ingres vs. manet - any thoughts?

[smokysun]

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i know i can't sum up five years of experimenting with digital, but you can scroll down the page at

 

wayne pease's Photo Galleries at pbase.com

 

and see the things i've tried. i'm writing at this moment after reading david hockney:

 

Amazon.com: Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition): Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters: Books: David Hockney

 

because he basically argues that a photographic (optical) way of seeing has been around since the beginning of the 15th century. and he contrasts it with what he calls 'eyeballing', drawing and painting without doing any tracing.

 

this seems to me very important for photographers. in

 

Amazon.com: Practical Composition in Photography: Books: BRUCK Axel

 

axel bruck makes a valuable distinction between line and color. line, which includes depth and perspective, he maintains can be taught. this is ingres and what i would say most photographers base their work on. ben lifson, recommended by sean reid, can show much about it.

 

RAWWorkflow.com - Make better pictures from your pixels™

 

brucke, on the other hand, says works based on patches of color - ie. manet, cezanne, et al - more difficult to learn though they obviously triumphed in terms of the market. (pop art, photo realism, of course, had their day).

 

now the reason i bring this up is viewfinders. the optical viewfinder has been championed because one can measure depth as well as outline. but i'm finding using an ev helps seeing in terms of patterns of color, eliminating too much linear information. has anyone else found this to be true?

 

yes, line and perspective can be measured, and our world dotes on what can be measured, the reason money important as an identification of value. numbers are extremely important to us. and most of the discussion on this forum has to do with it.

 

however i've always loved the mystery of what can't be seen this way: early vuillard and the whole of bonnard. imants said women love bonnard. perhaps it's because they have twice as many color detectors in their eyes? certainly color seems to play a stronger role in women's lives than it does in men's.

 

anyway, i would like to see more information on this particular way of seeing as opposed to sharpness and clarity. and some of the advantages, say, of the ev viewfinder in the d2, or even the lcd as in the d-lux 2.

 

wayne

 

ps. recently i've acquired 5 R lenses to use with the 20d. they definitely bring out line and depth. is this an unconscious leica adherence to b&w? both the d2 and d-lux 2 are great at it. and people have applauded the b&w of the m8.

 

maybe two examples would help, both taken while documenting an art class's projects. the mask portrait taken with the 20d and leica 28 2.8. the other with the fuji digicam f6000fd and it's electronic viewfinder.

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[sean_reid]

Hi Wayne,

 

One thing that I can say about LCD screens (as finders) is that they tend to emphasize general forms and the relationship of those forms to the edges. They're usually unable to describe small details seen at some distance. I find that information alone is not enough for me to work with. That LCD information in combination with direct sight (looking at the subject and keeping the LCD screen in peripheral vision) can be an interesting way of working and I know that, at least, myself, Ben Lifson and Mitch Alland often work that way with the D-Lux2/D-Lux 3.

 

An EVF, for me, is the worst of both worlds. It generalizes and yet cannot be used with peripheral vision.

 

Otherwise, my advice, as always, is to be wary of getting caught up in too much theory. I'm convinced that the path to heaven is not paved with art theory (at least not most of it). Did you ever get a chance, or desire, to go back to Langer?

 

Hope you're well.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[jrc]

I think line and color are different ways of seeing, and you can train yourself to either. Doesn't have to be color, either -- Rembrandt used chiaroscuro (essentially, patches of black and white) to describe objects without lines, and mostly without color. Sometimes I think people are genetically inclined to one or the other -- I feel that Picasso, for example, was a great draftsman and idea man, but didn't have much to say about color. Matisse, on the other hand, was all about color, but his draftsmanship was weak. Still, both great artists.

 

On the subject of using an EV. It might be helpful in the beginning, looking at the idea of color, but you're essentially using a trick or a crutch that will not be useful in the long run. You're subtracting information from what you see, rather than choosing it. I'm primarily a painter, and I have to say that it's interesting to take a photograph and run it through the changes in Photoshop and see what happens with the color. (One interesting thing to do is to take a very small patch of a photograph and blow it up until the pixels are dime-sized, and look at the abstracted display of color -- and then walk across the room, and recognized that you can again see the original photo...)

