogrand, Josef Koudelka and others. There's a video of a VERY young Bill Moyers on Winogrand. The pictures are not "perfect" but boy are they interesting. I happen to like "pretty" but a great street shot will always grab me. Enjoy.<br /> <a href="http://graememitchell.com/blog/category/audiovideo">graememitchell.com/blog/category/audiovideo</a></p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

"Just be what? What is the purpose of making the exposure? A print? If I let an exposure just be, I don't have a print. In

order to get a print I have to do stuff to it. If it is either film or raw data, I don't have any image at all yet, just what I

imagine."----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

 

 

I wasn't referring to the act of photographing but more to the photograph itself and how it's being experienced. Obviously,a

conclusion after viewing a photograph is always going to be made, but limiting this conclusion to the photograph being either

perfect or imperfect ( for whatever personal reasons ) is like thinking to have regained something when there wasn't anything

lost in the first place.