leo_papandreou1

Cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner. Worked on Fritz Lang's M and Metropolis. Check out the weird angles in M @ the IMDB photos link. The Third Man Persona Raging Bull ... There's so many.

They're better at narrative, and have a rich tradition of narrative, unlike photography, because they can depict the past, present and future on the same canvas. The photograph shows a moment in the real world. Its purpose under "SCREAMING HEADLINE" is to make the headline real (whether it's true or not), not explain what happened (because it can't!) Photographs index the world: they're taken, not made. That is their currency and claim to making things real. (Also why a straight portrait of Miss Wilkins fails as Juliet, who's an idea, an icon, and in particular not an index of flesh and blood Miss Wilkins in costume.) Yes I know about montages etc, they're ugly and incoherent as photographs, forfeit indexicality, and to the first approximation no one does them. Wouldn't you rather just make a movie instead? I know I'd rather look at one.

I'd rather learn why people visit portrait studios. What's that all about?

*shrug* back in the days of photo story magazines editors had to caption everything because photos don't explain (cf Sontag quote above.).

Structure arises from selection You can only select facts (details of the world) and discrete time intervals. A selection may lead the viewer's imagination outside the rectangular frame (another structural element), as inoneeye points out, but its edges and the passage of time eliminate everything but the selected facts. 1000 words, but which ones? If you're interested in this topic I recommend the terrific Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography), by the director Errol Morris.

It isn't limited to a single photo. I think single-image masterpieces are overrated and anyway history. Over a billion photos are posted daily. A few will be as good as any Bresson. it's just statistics. Sequences are the future, in photobooks. They can tell a story. They are more authorial.

"Photographs can be the most powerful storytellers: 1 picture = 1000 words, as is often said." This is a cliche (the element of truth is that photographs can suggest a narrative), you won't find it in a formal art history or theory text. Compare the featured works in that article with something like this. I'm not boxing photography in, I'm reminding you it has a structure, if you care, because people nowadays are used to digital, which has infinite degrees of freedom (can simulate anything).

I take a small solace in the fact I, at least, can still recognize people in their photos.

Narrative has a specific meaning in the visual arts. You can view art without learning this "baggage", make vague noises about snapshots that "tell a story" even, but you won't fully understand what you're looking at. There's a dearth of narrative in photography. That's a fact. Henry Robinson and Oscar Rejlander in the 19th century, when photographers were trading unsuccessfully in the prestige of painting, then a whole lot of nothing, and now today maybe someone like Crewdsen, whose work is "cinematic". That's about it.

I shall call it Policewoman Looking for Antifa Thug Who Stole Her Uniform.

me: Painting is better than single photographs at narrative because it doesn't have shutter speeds Fred: Here's a 2-sequence single photograph i took using a high-speed strobe of a boy and his basketball. Fred: It's the story of David dunking on Goliath in the Land of Pitch Black. Fred: Here's another I took using bulb mode. Perhaps you recognize the story? Fred: It's Juliet turning into a ghost after stabbing herself with Romeo's dagger. me: He must have really loved her. Fred: Not necessarily. Maybe he loved dying. I knew someone like that once. me: Well -- Fred: I disagree! Do you like my flower? Bees can't recognize it.

It would be historical, not narrative. Narrative = story unfolding over time (vs a discrete moment in time.)

Paintings aren't restricted temporally. The past synthesizes on the canvas as easily as the present.

A sequence is legit, but single photographs can't tell a story, in the narrative art sense of unfolding over time. They can suggest it, sure.

Sure, this happens when I look at myself in pictures. It doesn't happen when I look at a picture of a flower, say, or a toy truck. Those look right. Weird. People see with their brain.

"The ‘reality’ of the world is not in its images, but in its functions. Functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time." (Sontag in On Photography). This is why painting is so much better at narrative than photography, which records only discrete moments. I mean Miss Wilkins might be a homicidal maniac in reality.

No but you get a photograph of her that's true to her likeness, of course you do, too true by Shaw's light. It's not a hologram, but it's not a picture of an articulating artist's dummy, either.

An image was created, not necessarily the one I wanted. Wanted Juliet, got Miss Wilkins. What can you do -- selection: facile, minimal, useless. Inconsequential.

So by synthesis I mean turning nothing (a blank film, sensor, canvas, cave wall etc) into something (an image.) The moment of synthesis, in photography, occurs when you press the shutter. Nothing happens before then. Unless you're a wizard you have no agency in that part of the process. By selection, in photography, I mean the creative (or not) choices you make before you press the shutter. You can burn as many or as few calories as you like in that task, I'm not counting them. If you disagree with these common-sense (I think) meanings, then sure enough my argument is stupid.

That's nice.

Until the painter actually starts, you know, painting. The original claim was that selection is the basis for photography. ("Well, duh", I tell myself before pressing "Post Reply", "very deep, Leo.") I didn't think the replies were very responsive. I could have cut and pasted them into a discussion about cave wall painting. You don't have to believe me when I say selection is the basis for photography. You can just observe yourself in the act instead. Have a nice sit to think about what you want to say. Channel your delicate artistic tempers. Do the vision thing. Now look through the viewfinder. Chimp. Reposition yourself. Twist a dial. Change the lens. Satisfied? Press the shutter. What happened? Did you synthesize something on a blank sensor? No, you selected something and pressed the shutter (because if you don't press the shutter, then you're just looking.) Let's take a look. The good news is it's unmistakably a photograph, just as I suspected. The bad news is, it's no good :-( Ah, well, nevertheless. Fact is you'll take thousands of bad photos for every good one. The world is an uncooperative place, you want to select for this but it gives you that. I dunno, maybe learn to exploit what's there, or take up painting and synthesize what isn't.

This is selection. You are literally selecting what should appear in the frame. Don't forget to select for a smile. Say "say cheese."

I call even heavily-manipulated ("synthesized") digital images photographs because that's what everyone else calls them, maybe because they start out that way. Do they have the same pictorial standards, creative issues, challenges & etc? Nah, maybe they're not different enough to stop the world from turning but different things differ.

"The camera does the rest , and -- very important! -- it doesn't rely on a cultural archive of knowledge, skills and attitudes in order to accomplish this feat. It's just physics." You want to talk about what makes a good photograph. Vision, vocabulary, etc. I get it. It's just that, in photography, those things are integral to selection, not synthesis. Painting (e.g.) necessarily has a different vocabulary. When photography was invented regular-ass people who couldn't synthesize a circle ran rampant across the globe taking -- literally taking, *click* *click* --- pictures of literally everything. It was revolutionary! People wrote letters to the editor complaining about their manners.They didn't know sh*t about the vision and vocabulary of painting or whatever. They didn't need to. Some of their pictures were memorable enough and weird enough compared to paintings to survive and reproduce in the vision and vocabulary of our own photographs today, whether we realize it or not.

That distinguishes it from prior arts? Nothing. Specifically, essentially, nothing. Sorry for being so obvious and direct about it. I'm open to correction. Got anything?