ray robertson

Don E , Mar 14, 2007; 07:46 p.m.

This one, the subject: "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.", attributed to Aristotle

 

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Ah! Did Aristotle actually write that? I see.

 

It's certainly the sort of thing he could have written. It reminds me of another famous saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words", attributed to Confucious, but probably just made up by someone.

(An American advertising copy writer, perhaps?)

 

There's also another famous ancient Greek anecdote that is used quite often to demonstrate a point. It relates to counting teeth in a horse's mouth. The story seems to take many variations and I'm not at all sure which is correct, if indeed any are.

"...the only attribution I can offer for the quotation is that it appeared in the 3/13/07 edition of Investors Business Daily. I found reference to it on several sites..."

 

Don,

Which quotation are you referring to? There are a few in this thread.

Lee Ricks writes:

 

"Creative? No. Meaningful? Different question entirely. Maybe not. Meaningful seems to me to suppose that the photograph has special meaning for the photographer."

 

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Perhaps not entirely different, but I get your point. If my most successful photograph, from the sales point of view, is a cliche which simply panders to a fairly low level of public taste, then I could claim such a photo has great meaning because it brings home the bacon, although I might actually despise the photo as being tawdry; might even be slightly ashamed I could produce such stuff.

 

I still think there is a concept here in the original question that has been missed, but perhaps I'm getting this impression because I've missed the point that perhaps 'working' photographers simply don't take photographs for the sake of it. They either get paid to take photos or they are relaxing with a beer, whatever. So perhaps there's really no comparison to be made between personal creative work and paid creative work for a client.

"Perhaps it depends on just how much control the client insists upon having."

 

Lucs Bennett writes:

 

"and..... the photographer, their psychology, the context, the clients personality (level of control aside), the weather that day, what they ate for breakfast, the alignment of the stars blah blah blah.

then WHO is judging whether or not the commercial work has negatively impacted the personal work. is the photographer? their gallery rep? some self appointed "top name pro" with a hilariously outsized ego on an internet forum?"

 

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It should be clear from the original question posed in this thread that the only judge here is the photographer. All these other factors you refer to, eg. weather, what they ate for breakfast etc. is totally beside the point. I believe the question being asked here is, to paraphrase, " Do photographers feel (think) that their best work, their most creative and meaningful work, is done outside of the commercial pressures of working for a client's needs and to a client's schedule?"

"I'll throw the hand grenade in -- Great art is what great artists produce when they need the cash! Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. Dickens and his novels. Dostoevsky and his novels. (I'm being a bit facetious, but truly am interested in how far this reflects some truth....)"

 

Interesting! But we can't test this theory. We can't reconstruct history and find out what Dostoevsky would have written had he inherited early in his career a large sum of money.

 

As regards the Sistine Chapel, clearly it couldn't have been painted without the order/invitation of Pope Sixtus 4, and without doing some extensive research I don't know to what extent the work was compromised, but there certainly seems to have been some conflict between Pope and Michelangelo. If Michelangelo had had his unfettered way, would the work have been even more marvelous?

 

I'm reminded of the Sydney Opera House (I'm Australian). There was a conflict there between architect and client. It's a great building on the outside, but the interior is mundane because the architect was sacked before completion.

David Schwartz writes; "By the way, I see no comment about Shakespeare. Was he a high class hack? (He almost certainly would have agreed!)"

 

I prefer the Christopher Marlowe theory. The so-called Shakespearean plays were written in Italy. Shakespeare produced the plays and added a bit of local humour here and there. But Marlowe, who was an atheist by the way, faked an assasination to free himself from religious persecution and spent the rest of his life in Italy writing 'Shakespearean' plays.

 

The question raised here cuts across all artistic and scientific endeavour. Are we compromised by working for a client? Perhaps it depends on just how much control the client insists upon having. Science or art directed towards paying the bills seems compromised in some way to me. It might be good, but perhaps not of the finest ilk.

Archiving can be expensive. I would recommend to anyone who is at all concerned about preserving his/her photographic output for posterity, to start digitising the negatives now. Flatbed scanners of reasonable quality that handle up to 8x10" negatives are now very affordable.