 

Her's a snapshot that I was originally itnersted for sturcture, but that ran though some changes with color:

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[sean_reid]

I think line and color are different ways of seeing, and you can train yourself to either. Doesn't have to be color, either -- Rembrandt used chiaroscuro (essentially, patches of black and white) to describe objects without lines, and mostly without color. Sometimes I think people are genetically inclined to one or the other -- I feel that Picasso, for example, was a great draftsman and idea man, but didn't have much to say about color. Matisse, on the other hand, was all about color, but his draftsmanship was weak. Still, both great artists.

 

On the subject of using an EV. It might be helpful in the beginning, looking at the idea of color, but you're essentially using a trick or a crutch that will not be useful in the long run. You're subtracting information from what you see, rather than choosing it. I'm primarily a painter, and I have to say that it's interesting to take a photograph and run it through the changes in Photoshop and see what happens with the color. (One interesting thing to do is to take a very small patch of a photograph and blow it up until the pixels are dime-sized, and look at the abstracted display of color -- and then walk across the room, and recognized that you can again see the original photo...)

 

Her's a snapshot that I was originally itnersted for sturcture, but that ran though some changes with color:

 

That's a very interesting post John, thanks. I think Picasso was a Black & White painter who painted in color nonetheless. I believe he once joked that one could switch around a lot of the colors in his paintings and it wouldn't matter much whereas, he said (paraphrased), change even the smallest color in a Matisse painting and it can be destroyed.

 

I'm primarily a B&W photographer. I sometimes think many others may be as well although some have not yet realized it. Color in photography can be extremely difficult to use well. If one does not naturally think in terms of color, hasn't studied it carefully, doesn't know it inside out then strong work in color is almost impossible. What I see most often in color photography is color that is incidental. One of the great exceptions is Robert Bergman who, in my mind, has made the best color photographs I've ever seen. Lucas Samaras is great with color as well but then he's also a painter. It's interesting that most painters wouldn't touch color without knowing it well whereas its not so common for photographers to study color. Helen Levitt has always been good with color as well.

 

It certainly is no accident that many major photographers never switched to color even when the means for doing that were widely available.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[steve kessel]

I'm very interested in this thread and pleased that it's stimulating some discussion.

 

Just a couple of points for now. There's colour, line and also shape. The latter could be an amalgam of the first two. Excuse the pun but it depends what you (not the camera) focus on. What I've seen of the Lifson link (only a bit) is great, because he gives pointers as to how to use gesture and the frame to compose, mainly in terms of shape but also (only implicitly covered as far as I can tell) content - what the picture tells us and how it affects us.

 

So I'm now looking for ways of understanding colour in photography. Perhaps we can learn from abstract impressionism? Coming back to Matisse, I disagree that his draftsmanship was weak - just look at his drawings: the line may be all over the place compared with Ingres but how expressive and sensuous, and precise in its own way.

 

On using the monitor, in my case D-Lux 2, I have also tried looking at the screen and the subject and find it a worthwhile challenge, in spite of, but more because of the fact that the two views are different (not just colour rendering but parallax and scale). That's what I find fascinating about photography - working with a precision instrument but not letting precision get in the way.

[Guest stnami]

Matisse is a great draftperson as are people like, Paul Klee. Franz Kline, Carl Andre, Barbara Kruger, Tim Eitel, the Japanese sculptors of the 70,s etc but not in the traditional sense as Piccasso and company are considered.

I don't feel that colour photography is that difficult, pretty much as with B&W one has to be aware and attuned with the subject, eg what do I do with that orange how does it affect the rest of the image, ie what is its role.

Somewhere someone came up with a myth about colour photography and it stuck. In reality it is pretty simple ........use colour as colour

[Guest malland]

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Wayne, I think you're making too much of the line versus color approach from painting: after all were not picking up pencils or brushes and deciding how to draw with them — wether to draw with patches of color or with line; we're just picking up a camera and, unlitmately, just deciding what to put the frame around. On the other hand, I find there is a big difference in how I look when I intend to shoot in color rather than in B&W. At the limit, for the latter, I tend to look for strong graphic shapes and the relationship in forms; for color I look to color shapes relate to each other and create forms. But none of this, in my view, is related to the type of viewfinder used: it's related to your eyes and how you see. Incidentally, shooting in RAW one have a choice during post processing of whether to go to B&W or stay in color — in my experience, for my best pictures, the choice is obvious it's almost always better to go the way one visualized the pictures: the ones that can go either way or are better, say, in color after having been visualized in B&W tend not to be my best pictures, or are very much an exception.

