Avoiding the cliche photo

[johne37179]

<p>I like cliche martinis myself.</p>

[Wouter Willemse]

<p>But is the sirloin steak still the same cliché if it's served with a different wine, a different ambient temperature, or .... ? Is that Martini the same cliché regardless of the company you're in, the place you're staying and so on?<br>

There is a personal aspect to photos (and the enjoyment of food and beverages) which may be invisible to the rest of the world. To the creator (eater/drinker), it may just make all the difference.</p>

[johne37179]

<p>I think the personal aspect is what removes it from the cliche. If you can look at a photograph of a cliche subject and immediately recognize the photographer -- that is not a cliche. It is the vision of the photographer -- even with the cliche subject -- that makes the difference. The real struggle that many of us have, is finding our vision and then executing it in our work.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>This is proof that we shoot for our own pleasure . . .</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I don't make photos just for my own pleasure. I photograph to express myself and to show stuff. I do it as much to share as for myself. For me it has personal meaning and reach well beyond myself. Photography connects me to the world and to others. Even though it can be movingly solitary at times, it can also get me outside myself and link me to the world and to others. For me, it's also not always about or for pleasure.</p>

[johne37179]

<p>I'm with Fred on this. While I immensely enjoy photography and take a lot of selfish pleasure from it -- it is still about communication and sharing a vision. I look to gain as much from the enjoyment of the work of others and fell that my work is simply a bit of the exchange of visions. In some ways that is what prompted this thread. What I look for in the photography of others is not simply the recording of the fact that they were standing next to something they are showing me, but that they are able to insert their vision into what they saw and share that.</p>

[GerrySiegel]

That is interesting Fred. I would be interested in pursuing that revelation. Why photography for that personal connection. Instead of a novel or essay or poetry or some other format. Might there not be more ambiguity in the visual form? You have a feel for language. Does the photo take you farther. Or is it supplemental to words alone? Just wondering.

Does the reaction of viewers help to solidify something to yourself in the form of dialogue maybe? Or as E.J puts it and exchange. Then it is a 'transaction' for many. Is that getting close to the idea for you two?

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Gerry, yes. Connection. For one thing, I shoot mostly people, so I connect with them as part of my process. That's very important to me. And yet, the camera can act as both a go-between and a barrier at the same time. I like working with those sorts of oppositions at play. As for viewers, I'm putting something out there which will have a tiny ripple effect on the small community of people who see my work, on PN and elsewhere. Could be a novel or poetry or essays, but I'm not inclined to writing novels and poetry and my philosophical essays suited me well (and still do) though they lacked something which photography helped supply for me. I was often frustrated by philosophy which seemed stuck on certain questions and stuck on finding answers. Photography allows me to ponder without always drawing a conclusion. Yes, I appreciate photography's abstract/ambiguous side (though I think good novelists and poets can be plenty abstract and ambiguous when they want). I've also studied and played music (piano), probably the most ambiguous/abstract of the arts. The photo doesn't take me <em>further</em> than language. It often takes me to different places. The reaction of the viewer doesn't necessarily <em>solidify</em> anything to me but it does feel to me like an important kind of unspoken dialogue. Viewer reactions have helped me get to know them and sometimes have helped me see things about myself and my work that I may not have overtly realized. It's not so much that I chose it because it's better at doing any of this than any other form of communication, expression, or art. I kind of fell into it. Probably most influential has been my love of movies since I was a kid. As my philosophy writing was academic and philosophy tends to lean toward the theoretical, I use my photography to different ends. First, it allows me to make stuff up. Second, it teaches me that making stuff up can have a ring of truth to it that reality itself sometimes does not. Third, it's shown me there's staging and theatricality even in the most real of situations. Fourth, it can encapsulate in a single moment and single image a whole lot of stuff that would take pages and pages to describe.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>I should add that, of course, photos can be very direct as well as ambiguous, sometimes simultaneously! ;-)</p>

[GerrySiegel]