 

In a few years time, Blu-ray discs that hold up to 20GB of data will be as cheap as current writable DVD discs. Lossles compression of photographic digital data can cut storage to 1/3rd. 10,000 MF negatives scanned at 4000 dpi could probably easily fit on 50 or so Blu-ray discs which in turn would take up less physical space than your ashes after you've been cremated. That's really not much of a burden on your descendants.

 

What could be a burden are boxes of physical negatives slowly deteriorating. That's a burden which I am now confronting myself, having inherited several thousand slides and negatives taken by my now deceased father, the earliest of which go back to around 1920, shots of his school mates taken with his first camera.

..."The point of the above is that all these so called educated critics are often wide of the mark in their pronouncements if the effort has "original" thought that doesn't comply with their preconceived notions of what is and isn't.""...

 

Thomas,

 

That's a general point that applies to all of us without exception. The human species has an enormous talent for making mistakes. In that regard it makes little difference who we are. We are all destined to make mistakes. Some are trivial, like cutting your finger; some more serious like getting caught driving under the influence, making a wrong career move, marrying the wrong person etc, and some are really serious depending on the responsibility of a person's position in society. I heard a rumour the other day that George Bush had made one or two serious mistakes. Just rumours though, I'm sure.

 

Art critics are certainly not immune from making mistakes in assessing a work. One could analyse why they might have had such a lapse of judgement in hind sight, but without their efforts in pointing out to the general public the value of certain works, such works might often be forgotten. My gut feeling is that appreciation of the works of Van Gogh, for example, are not intuitively accessible to the public at large. Without someone 'championing' such works later on, they'd be lost forever.

 

I'm leaving today on a photographic trip for a few weeks so will have to continue this later. It's an interesting subject.

.."And exactly who decides who's informed and who's uninformed?"...

 

Well, not you it would seem, HP. It makes little difference to you whether or not a person is informed or not. His opinion is of equal value to anyone elses. But generally it's educational institutions of various types, a concensus of opinion amongst peers and a reputation and demonstration through works and writings etc.

.."When customer #1 and #2 are at the front counter and one leaves; often one will mention the other chaps work is total crap; or really not art. This is very funny."..

 

And these people aren't even critics. Talk about being driven by envy and malice! Real critics are usually much more eloquent.

..."and often those judging, don't even possess a soul of their own, let alone, the creative capacity to make art that bears their own spirit. a critic is usually driven by envy, first, and a mongering for power, second. somehow, they know they hold your very heart in their hands. and for some of them, it elevates them to make you feel just a bit inadequate."...

 

Maybe their critique is their creative work of art and they are sometimes driven by a 'spirit' of envy and power. There's a lot to be said for the Nietzschean view that a Will to Power is at the basis of all human motivation.

.."we are perceivers. perception is a filter."..

 

Lost,

 

That may well be true, or at least a valid way of expressing it. But I'm still having trouble finding any logic in your argument. Are you implying that all filters are equal?

..."When someone brings before one of the so called experts a piece of "artwork" and it's declared to be "valid" and of the highest order, then it's been ordained."...

 

Quite so, and therefore it's quite in order and even necessary to ctiticise the critics, but such criticism has little value if the person making the criticism is uninformed on the subject. Anyone who is not brain dead, mentally retarded or completely dumb can express a like, a dislike or an indifference in a few short words. "What do you think of this?" "Huh! Don't know and don't care." Is that an opinion equal to any other?

 

The phenomenon of so-called abstract paintings from elephants and chimps sometimes fooling the so-called art critics is an interesting one. It says a lot about the current state of abstract painting and this deserves a discussion in its own right. There are lots of people who still think Picasso was a complete fraud but they tend to be people who have spent little time studying his works; people who never get beyond an initial averse reaction like the school boy who finds Shakespeare boring and pointless.

If that's what you truly think, then your understanding of the term 'fact' is different from mine and any further discussion would be pointless without defining precisely and agreeing upon a meaning of the word 'fact' as used in this context.