 

Example: this picture is not interesting in color; it's also a good example of framing with the LCD on the D-Lux 3:

 

 

And the attached picture is not much in B&W (Leica M6, Noctilux f/1.0, E100S film).

 

—Mitch/Paris

Flickr: Photos from Mitch Alland

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[Guest stnami]

Bergman comes to mind first as he reminds me of images from colour films in the 50s as with some of Shore's images.

Alex Webb comes to mind though he is a bit one dimensional in his approach, found a formula and stuck to it.

Photojournalist James Lee uses colour well though it may be accidently, though some of his shots show a carefull directional use of colour to create a scenario or starting point of an image visually

Laura Letansky does some interesting things with light and colour as does Katy Grannan

Agatha Katzensprung does some really intersting stuff as well

You will probably see a trend there......

 

......use colour as colour

just that, let it be your guide don't battle with it

[ericperlberg]

I find it difficult to take this analytic approach to photography though I applaud this thread for getting away from the endless talk about back focus and photographs of brick walls and black synthetic clothing.

 

I don't know why I take the photos I take or even the ones I like by other photographers except to say that there is some sort of emotional resonance with what I see at a given moment or what has been put within the camera's frame by someone else. Bruce Naumann has a neon which says something like "the purpose of an artist is to reveal the mystic truths"

 

I was looking at Stephen Shore's new book the other day in which he describes and demonstrates the elements of a photograph. Shore is one of my heros but I couldn't do more than 5 pages of reading before putting the book down (the photos were great, it was the text that I lost interest in).

 

I'm reminded of a line from an Incredible String Band song of long ago, "you learned all the words and sung all the notes but you never quite sung the song..." Not to say that applies to the fine photographs linked to by the people in this thread but somehow to me all these elements for discussion don't add up to the emotional impact of a photograph which speaks to me. Undeniably these elements are part of a photograph but not the essential bit that makes one work. I think a photograph constructed from the analytics without that emotional je ne sais quoi is like tasting a photograph of food.

 

As an aside I was looking through American Surfaces last night and struck by how much vignetting was in Shore's photos and laughed to myself. They're great photos but had he posted them to any of the popular photo discussion forums he likely would have been answered with mentions of camera raw and lightroom.

 

By turning the photographic situation around (by looking at the "scrutable" instead of the "inscrutable"), makes art feel sterile and academic to me. I guess I'm from the William Eggleston school of analysis, "a picture is what it is".

 

So those are my thoughts. Thanks for trying to create a thread about photography instead of one about the tools of photography.

[Guest stnami]

A couple lof older threads that may interest

 

 

http://www.leica-camera-user.com/digital-forum/1456-sean-reid-street-photography.html

 

http://www.leica-camera-user.com/digital-forum/1717-imants-personal-photography.html

 

http://www.leica-camera-user.com/digital-forum/4115-smokeysun-colour-revival.html

[Guest malland]

...but somehow to me all these elements for discussion don't add up to the emotional impact of a photograph which speaks to me. Undeniably these elements are part of a photograph but not the essential bit that makes one work. I think a photograph constructed from the analytics without that emotional je ne sais quoi is like tasting a photograph of food...)

The emotion has to come from somewhere, but if you look for it, that is, if you start with the idea that you want to express emotion, most of the time you'll end up with trite pictures. As in any art, form is the most basic buidling block and, once you've found the form, you are on your way to expressing something and the emotion will eventually surface.There's nothing wrong with analyzing and trying to grasp the elements of what makes a photograph art.

 

—Mitch/Paris

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/

[smokysun]

in a way i guess we could be discussing natural talent vs. learned behavior! (you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear). being a student vs. being an accomplished practitioner.

 

somewhere i read the best jazz musicians have musical training and it's given them more choices. alas, i do best what i learn on my own but it takes about 25 years! that makes 20 more to go in photography. (which famous actor said it takes 20 years to become an actor?)

 

jon jory has a book for actors he calls 'tips', and he says most actors learn from other actors in the form of tips. and i'm looking for tips from photographers. in the end of course, it's about putting three of the right things for you in practice. i learned this directing for theater. to re-emphasis: they have to be the three right things for you at that moment!

