The Shadow

Something else to consider is politics. Even if not strictly political, most documentary work has a political element, or even a social element than touches on politics. As wer’re treated like babies here, politics is mostly verboten and seems to stir up more controversy than the powers that be can handle. Good doc work might well lead to opinionated responses and lively discussion. These days, controversies and discussions on PN are mostly about what gear to use. Better to look at boobs in Nudes or pics of cameras and lenses throughout the gear threads than dare discuss anything of political or social relevance.

I think Street work, which tends to be (not exclusively, of course) more single shots and more spontaneous than most documentary work, is more conducive to the PN framework, which has become more of a fly-by social media scene and gives less ability than it used to for us to put together groups of photos on a theme, such as the PRESENTATIONS we used to be able to create. A lot of doc work is done in series and has accompanying text and it’s not easy if even possible to put something like that together on PN. Also, looking at documentary work often requires more time and thought and often requires reading that accompanying text and there’s a noticeable resistance among some active members to such explanatory text. This represents a shallow belief that photos should “stand on their own,” as expressed over and over again In many of the more banal PN discussions. Why would a documentary photographer bother?

Documentary photography will often be about and provide information. Documentary photos can show evidence of something. They may come in series and illustrate things being discussed in larger scale reports, articles, stories, and investigations. Street work, IMO, has a less rational or at least not as informational sense about it. As you suggest, there’s much overlap and few genre categories have hard and fast borders drawn around them that don’t have at least some give. “Accuracy,” mentioned by the Tate, deserves some nuance. A documentarian probably shouldn’t be going to a baseball game, shooting just the audience, and claiming they were watching football. That would be inaccurate to the point of being false. But documentarians can be and often are opinionated. They tend to offer a particular point of view. Some maintain more objectivity than others. But I don’t hold documentarians to the same standard of objectivity as journalists. Some of the best documentaries have come from a belief in and passion for a “cause.” I wouldn’t say that makes them inaccurate but it can make them less than objective, and I think that can be a vital aspect of documentary work, as long as viewers don’t confuse it with journalism. Any type of photo can document. Architectural photos, still lifes, landcape, nature ... so it stands to reason that there’s a strong documentary feature in a lot of street work. Many street photographers engage in studies of certain street themes or topics, which can lead to a more documentary feel. On the other hand, a lot of street work is looser and more spontaneous, which may make it feel less documentary. I’ve been documenting a farming community in New Hampshire for several years now. Here are three images ... And here’s a street photo ...

Yes. Time is moving faster than it used to.* Classic happens quickly these days. *No, Yogi Berra did not say this.

Can we please take a breath folks and stop with the straw men? I’m not claiming that machines are about to take the place of humans. I’m not suggesting that machines are going to be doing wartime triage or that you’re going to be expected to marry one, give birth to one, or pray to one. Got it? I’m simply stating that stats and algorithms used by machines to come up with results are similar to the fact that humans use stats all the time to make decisions and affect outcomes. I’m saying that machines are capable of making art and that driverless cars may very well prove to be safer than ones driven by humans for a variety of reasons. Will driverless cars have accidents? Most likely so. But there’s a good chance they’ll do better than humans. Don’t make this out to be more than it is. I’m not after your souls. You may remain blissfully prone to put your faith in them. I’m simply recognizing the power of humans to create machines that have certain capabilities that may well be different and in some cases beyond what humans themselves can achieve without the machines they’ve created. If this threatens your sense of humanity, I suggest your sense of humanity is weak. If your way of approaching this is to come up with hyperbole about wartime triage and machines curing all the world’s ills, it’s because you’re incapable of addressing the actual issue at hand.

Are you not aware that humans already make those kinds of judgments? Hospital ethics boards daily decide who lives and dies, who gets treatment and who doesn’t. Do you think they just use their “souls” to make these decisions? Do you think the souled humans making these sorts of decisions aren’t relying on stats and algorithms, considerations of age, etc.? The simplistic notion that AI will solve all the world’s problems is irrelevant to what I’m talking about, since I’m not suggesting that AI will solve all the world’s problems or won’t create some new ones. Problems don’t magically disappear with new discoveries. I’m suggesting that AI can make art and can make cars that can be programmed to drive more safely than a lot of humans. Those points aren’t addressed by bringing in extreme cases of lauding AI as some sort of perfect magic bullet for all the world’s ills.

Thanks for this. Funny how many people quote Shakespeare and think they’re making the opposite point. That’s because quoting is sometimes a matter of illiteracy. And lawyer jokes are cliché and tiresome. Without lawyers then sitting on the Supreme Court, Brown vs. The Board of Ed. would not have been decided, your parents may not have drawn up their will properly to protect their assets for you, and John Scopes likely would not have been adequately defended. Get over the base mockery.

Unless there’s a fire, flood, earthquake, or war! I think we have to face the fact that we live in an imperfect world and no means of backup is perfect, whether file or print. It does seem, however, that making prints does cover some vulnerabilities of files just as saved files would cover some vulnerabilities of prints. The best antidote to possible file corruption or print loss is to keep making new pictures and pay enough attention to preservation as seems reasonable while not succumbing to obsession.