Lost,

 

I find your reasoning deeply flawed. Joke aside, there's no direct connection between having an a-hole and having an opinion. Oviously there's a very indirect connect. We can't have an opinion if we're 'dead' for example, which you would no doubt soon be if you didn't have an a-hole.

 

Like-wise, you can be brain-dead, or in a coma; still have an a-hole but no opinion on anything. What you are attempting to do is denigrate the intelligence of critics and the value of opinions in general and imply that any opinion on any subject is of equal value to any another opinion. This is clearly absurd.

..."opinions are like a-holes; everyone has one - hehehehehehe.""..

 

Well, that's simply not true. There are lots of matters on which people have no opinion. What's your opinion of early period 13th century Persian pottery?

 

It's difficult to have an opinion on something you have no knowledge of, and your opinion on something you simply don't understand is an uninformed opinion of little value.

..."so who needs an outside critic when we can simply be that filter ourselves?"....

 

Lost,

 

Outside critics, hopefully, have a wealth of training, education and observation, as well as a natural analytical capacity. That's their job. When criticising a work, they can draw upon a vast knowledge of the subject at hand and draw upon references to myriad other works.

 

You are at perfect liberty to disagree and express your own opinion, and in fact most of us do just that.

 

For the rest of us, it then becomes a matter of whose opinion we should pay more attention to. Most of us tend to be a bit like sheep. If a well-known critic raves over a Jackson Pollack work (which we privately think is crap), then whose opinion triumphs?

I see you really are lost. We have cultural standards and certain individuals called 'critics' and other individuals who work for publishing houses, make decisions as to the 'worth' of a publication or potential publication.

 

In the final analysis, anyone can be a critic and everyone has the right to express an opinion, in a free democracy.

 

The act of expressing an opinion can be considered in itself as a form of art, and others may wish to criticise the critic. And so it goes on.

.."Unfortunately, I can't really comment on the technologies and physical properties/relationships of photographic equipment, much as I would like to find such things 'easy' to understand. I still grapple with the main principles of physics themselves, and probably always will.""...

 

Shawn,

It seems we both read (or have read) similar books. I find the writings of John Gribbin (Schrodinger's Kittens, for example) quite fascinating. Such books (the stories therein) really are fine examples of fact being stranger than fiction, but I find that it's always necessary to apply a bit of basic maths to keep things in perspective.

 

The complete predictability of a single photon may well be impossible and its behaviour very strange, but the greater the number of photons, the greater the predictability. It can therefore be misleading to apply principles that are very relevant at the sub-microscopic level to the macro level. It's the maths of the theories of probability that point to the irrelevancy of such principles on the large scale. There may never truly be 100% predictability, but 99.9% followed by a few nines is as good as certain for me (although I don't expect such accuracy from the weather forecasters).

 

Photonic noise in digital cameras is a good example of the increasing irrelevancy of that type of noise as the numbers of photons increase, whilst still remaining in the microscopic world.

 

The predictability of 16 photons impinging upon a single photodetector is not good. There's a probable error of 25%, given by the square root of 16. However, the predictability of a million photons impinging on a single, larger photodetector is much, much better. Square root of million is a thousand which represents an error of just 0.1% which is vastly better and we're still at the microscopic level.

 

It's theoretically possible for an object which normally falls to the ground when dropped, to not fall to the ground (without being influenced by sudden updrafts or magnets and other obvious explanations). But the probability of such an event occurring is so remote, you would be unlikely to witness it if you lived for 10 billion years.

 

When we gaze at the night sky, it's true that we are looking at the past. The light from many of those stars has taken several years to reach us, perhaps hundreds of years in the case of some of the faint ones, and even longer for some if we use a telescope.

 

However, as you've already implied, such delays are quite irrelevant in every day, terrestrial interaction of sentient beings. You are drawing a long bow to suggest that such theories conflict with advice like 'live in the present' because, if we want to be very precise, the present doesn't exist or is not knowable.

 

It's true that often in Australia when I'm watching a satellite live broadcast of an interview of someone in America, there's a delay of 2 or 3 seconds before the interviewee hears the question, but that's not due to the time it takes light to travel. The speed of light is such that a signal could encircle the earth in about 1/7th of a second. The delay is due to various switching devices.