NT

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<blockquote>

<p>I don't make photos just for my own pleasure. I photograph to express myself and to show stuff.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That one threw me, Fred. Am I to understand you don't find pleasure in expressing yourself and to show stuff?</p>

<p>To me photography is all about getting pleasure through its pursuit, process and level of creativity. Is there some other pleasure you're talking about?</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Tim, that part of my post my be helped by some italics, for what I was emphasizing in that sentence, which was the sharing aspect of photography that's important to me. "I don't make photos just for <em>my own</em> pleasure. I photograph to express myself and to show stuff."</p>

<p>In terms of pleasure itself, no, I don't always find pleasure in expressing myself. Sometimes, it's painful, sometimes obsessive, sometimes tense, sometimes irksome, sometimes strenuous, sometimes tedious, and many other feelings besides or instead of pleasure. Now, I suppose one could say I wouldn't do it if I didn't get pleasure from it on some level, even if it is painful, etc. And that would be one of the reasons I gave up philosophy. Because I no longer have to adopt that sort of mindset. I can simply say I don't necessarily photograph for pleasure and be done with it.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>None of that, by the way, should be read to mean I never get pleasure from photographing. I get a lot of pleasure from it, but it's not usually the first thing that comes to mind when I think about why I photograph. </p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>Then I take it you sometimes use photography as a cathartic process? Or are you feeling pain from outward influences derived from the subject being photographed?</p>

<p>The only pain I've derived from photography is when I get overly obsessive at getting a shot usually in low light that require long sessions of body contortions while being perfectly still. Macro shots without a tripod can be a real pain.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>This all relates to clichés. If I were shooting just for my own pleasure, which I do at times, I wouldn't care much about clichés. I've taken many of them, happily, and keep them to myself. But when I'm trying to connect with others through my photography and share something of significance, I want the communication/expression not to be trite and not to be something that's lost it's meaning due to having been done so many times before with such similar sensibility. (As I understand it, triteness and loss of meaning due to overuse help define clichés.) So, then, clichés become something I much more want to avoid, because I think avoiding clichés makes for deeper and more personal communication and expressiveness and more provocative thinking and understanding. That is, unless you're consciously working with clichés as a choice to say something beyond the cliché. That can be very enlightening.</p>

[aplumpton]

<p>If you photograph to understand better your subject or to strive to create your particular perception of it, there is I think only a small likelihood of producing a so-called cliché image. Exact copying of what someone else has done (something I do not advocate unless it is part of a learning purpose) may not produce a cliché image, unless the original has been copied many times and is recognised by several others or the public to the point of becoming a "standard" image of the subject.</p>

<p>Some subjects are themselves near to being cliché, where experience has shown them to invariably be photographed in the same way. Given the access from appreciable distance to the Statue of liberty, to the Parthenon or to the Eiffel tower (or in my city, the emblematic Chateau Frontenac hotel), photographing them in a unique manner is either geographically difficult or demanding of quite fresh thinking. Elsewhere, not allowing one's approach to change or evolve has the evident danger of maintaining a cliché response to chosen subjects. Avoiding such personal clichés often requires voluntary rejection of past photographing behavior or approaches and assuming the pleasure and challenge of exploring what something completely different does for our photography. </p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>The pleasure of exploring as Arthur put it I would think would be a very good motivator and assurance for not creating a cliche image over avoiding cliche results as the only goal. It gets into overthinking the process where self expression and emotion would seem to take a back seat or be squelched entirely.</p>

<p>Not sure because there can be a long and arduous process with many variables involved arriving at the final result that may or may not produce a cliche image. But going about it just solely to avoid making a cliche image I would think involves too much reverse engineering thought processes getting in the way of exploring.</p>

<p>I guess a good test would be to examine the final image and compare it to other images in a Google image search on the same photographed subject.</p>