Right. We agree on that. But you were putting down the jet for not caring whether people die or not. What I’m saying is that I don’t care that the driverless car can’t make the moral judgment whether saving lives is a good thing or not, I just care that it may be able to save lives. And it may be able to drive itself more safely than a souled human can. I don’t care whether a machine knew that it was making art any more than I care whether an ancient potter thought he was making art. Both can still have made art. Souls are important to people. I get that. But they’re not important when it comes to what entity can make our roads safer and what entity may make the next great work of art.

Perhaps a little more constructive reply to this ... When I first get a new camera (or when getting a new TV recently) I set aside a concentrated, quiet four hours to sit with the camera and manual (print or online) and learn the different functions and where they are. I may have to google a few things to better understand them. Then maybe once a week at first, then once a month, now once or twice a year, I will have to refer to the manual again to find something I forgot or refresh my memory on a particular function. Though menus can seem quite complicated, once you get the knack, they’re usually easier than they at first might seem. Also, there are way more functions than one person may be interested in using, just like post processing software such as photoshop. So a lot of the functions can be read about briefly and then ignored in favor of the few that you will likely use. On occasion, I go through some of the functions again to see if there’s something I might find useful that I wasn’t aware of or didn’t realize earlier.

One of the failings of beings with souls is that they sometimes tend to blame others for their own laziness or inadequacies.

Right back at ya. Driverless cars. They’re the wave of the future, soulless as they are. A day will come when they will likely be safer than cars driven by humans, especially if the oh-so-soulful humans continue texting and applying makeup while driving. Having a soul doesn’t mean having “good” intentions just because it means having intentions. There are plenty of unsafe and stupid souls driving cars. So, I don’t particularly care whether what’s driving the car is a soulless program/mechanism, as long as it’s safe. Whether it “intends” to prevent an accident or is programmed to do so doesn’t matter to me. I’ll take the safe route. Though a programmer may intend for the AI system to make art, at a certain point the programmer has no intention or even a guess as to what art the machine will make. The machine will be closer to the art than the programmer. The programmer programs the machine to go well beyond the programmer’s ability to specify the results of his own work. You’ve heard of Frankenstein, who built the sympathetic monster who humans simply couldn’t understand? There’s a Truth for you. And I’d posit that the monster had more good in it, though soulless, than a lot of the people with souls who went after it. Goodness is not merely a matter of intention. It can be found in results. Though it’s up to those with souls to judge something good or not, it’s not only the actions of those with souls that produce good. Nature produces good, which humans then recognize as good. Machines produce good as well, sometimes by being programmed to go beyond what a human is actually capable of, like driving emotionlessly or without the possibility of human distractions.

I’m glad I’ve been keeping all my RAW files, even ones that may not have seemed like “keepers” when I first saw them. I’ve gone back to many unprocessed files I passed by at the time only to appreciate and fulfill their potential years later. I’ve also gone back to files I was “happy” with the way I’d processed only to realize years later how much more or differently I could do now. Since my vision is always growing and changing, I want to maintain the original RAW files for future ways of seeing and processing. As to storage, I have 3 backups where I store photos, 2 at home and one at a remote location. I periodically replace the drives with new ones. That’s worked out well for me so far. Good luck!

Most places, I find, viewed from the road are not near as compelling as when I drive off the main road and more so when I get out of the car and walk. There’s a reason Google Earth view is called “virtual.” It’s discovering the out of the way places, all over the world, that generally provides a more rich and intimate feel of a place.

California gold country with its historic mining towns is rich with both things and atmosphere. Check the Grass Valley / Nevada City area in the Sacramento Valley. Don’t miss the Yuba River if you do it, especially this time of year toward the end of the rainy season when the river will be full. A waterfall or two at Yosemite, a couple of hours away, isn’t a bad idea either and there are plenty of cool towns near the park as well. A recommendation ... don’t limit yourself to what’s commonly called “ruin porn.” (I don’t necessarily love this term, just using it because it’s become part of the vernacular and conveys the genre.) And don’t just be on the lookout for “stuff” to photograph. Soak in the atmosphere of these places, think about ideas, lifestyles, history and consider portraying these less tangible aspects of life and how you would do that photographically by using atmosphere, lighting, perspective, terrain, and style on even supposedly “uninteresting” things. There’s always the possibility not just to search for “interesting” places and things but to find the interest in almost anything or make things look interesting in a photo that otherwise might get passed by.

I do ask myself, what’s really the difference if I post to an old or new thread yet one more photo with Red in it, or with a Sunset, or taken in Springtime, or just one more ever-so-cute Street Sign? The world will keep turning either way. Instead of thinking too much about Internet procedural minutiae, maybe we could put our minds to thinking up some challenging and inspiring themes, ones that may not rely so much on the portrayal of seasons, colors, and things.

Probably not fair to sarcasm to make it the only form of communication here worthy of question.

Appreciate your deep use of the emoticon. [Just found out that the emoji for sarcasm is an upside down smiley face. Too bad PN doesn’t have one. It would help those who don’t get it off the page.] Two quotes for you not to think too much about ... I guess, being originally from NY, I’m not unduly sensitive to or down on sarcasm. It’s just a form of communication, which most people both employ and understand.