Norma Desmond

My suggestion is that if it's at all possible, wait and do it with them in person. Those photos seem meant to be handled and looked at together. That may be impossible for one reason or another, in which case some kind of scanning and web sharing might have to be the way to go. But the personal nature of the photos is partly embodied in their being physical prints with all the lovely wear and tear the years might have added to them.

I find it interesting to consider, not to the exclusion of many other things I care about of course, but in addition to them. More than an amusing pastime, thinking about such things can be inspirational on a lot of levels. I'm used to this kind of reaction, having studied Philosophy as an undergraduate and then in later years at the graduate level. Philosophers get this a lot . . . waste of time . . . etc. Thinking about abstract, unanswerable questions is related to art and photography in so many ways that the reason to do so seems so profoundly obvious to me. Pondering is one of the great creative forces. No one needs a particular reason to do so. When I read through this thread, I get something significant about who we are and how we think. Why, just in my last post, I said this . . . I think you'll find that born out in my photography. Many of my photos explore personas and artifice, obvious posing, people wearing metaphorical masks, the adoption of different characters. So the whole notion of what intelligence can be artificially produced and how photography could be infused with that, whether by man or machine, is interesting to me. This seems like the perfect place to discuss all that.

It might even turn out we don't have free will at all, at least in the way we've historically come to think of it. Could be we've been mistakenly thinking we were the programmers and not the programmed. "Artificial" is in some ways better than natural. Photography is artificial. So is most art. "True artificial intelligence" seems like an artificial way of semanticizing it out of reach.

From Wikipedia (emphasis added):

The best memories are the ones in my mind and heart. My snapshots are mementos. My photos are usually something else entirely.

Lucas Samaras . . . was the point . . . missed by all.

Ummmm, yes. Supriyo already mentioned Google Glass in his post on the subject.

Real men don't wear snaps, they DO IT! :)

[bEGIN tongue in cheek]Why bother with a camera at all, even worn as a pair of glasses? Maybe someone's working on a chip that can be implanted in my brain that will simply record all that my eyes see. Someday, there will be no difference between reality and a photo of it.[END tongue in cheek] At that point, we can proclaim, "Photography is dead. Long live photography!"

Thanks for the tip. I may try it, though kept in my shirt pocket it wouldn't be near as much fun when it vibrates . . . :)

So, what this says it what should have been known all along: movies do things differently from books. Just because they do things differently doesn't mean they can't, in some instances, be judged on their fidelity to the original source. Whether it makes a difference how much a movie strayed from a book will matter on a case by case basis. If A kills B in the book (regardless of chapters' worth of motivations given by the author) and a director has C kill B instead, a viewer has every right to complain about the director's choice and mention the unfaithfulness to the original in his critique, especially if he thinks A killing B made more sense and was at the core of the story or at least moved the story along better. On the other hand, some may see it as a wise choice and not make a big deal about it. If done rebelliously and carried through in a way that works, it could be a genius move on the part of the director. Many possibilities. There are certain books, many perhaps, that have become part of the cultural vernacular. If a director takes a whole lot of liberty with the plot or themes or gestalt of such a book, it makes perfect sense that it would bother some people. Duchamp painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa in part because he knew it would disturb people. He was making a rebellious statement about the public's affinity for certain traditional, historical works of art and ways of seeing art. His statement only worked because of the known affinity the general public has for beloved works of art. Though Duchamp's rebellious gesture made an important statement and, in some ways, changed how we think about art, people still maintain affinities for a lot of art that's gotten into the collective consciousness. I give a movie director credit if he tries to flout that affinity and comes up with an adaptation that rebels against the original while presenting something that has its own worth. But, we're generally not speaking of that when we talk about faithless adaptations. We're generally just talking about failures, because a director simply couldn't capture the essence of what the original presented.

