"Just another frame?" Is it all just variations on a theme?

[sjmurray]

<p>A photo that I make is an expression of my personality, inner life, etc. But, any viewer is likely to see things in my photo that stimulate their own personal and unique thoughts and feelings which I have no idea of or control over. That’s the beauty of the whole process. The question posed: “Is there anything new left to be found (or done or created),” is irrelevant because as long as there are people around making photographs and viewers to look at them, something is happening, whether it be communication, education, emotional stimulation, or whatever. Does that make sense to anybody else?</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>What you say makes sense to me, Steve, but doesn't lead me to believe the question Lannie posed is irrelevant. We all know that every minute, sleeping and waking, something new is happening. That would seem to be a given. And, I suppose, for some, that's enough to make life interesting. Many, however, choose to do things with their time, including make photos. Now each photo is a unique thing and something different but that doesn't make each photo interesting. I took Lannie to mean not only "new" in the clinical sense of every darn minute being a new minute but new in the sense that we can spend our minute watching TV, caring for our elderly parents, running, sleeping, eating, working on an academic thesis, painting a house or making art on a canvas. We pretty much eat because we have to. But a lot of other things we do because we want to. If we don't do one thing we will do another, that's for sure. We will exist in each moment. But what gives each moment meaning and what gives some moments more significance than others? Do I like to do things I haven't done before? Yes. Each time I walk down the street to work, I'm doing something new in your sense of the word. OK. But, often, when I go on vacation, I want to go someplace new because the newness of each instant of walking down the street to work is not quite as fabulous as the newness of going to a foreign land, or going to a state park I've never been to, or meeting some people who are somewhat different than my friends (who are, of course, new each time I see them since they've shed their old skin molecules and adorned some new ones and they've grown a day or two older).</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Bernd Becher (Düsseldorf Art Academy) collaborated closely with his wife Hilla Becher (St. Louis Art Museum).</p><div></div>

[aplumpton]

<p>Each day is a new frame in my life. I relish that. Also the unknowns it might bring and I will deal with. I see different things even on familiar paths. There is a continual mixing of new acquired knowledge, experiences and fresh views with what I know and have done and each such intermeshing or interaction allows me a mental approach that is slightly different, ready to see something different and worthy of contemplation or as subject of a visual representation. My best aid is an undying curiosity for things and persons, the desire to explore and to re-evaluate even what I have previously witnessed and photographed. The theme is not so constant that it constrains my approach. Variations on a theme are fine. Bach and some other great composers created very original variations on a single theme base. Variations on a theme is not a constraint.</p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>Another way to look at this topic is that it's new to somebody at a certain time and place depending on the person viewing any creative endeavor.</p>

<p>I look at Steve Murray's '70's portraits and digital color portraits in his PN gallery and quite a few of them give me a strange and unexpected calming and peaceful sensation because it appears Steve has found people with faces that have a special relaxed and somewhat ego-less gaze and timelessness as if they came from a place of intelligence and innocence, a rare combination in people down here in Texas.</p>

<p>I actually want to hang out with Steve's portrait subjects just to see if this sensation is on account of his photography or inherent within the subject's character. It's similar to the parallel universe feel I get from Fred's portraits. It's a tangible, real feeling I don't see in quite a few portraits.</p>

<p>So in this sense Steve's portraits are new to me as portraiture goes. Someone else may not see what I see and so may see his work as hackneyed photography. Who knows? I mean today's youth find old Polaroid styled photos as new and stylish.</p>

[sjmurray]

<p>I'm in total agreement with you here, Tim. BTW, thanks for the positive comments on my portraits! I also would like to believe that I could do the same type of portraits down there in Texas because that is what my own "radar" seeks out, just a Fred's "radar" seeks out his own type of image. I don't think its particularly conscious though, but more a reflection of our individuality. </p>

[sjmurray]

<p>Lannie, since you started this topic using the sun as an example, I remembered an interesting article on the web about cliches. Here's the last couple paragraphs:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>The continuing production and circulation of sunsets may seem to suggest a brainless, sheep-like adherence to popular image templates, and yet, for all photography’s reproducibility, each photograph is always unique to the photographer; they were individually moved to record it. Each of the sunsets that I have discussed in this essay could also be described as, in their own way, ambitious, for each is either submitted for competition or for public appraisal; they represent something significant that endures, and is shared, for a reason that repetition cannot dampen. As an amateur photo blogger, Paul Butzi, has put it so well:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>the world is supped full with photos of children blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes. You know it. I know it. And yet, the world is not suffering from a surfeit of photographs of <em>your</em> child blowing out the candles on his birthday cake on <em>his</em> third birthday. <a id="#fn17-ref" href="http://eitherand.org/reconsidering-amateur-photography/when-cliche-not-cliche-reconsidering-mass-produced/#fn17">[17]</a></p>