 

However fancuful and strange the true nature of reality may be, let's not stray too far from the practical implications and uses.

This is such an interesting topic I'd like to continue, if that's OK with the moderators, but I'll keep a connection with photography.

 

This indeterminancy, Shawn, which Eistein objected to, is of great concern to manufacturers of imaging devices (digital cameras). As we know, noise is a major problem with digicams. The smaller the format and the smaller the photodetectors, the greater the noise, especially at high ISO's. Cameras that produce relatively low noise images at high ISO's, such as the Canon DSLRs, have a competitive advantage. The new Canon 5D has amazingly low noise at ISO 3200, helped greatly by its relatively large pixels.

 

Would it ever be possible to produce a small P&S camera with such low noise? Where are the limits resulting from the fundamental laws of Physics?

 

As I understand it, there's a phenomenon called 'photonic noise' or 'photon shot noise' which seems to present a barrier to lowering noise as insurmountable as the effects of diffraction on lens performance.

 

Essentially, for a given exposure and a constant light source, we can calculate how many photons will impinge upon a single photodetector on the camera's sensor, EXCEPT as a result of indeterminancy (photons misbehaving and arriving at different times) there will be an error equal to (on average) the square root of the number of photons. If exposure predicts there should be 16 photons impinging upon a particular photodetector, in practice 4 of them will in all probability represent noise. They might arrive too late or too early.

 

I think I can appreciate Einstein's concern with qantum theory. As I understand, his view of God was not the anthropomorphic God of Jewish tradition, but more like that of an ordering principle behind the world of the senses; an odering principle that we mortal humans could explore through disciplines such as Physics (including Photography, why not).

 

The notion that, at the most fundamental level his discipline of Physics could explore, there appeared to be a degree of chaos, an apparent lack of order that could only be dealt with in probabilistic terms, must have been disturbing.

Sorry! The background is so out of focus I couldn't recognise the image there. I assumed it was a reflection. It's impressive either way.

Oops! I think I've had too many glasses of wine. There's a flaw in my thought experiment. I can't communicate the point where I've stopped observing photons. Hhmm! You're probably right Ocean Physics, but it's an intriguing concept.

Ocean Physics,

 

Okay! I'll give you an example of instantaneous communication. Of course I'm talking about photon entanglement where a pair of photons can be produced in such a way that each photon has an opposite polarisation.

 

Let's say I'm at the other end of the universe (okay! lets be practical, say I'm one light year away).

 

I have a large number of containers holding a single photon, each one of a pair. I can label the boxes in order 1,2,3,4. etc. (they'll be very small boxes and I'l have millions of them). The folks back home have the same number of boxes each identically labelled and each containing the other twin.

 

I have no idea of the polarity of a particular photon but I know after I've observed it, its twin a light year away is going to have its opposite polarisation.

 

Before I leave earth on my epic voyage, I make a pact that in one years' time I'll start collapsing the individual photons (by obseving their polarity) starting from box '1'.

 

The agreement is a code consisting of, 3 consecutive identical polarities followed by 2 consecutive non-identical followed by 5 consecutive identical (whatever) indicates 'I'm all right'. I just have to continue observing each photon in each box until I get that pattern. Then I stop.

 

I've just communicated the fact I'm all right, virtually instantaneously.

Ellis,

That a very eye-catching front-page image on your website, a hand-held sphere reflecting an inverted skyline.

 

Of course, the term 'what is art?' has now been debased beyond all recognition. I think the dictionary definitions could be amended along the lines, "Art is what anyone thinks is art. It's purely a state of mind devoid of all objectivity."

Of course, the correct answer is 'neither wave nor particle', but something else we don't have a word for because it's true nature is beyond our experience and comprehension.

 

We understand by analogy and metaphor, by cause and effect.

 

Quantum weirdness disturbed Einstein, not only because of the apparent randomness of events at the sub-atomic level, but also because one of his axioms (nothing is faster than the speed of light) appeared to be challenged.

 

Quantum weirdness and non-locality make it theoretically possible to have instant communication across light years of space.

 

I hope I live long enough to have a quantum computer on my desk.