Here's the text of your original post on the subject. It doesn't read as if you're simply relating your personal experience with digital files over many years. And that's why I disagreed with you. I wasn't questioning that you've had what experiences you've had. I was questioning the categorical statements you made about the difference between negatives and digital data. Your descriptions were pretty colorful and illustrative and didn't for one minute seem to limit themselves just to how you experience them. As a matter of fact, the only personal pronoun you used in that initial post comes in the very last sentence which is the only few words that are about your personal experience. You began with a bunch of clear, theoretical statements which you never suggested was just about your own experience, but seemed to apply much more broadly, at least by the way you presented them. Perhaps you will consider the difference between saying "A photo album, or shoe box full of negatives are hard to lose, and take real purpose to dispose" and "I've never lost a photo album or shoe box full of negatives . . ." Please don't blame me for reading what YOU wrote and don't blame digital into for a user's inability to effectively manage it.

You make your professional living on computers and haven’t figured out a way to organize your photos so they don’t turn to dust. OK. Good to know. Thanks for the information. I bet a lot of people who have similar complaints about keeping track of their digital photos have shoeboxes full of snapshots lying around an attack somewhere as well, in disarray. That just means they haven’t bOthered to organize them. It doesn’t mean dealing with snapshot prints is an insurmountable task. If they had to find a graduation photo from 10 years ago, they likely wouldn’t be able to find it unless they’d taken the time to put it in a photo album. If they had hundreds of photo albums from over the years, they’d have had to label or identify them and store them all in some reasonable way or they’d have a whole lot of trouble finding the picture. The so-called ethereal and intangible nature of digital info seems much more a problem for those who weren’t born into the digital age. Ethereal and intangible though it may seem, it’s data. It can be organized and managed.

Michael, this is almost a perfect response with which to make the point. First off, I wasn’t applying the book/movie post directly to photography. Movies and the books they’re based on had been brought up by someone else so I was commenting on that relationship specifically. But, in the broader sense, there’s a lesson here. When “translating” from one medium to another, one is not necessarily looking for a verbatim or word-for-word translation but rather for a gestalt type of re-interpretation! One doesn’t write a book when making a movie but one, with imagination and skill, can ADAPT themes and other qualities of a work. As you note, the relationship of book to movie is different from that of painting to photo. But, I think you might be able to take this idea of non-verbatim translation, or adaptation, and “translate” that to the painting/photo world. Despite the fact that the book/movie world is generally more narrative than the the painting/photo world, the principles of finding essential as opposed to verbatim elements to adapt or reinterpret is the real point, as opposed to the specific difference between a narrative and less narrative art form. Translating from one medium to another requires an ability to grasp the emotional, visual, metaphorical, and imaginative qualities in addition to whatever literal or narrative content there may be. Also, I didn’t take the OP’s question to be limited to direct translation from a painting to a photo, like taking The Starry Night and making a photo of it. He seemed to be including more generically making some photos that look like paintings in general rather than looking like a specific painting.

True. But not all photos are meant to act like greeting cards. Thankfully. A GOOD street photo with a 2015 Buick in the background won’t cause a nostalgic emotional response but will cause some other significant response in an open viewer. As a matter of fact, an exercise worth trying is creating the mood of nostalgia in a photo without photographing something old or from childhood. It can be done. There’s a difference between a good street photo and a snapshot taken on the street that happens to have a Buick in it. Some snapshots are very good. Most are tossaways. In any case, the point was not to put down nostalgia. The point was to put down nostalgia when it creates an atmosphere, as expressed by Meyerowitz, where it prevents him from engaging in the present or preoccupies one enough to continually distract them from what’s happening today or induces one to spend a lot of time comparing yesterday to today.

I’ve made a few canvas prints with photos that seemed to lend themselves to that. I plan to have a few select canvas prints in my next photo exhibit. I have several painter friends and none of them felt insulted when they saw these prints. I’ve seen gallery shows where canvas prints were used. Some were done tastefully. Others came across as gimmicky. Case by case basis and context and choice of image makes all the difference. I’ve seen better work than what Canvas Pop produces, but it’s a reasonable alternative if cost is an issue. A lot of painters photograph their work to display on the Internet. Not totally analogous to printing a photo on canvas, which is more of a finished product, I know, but if a photographer were to feel insulted that his precious medium had been abused by an interloper, I’d say the photographer had a wee bit too much time on his hands.