</blockquote>

<p>Patterns exist because they show what matters to people. The ‘evidence’ of numerous photographs of sunsets as a popular subject, then - whether in the historical archive or in contemporary online photo-sharing sites - cannot be simply grouped as one-of-a-kind and thus be adequately dealt with quantitatively, whether there are fifty-five thousand, nine million or sixty billion. It might be more fruitful to consider these thematic photographs as forms of antanaclasis – a rhetorical linguistic form that has been linked to photography by Victor Burgin - signalling “repetition with different significations, or one repeated picture with different captions” <a id="#fn18-ref" href="http://eitherand.org/reconsidering-amateur-photography/when-cliche-not-cliche-reconsidering-mass-produced/#fn18">[18]</a> Sunset photographs may all look the same, but the meaning changes with each one. As Richard Dyer has argued about stereotypes: they “are a very simple, striking, easily-grasped form of representation but are none the less capable of condensing a great deal of complex information and a host of connotations". <a id="#fn19-ref" href="http://eitherand.org/reconsidering-amateur-photography/when-cliche-not-cliche-reconsidering-mass-produced/#fn19">[19]</a> Even stereotypes and clichés carry complexities and nuances. Just like sunsets, then, every sunset photograph is different. (from Annebella Pollen:<em> When is a cliche not a cliche? Reconsidering mass produced sunsets)</em><br>

http://eitherand.org/reconsidering-amateur-photography/when-cliche-not-cliche-reconsidering-mass-produced/</p>

 

</blockquote>

 

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Seems like Mr. Butzi is supplying a rationalization for why nothing can ever be a cliché. He's taking the word out of the lexicon. Trouble is, clichés are stubborn so he's got an uphill climb ahead of him. As I read it, he's justifying mediocrity by saying every sunset photo is "special." The question is, special to whom!</p>

<p>That I take pics of my nieces and nephews on their birthdays makes them special to me and my family. But their specialness to me and my family doesn't mean they're not clichés. They're simply clichés I'm willing and often happy to indulge in. It depends what I want out of a photo at a given time. Most photos of sunsets I've seen come off as decor, good for hanging in motel rooms. Stuff in art galleries and stuff that's made it into museums and great photography books generally challenge me a little more.</p>

<blockquote>

<p><em>Sunset photographs may all look the same, but the meaning changes with each one.</em> —Butzi</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I suppose so. But photography is a <em>visual</em> medium so looking the same is very significant and the fact that a part of the meaning changes with each one doesn't make up for visual repetitiveness.</p>

<p>Context has a lot to do with all this. What I want out of my family snaps and in my travel scrapbooks is different from what I want from hard-hitting documentary photos and art photos and legal forensic photos.</p>

<p>If I'm making photos to express myself and to create something, I'm probably going to stay away from kids' birthday parties. No doubt, a few here and there will make art out of a kids' party. But I've seen enough pics of kids' parties to know that most, individual though they may be because of the uniqueness of each kid, are not going to have much meaning to outsiders. I have a sense of how to understand the "specialness" the loved ones will feel which is kind of a special kind of specialness. The most meaningful sunset photo to someone because they were there and they're a special and unique person identical to no other person and because no sunset is ever the same as another sunset is very likely still going to bore me to tears. Again, a picture of a sunset is very different from the sunset it's a picture of.</p>

<p>Sure, every cliché has something unique because it's not identical to the instance of the cliché that came before it. But every cliché has a whole lot more that is not unique and that is pedestrian and mimicked.</p>

<p>By the way, clichés can be great to work with given a consciousness and awareness of the cliché and how it can be used. But the rote or mindless tendency to cliché is nothing, IMO, to herald.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>I don't think its particularly conscious though, but more a reflection of our individuality.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>First off, my thanks as well to Tim for the notice. I'll disagree with Steve a little on this, though I also agree with the gist of it. My work tends to be fairly conscious. I put a lot of thought into my photography overall even if I'm not necessarily in thinking mode when I'm taking the shots. My shooting, however, is very influenced by the thinking I do when I don't have a camera in hand. So my individuality is very wrapped up in what I'm conscious of. My individuality is not just reflexive. It's a whole package. I suspect Steve's is too, as is Tim's and everyone else here. At the same time, I do agree with you, Steve, that much of my shooting is probably determined by my life experience and even my biology. So, in that sense, it may not be conscious. I think all my actions and endeavors are a product of both, my very intentional conscious awareness/behavior as well as those forces over which I've had very little control, like where I was born and to whom, the color of my skin, my height, and the genes I've inherited.</p>