<p>I'm doing that right now assessing whether I can come up with a better rendition of Texas's Garner State Park compared to the hundreds of tourist shots mostly taken with smart phones. All make that park look different, some are better than others, but most don't raise the bar on self expression of how they feel about that beautiful park. I can't believe no one has done that place justice. I wouldn't even call these shots cliche but deem them more as a representation of the shooter's struggle just pointing & shooting with a cellphone.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>The pleasure of exploring as Arthur put it I would think would be a very good motivator and assurance for not creating a cliche image over avoiding cliche results as the only goal. It gets into overthinking the process where self expression and emotion would seem to take a back seat or be squelched entirely.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>If these were the only two choices, I'd probably agree with you, Tim. I'm thankful there are other ways to approach it. I can do both, experience exploration and think about clichés. I didn't read anyone here as talking about avoiding clichés "as the only goal." That would, indeed, be stifling. Thinking, to me, doesn't imply or even suggest over-thinking. But, yes, thinking about avoiding clichés to the exclusion of everything else does sound like over-thinking, for whatever it's worth. By the way, I don't think much about clichés when I'm actually shooting. I try to be a bit more spontaneous and in the moment. But I do think about this stuff when I'm mulling over photography, planning some things, looking at other's work, etc. I'm not a big supporter of the notion that the way to avoid something is not to think about it, at least for me. I think I might be a bit more prone to clichés if I didn't at least consider them. To me, it's like working at any of my photographic skills. I do that to improve my ability to express myself through photography. Always learning. Part of learning, to me, is learning about clichés. No more important than learning about composition, or style, or color, or black and white conversion, or how the sun will reflect off windows. Just another element to consider.</p>

[William Kahn]

<p>I have a theory, that no matter what you shoot, no matter how bad it is, no matter how much it screams "Cliché!", once you somehow become famous by whatever means, and not necessarily as a photographer: Every shot you ever took will suddenly be in demand. Is an image once considered to be cliché and is suddenly in demand, still cliché?</p>

[PapaTango]

<p>William W's post made me smile the whole time I read it. Perhaps we should refer to what he is talking about as the "Annie Rule." People seem to like local stuff--but mostly the things they have not seen before or things and scenes from the past. Yet when BUYING something, the opposite is true. The corollary to this is that people from somewhere else prefer seeing common local themes...</p>

[Ian Taylor]

<p>When you are about to press the shutter ask yourself the question "Am I taking a picture of a picture?"<br>

If 'yes', don't press.</p>

[aplumpton]

<blockquote>

<p>More important than originality or avoidance of the cliché is authenticity</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Except that a typewriter (or Word software) does not a writer make, nor does a paint brush make an artist-painter. The camera is a tool to convert whatever (and however) we wish to place in front of it into a two dimensional representation. A scientist with a camera may wish to show what is under the microscope and a forensic worker the subject in study and for those objectives the camera can produce fairly authentic facsimiles. As a photographer the choices are greater than that and some ideal of authenticity is happily sacrificed for the creative space known as originality. And even cliché images can be a form of art, but hopefully not an exclusive one.</p>

[johne37179]

<p>Cliche photographs were creative the first time. They become cliches by being copied repeatedly. The creativity in repetition diminishes rapidly.</p>

[Brad_]

<p>I believe those who talk about taking measures to avoid creating cliches, end up embracing and creating cliche work through those efforts. Easy to see from the outside.</p>

[AlanKlein]

<br />Ecclesiastes 1:9<br /><br /><em>...The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.</em>

[Julie H]

<p>[Alan, they had cameras back then?]</p>

<p>Responses to these "avoiding cliché" threads are becoming clichés. So I've tried to avoid such clichés in my response. Here goes:</p>

<p>Photographic clichés are visual karaoke. Enjoyed for their ... variety.<br>

Or, photographic cliché material should be used as a visual allergy-patch test. Every budding photographer should be exposed to scenes known to result in cliché photographs. If their picture(s) is/are clichés, then they have no special sensitivity to the genre. If, on the other hand, their pictures show signs of inflammation, outrage or other disturbances, clearly they have a unique sensitivity that might develop into something interestingly twisted. Like a steak cooked on high in the microwave.</p>