I think your chosen digital lifestyle is what dooms you, not digital technology per se. And I hope you and your wife realize how eccentric your computer habits are. Also, I wasn’t suggesting naming every photo you take. I was suggesting naming the important ones, maybe just the ones you print or share with people or have meaning special enough that you might want to find them at a future date. If you have 20,000 negatives completely unorganized, you’d be in no better shape than your practices with 20,000 digital files. You’re letting the dust pile up, never really taking out a dust rag or vacuum cleaner and then bemoaning the fact that things are a mess. Your digital behavior over the years is comparable to having several homes, several divorces under your belt, moving back and forth across country a few times, tossing your stuff into cheap cartons that won’t adequately withstand the move, and living through a few hurricanes and earthquakes. Your negatives, in a comparable analog life to the digital life you seem to live, would have long been destroyed or misplaced as well. If you have 20,000 negatives or prints and can find what you’re looking for with relative ease, it’s because you’ve set up a system and organized them in much better fashion than whatever it is you’ve made of your collection of digital files. How many shoeboxes need you look through if they’re not labeled and organized to find 1 in 20,000 photos? Your comparison simply doesn’t hold water. Just sayin’ . . .

Making a movie that's faithful to the book is not trying to imitate another medium. It's using a different medium in its own way to deliver a similar narrative. What a movie director does is not pretend he's filming a book. He translates from one medium to another, often taking liberty along the way. The Godfather is a great example of an awesome movie director making a movie that's as good as and also faithful to the original book. The movie does not try to do all the things the book does. It can't and no director thinks it can. The movie captures the essence of the book in film. Jaws, IMO, is a better movie than it was a book. Many great directors intend their movies to be faithful to the books on which they're based. Some take a lot more leeway and just use the book as a jumping off point and for the basic idea of plot, if even that. Actually, it often is not. Many director's see themselves as collaborating with the writer of the original book. Many times, the original writer will be hired to write the screenplay and will play an important role on the set of the movie. Directors work with these authors very closely quite often. Directors, more than many other more singular artists, know they can't go it alone. They most often require huge production crews, writers, lighting people, actors, and routinely rely on already existing source material. It's usually NOT the director's own artistic creation.

Sounds like you need a much better digital naming and filing system. A digital picture is like trying to keep track of a dust particle only if one hasn't kept up with technology and doesn't understand how digital storage works and how relatively easily it can be managed. If I had taken Sally's graduation picture, I'd title the file something along the lines of . . . oh, I don't know . . . let's try, "Sally's Graduation Picture." If someone leaves an important picture titled DSCN_355534.NEF and leaves it loosely floating around a hard drive like a speck of dust instead of in a folder labeled in some thematically relevant way, I don't think they should blame digital media for their own blatant negligence.

It’s worth noting that a photographer can act like a painter in all phases of working but especially in post processing, bringing out certain elements and textures, adjusting lighting, emphasizing perspective and relationships within the frame, nuancing highlights and shadows, without emulating or imitating the look of a painting. Many photos have been given the attention of a painter’s canvas in post processing that the viewer will never even realize was done.

Photographers aren't the only ones who draw from, are influenced by, pay homage to, imitate, and learn from other mediums. Photorealists were painters who imitated the detail and realism of photos, often working from photos as their guides. Just as in photography, Modernism, the "straight" approach to photography, grew out of and was a response to the painterly Pictorialist style, in painting, Photorealism grew out of and was a response to the more spontaneous and subjective Abstract Expressionism. Pendulum swinging back and forth . . .

Da Vinci had it easy, though. At least he didn't have to worry if he'd catch any of the Apostles with their eyes closed! ;)

I use my iPhone for convenience and it can be inconspicuous, though I carry it in my pants pocket because it’s too likely it could fall out of my shirt pocket. Though I’ve tried and like it both ways, lately I’m liking more and more being conspicuous on the street, fine if my bigger dslr draws attention to itself. If I’m out taking street photos, there’s something cool about being up front about it. It can help create an interesting street dynamic. Often, strangers will purposely engage with me because of the camera or with the camera itself in ways that I think can connect with viewers directly and genuinely.

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” —Pablo P.

True that differing responses to photos can be assessed differently. In this case, I think both our responses to Adams’s work are valid and can and have been reasonably justified. The subject, IMO, makes for a good discussion about photography . . . and its expression, communication, and documenting of both the political and the personal.