leo_papandreou1

S E L E C T I O N

The structure of photography (selection vs synthesis) gives rise to important creative issues. Here's GB Shaw as quoted in The Photographer's Eye. "There is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse from Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good — it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet."

The biggest impediment to your understanding is your churlishness.

Not a picture scientist, i get it.

You and steve seem determined to discuss things I haven't broached except by bundling into the phrase "creative issues". Why aren't you also telling me there's more to painting than just pushing pigment around a canvas? Do you agree that when I press the clicky thing on top of my camera I get a photograph? If so, do you agree this represents the invention of a radically different picture-making process? Well then what specifically, essentially, makes it radically different? The underlying structure of photography is important. If you don't investigate it you'll be limited to making vague noises about "vision and vocabulary" rather than photographically literate issues that arise , say, once I, Joe Average, not King of Canada or otherwise Very Important Person, acquire the wherewithal to suspend pictures of my ancestors on the wall.

"... that's a selection ..." I agree. I don't want to argue at what point a pile of dirt turns into a mountain, I mean even painters select what to paint, but this: Is it pointless though? Do you sometimes look at a photograph and call it a painting? Every art form has its own set of creative issues that arise from its structure. I'm no scientist, just an ordinary Joe who can (hint) successfully operate a shutter, mission accomplished.

All you're doing in a darkroom is selectively adjusting the exposure of a negative on a substrate such as paper. Printing. It's harder than it sounds, practically an art form unto itself, but still, it's a removal of information not an addition. Yes, experimental/mixed media techniques that synthesize new information on a negative are a thing photographers can play with, but I wouldn't call it an essential feature or tradition.

Ah, one of my finer moments.

"Mechanical thinking" etc -- what are you even talking about?

So by "nothing wrong with that" I did not mean to imply "less valid". The taking vs making distinction is pretty basic, though, the reason photographs look the way they do is because photography is a mechanical picture-making process based on selection rather than synthesis. You select what's in the frame. You select what's in focus. You select the duration in which the picture is made. You select the lighting. 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. That's why almost all photographs are sh*t. It's hard to take a good picture. It's called printing.

Make sure you get the right pop-up diopter strength, that camera is harder to fine focus than its bright screen would suggest.

JPEG 2000 has arbitrary bit depth and can do lossless compression. It's a better tiff. If you absolutely need RAW in post processing you might be making pictures rather than taking them. Nothing wrong with that but it does take your picture-making process further into the synthetic realm occupied by traditional visual arts such as painting -- different pictorial standards, creative issues, challenges etc. Different art forms. Also raises some social issues, see Reuters, which accepts only in-camera jpeg submissions (traditional dark room effects (cropping, curves) are still permitted).

I just mean the epistemic community of people (real or imagined) whose approval you value. Doesn't everyone seek validation? Would you continue to post photos here if we politely ignored them and praised everyone else's MaSEStiC lAnDSapEs (not far from the car)? No you'd tell yourself stuff our mountains and find a more simpatico site. Most of us are too conventional to be driven off an internet site but you understand, there's no universal audience, even Sally Mann has a multitude of haters today, and in the future she's going to appear regularly in top 10 videos.

I'm sure whatever you have in mind is a legitimate approach, but have you considered why an art school graduate (Sweet) might try his own? Pointing the camera at something will never produce a Venus or Sistine Chapel. Or a Popeye. Overcompensating with "picturesque" subjects, "rules" of composition, dramatic lighting, angles and other affects --- nice try, it's still just a photo, nowadays to be sucked into a black hole of social media and forgotten in seconds. The artist's struggle in photography has always been how to obtain meaningful, authorial results from a mindless mechanical process: "Nice picture, but why should I give a sh*t?" Does anyone care about the perfect and well-paid photos of models in Walmart circulars? No, they'd rather look at a blurry picture of girl-with-tree-growing-out-her-head.jpg because her smile is warm and she doesn't have camera face. (Of course, some do care, the audience for that kind of photograph. Everyone photographs for their intended audience, even Sweet.)

They are the most honest visual clues of other people's existence. No photographer with a bag full of lenses and a head full of strobist and bryan peterson can fake out a mom and her instamatic.

It's about time! Finally we'll be able to take a good photo.

For interviews, A Small Voice is excellent, also Magic Hour, which is newer but coming along nicely. The Candid Frame appears regularly on top 10 lists, so of course it's a middlebrow snorefest, but what do I know. It has its moments.

My rule I just made up: don't bet against computers at anything that admits child prodigies. Things like sociology seem safe (LOL @ a 5 y.o. Karl Marx).

I do not mean to minimize the accomplishments of AI in art. As my inadequate outline above should suggest they clearly derive from a ton of expert work. Not that I feel inadequate or anything, "f8 and be there" is hard enough, the most important thing remains finding something to say and a concept with which to say it.

Also, it's not true the human has no idea what the computer will come up with. The AI in the article that started this thread, for example, produces landscape photo thingies. There may be some surprising details (I dunno, a donut lake?) but so what, digital paint flowing over the digital page, the overall look will be modulated by the data and algorithm. Human beings are more surprising, it's just that we expect them to be.

Here's how a computer makes art using an AI. Human finds something to say and a concept with which to say it. Human identifies a promising source of non-uniform data. Human gathers data, transforms and encodes it. Human writes an algorithm to process data. Human visually interprets result (1s and 0s). Human evaluates result for artistic merit. Human tweaks some parameters and repeats. Here's what the computer is inspired to express at every stage in this process: heat.

You know what else can exceed a human's intents and computational limits? The way watercolor flows on a piece of paper. Yes we do, and there is no plausible sense in which a combinatorial explosion of outputs means that we don't.

The power of modern hardware to (enable humans to) fit mathematical functions onto enormous quantities of data (the only real progress AI has made since its inception), while useful and consequential, is hardly the computer we know "evolving" into something it fundamentally isn't or a singularity struggling to be born. Machines remain exactly as smart as they've always been and dumber than every living thing. Seriously, guys, to date and into the foreseeable future, "artificial" intelligence is leveraged human intelligence, and computer art is human beings making art using a computer. Even if you believe in a fantastic remote future for machines, it does not follow a quasi-thing like 'art' will intersect ontologically with a quasi-thing like 'intelligence' inside a literally alien being of exotic materials, and then in such a way that a squabbling ape barely evolved from its food would (if it could) recognize either in it.

About as often as getting shot accidentally or on purpose. Middle-aged men especially should be realistic about all the cool ways parks have killed people. Nothing says "not today, Nature" better than preparing at the gym out of season instead of the shooting range.

Your best protection against being mistaken for a deep woods narc is to pretend you're a middle-aged man laden with gear stumbling around in the woods.