[sjmurray]

<p>Well, Fred, I'm pleased you can agree with me a little! I think I was speaking mainly about myself and how I shoot. When I have a camera, I am in a sort of "visual mode" and I am just drawn to certain things. Its not planned. More like a musician jamming and improvising: you're just going with the flow. Thinking just gets in the way, unless its about f stops and such. I realize a lot of people very consciously plan their shots and that's valid for them. </p>

<p>Going back to the original idea: "is there something new to be mined out there?" I would go back to what Tim said: "Another way to look at this topic is that it's new to somebody at a certain time and place depending on the person viewing any creative endeavor." I like that sentiment. For any one image there are an infinite number of potential viewers, all with different lives and experiences and perceptions, and reactions. </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Steve, sorry, you followed the statement about both you and me with the statement I quoted, and I thought you were including me in that as well. In any case, it's good to sort out how differently we each work and think.</p>

<p>On the newness thing, I took Lannie to be talking about, or at least I approach it from, the perspective of a photographer for the most part. When asked if there's something new to be mined, for me, it's about what I want to do with my photography, whether I can mine new things or whether any photographer can. If so, I think it takes work, thought, creativity, and instincts, probably some passion as well as being willing to take a few risks. I don't think it just happens and I don't think all the viewers in the world with all the infinite number of perceptions will help me mine something new. If that was all it took, new viewers with different perceptions, all I'd have to do would be to throw anything up there, anything at all, and they could just perceive away to their infinitely variable content. There's got to be more for a photographer to want and hope for, or at least for this photographer to want and hope for. And I think a lot of viewers beyond the mass of pop culture and pretty things want a lot more than another sunset to throw their unique perceptions at.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>Thinking just gets in the way, unless its about f stops and such. I realize a lot of people very consciously plan their shots and that's valid for them.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>One important point. Thinking and planning are two different things. Thinking doesn't require planning. So when I say I employ thinking and, as I said, it's not usually in the moments I'm shooting so it doesn't interfere with anything for me, it doesn't have to include planning. I may think about who the person is and what are his personality traits the week or the night before a shoot. Overall, I may think a lot about what types of photographic techniques and styles appeal to me and I may do that while I'm on a bus or laying awake in bed at night. To think about my photography doesn't require that I'm deciding in advance where a person is going to stand or what outfit they're going to wear and may have nothing to do with planning.</p>

[sjmurray]

<p>Fred said:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I may think about who the person is and what are his personality traits the week or the night before a shoot. Overall, I may think a lot about what types of photographic techniques and styles appeal to me and I may do that while I'm on a bus or laying awake in bed at night.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Just for the record, I absolutely do none of this type of planning. <br>

Lannie asked: "Is there anything new left to be found (or done or created)" Well, even if it is something that's been done before, it can be "new" for you, a discovery. You are the first "viewer" after all. I see a lot of similarities in photographs of people, especially beginners, that seem to go through the same themes as they discover their world through the lens. To them it is new. As we mature in our craft, we push beyond our early explorations and develop our own unique style. I don't know, I'm just rambling here! Gotta go to bed. </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Steve, I guess if it makes you feel good to refer to what I do as planning, that's cool. I do plan sometimes. And that works for me. Just saying I think without planning sometimes as well. But I say, if you want not to think, more power to you. Don't think.</p>

[sjmurray]

<p>There's an old saying about meditation: "its not what you think." I think that can be true about creative endeavors as well. There's a difference between thinking and planning, and just being "open" and in a way letting yourself be guided by inner and outer forces. Most of my best photos are "discoveries" that were not so much planned in advance. People have different ways of working and I'm just trying to describe what works for me. I was not intending to be disrespectful towards you, Fred. I respect what works for each person. I just caught your "rant" in your new post. I'll let others hash it out there. I think we got off on the wrong foot about just what is "thinking." That's a whole nuther conversation!</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Speaking of improvisational musicians, I found this quote by Miles Davis over the weekend. Seems pertinent and insightful, straight from the horse's mouth . . .</p>

<blockquote>

<p><em>"I'm always thinking about creating. The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas."</em></p>

</blockquote>