 

is the zone theory a theory, or a practice? hockney examines practice in 'secret knowledge'. i think you will come away from it seeing a little more clearly the difference between the painterly approach and the optical. in his book on photography he says most photos will eventually be appreciated for their 'historical' value and not because we saw them as art. last eve i ran across an older book lauding photographers for the experimental stuff they did in the 70's and 80's. now any child can do that stuff on the computer, and much more. dated, they no longer represent art but history.

 

alex web interesting because he does have a formula, but it's interesting. just got his book on istanbul. he often has a blurred figure in the foreground instead of the background. this is rather like cezanne using warm colors which come forward in the background and cool colors which recede in the foreground. these reverse the expected order and create an interesting tension.

 

or distance. william klein obviously gets in very close with a wide-angle lens. ktratochvil often tilts his horizon and has a narrow depth of field with lots of blur. hcb likes to have several different groups doing different things in the same picture.

 

or take the book 'falkland road' by mary ellen mark. very crude, saturated color. the figures very large and brightly lit in small spaces. this befits the subject of prostitution.

 

or take the use of flash in the color pictures of nan goldin. or in the b&w of weegee. how this dramatizes the scene.

 

as a literature student i felt european writers do their best work when older 'because' they are working out a theory. american writers tend to depend on experience and burn out early. and really, we live in a sea of theories. does it help to know what they are? perhaps not. we pick up the practices of others, how they make things look. we can easily be following a rule without ever knowing what it is: the rule of thirds, the golden section. and this since it naturally feels right. but it feels right partly because we've seen it so much.

 

this discussion helps me. hope it does you! millions of people are taking pictures so it seems to me you have to struggle to find a significant practice. doing what comes naturally may leave you on a lower level.

 

wayne

 

ps. a tip from christopher isherwood years ago: you can treat ordinary things in an extraordinary way (bonnard?) or extraordinary things in an ordinary way (hcb?). thus you get art. and jung with all his theories said, 'when i get a new patient, i try to forget everything i know.'

[DavidStone]

Eric wrote:

 

"So those are my thoughts. Thanks for trying to create a thread about photography instead of one about the tools of photography."

 

I certainly agree with Eric that it makes a change to get away from photos of brick walls.

 

To address the original points - David Hockney's book on the use of optics in art is a fascinating and perceptive hypothesis, although his knowledge of the history of photography is a bit woolly. I can't see that it has much relevance for modern photographic practice, however.

 

But I suggest, Wayne, that you take a look at Hockney's book "That's the Way I See It". Not 'about' photography, more about seeing and depicting, and therefore very relevant.

 

And the 'zone theory' is the zone system - Ansel Adams didn't invent it all. What he did was to put together a whole load of existing knowledge about photographic practice and integrate it so that it all works together - which it does.

 

And viewfinders. Good photographs, and good photographers, are independent of the kind of viewfinder used. First you need to learn to see. Only then should you attempt to capture what you see. The camera comes last.

 

But the subject of human vision and how we depict what we see, and what media we choose to use for this depiction and how these media interact and what photographers can learn from painters and vice versa is such an enormous subject that it's impossible to do more than scratch the surface here. and yes it takes years and you never stop learning. So keep looking, keep reading, keep shooting.

 

Some points, as brief as I can make them:

 

I always told my students that they would not understand photography from the inside. To understand what photography is, you need a clear understanding of what it is not. You should learn not just its possibilities, but also its impossibilities. To quote Kipling: "What do they know of England, who only England know?" Substitute 'photography' for 'England'.

 

The camera is a photo-mechanical device. Camera optics and physiological optics are very different. This was clearly understood in the nineteenth century, when photographic images were elbowing their way into the existing community of hand-made pictures. Photographs were criticised for not showing the world as we see it. Camera lenses were and still are designed by optical technicians, not by artists. The 'reality' they depict is not that seen by the eye and brain, although most people are now convinced that it is.

 

Some of the best photographers have also drawn and painted - Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Charles Sheeler spring to mind. There are and have been many others.

 

Studying the work of other visual artists is valuable (I would say essential), but as photographers we can only record what's there (I'm going to be old-fashioned here and say that I don't count Photoshopping as photography). We therefore have to accept that we have to relinquish the artist's freedom to depict tones and colours as seen, but are obliged record the various relative luminances and wavelengths reflected from our subject.

 

Photography has strengths of its own, however. It has an inherent documentary truthfulness (although this is slipping away in this digital era). It can hold up a mirror to society in a way that is denied to other media.

 

And to return to brick walls: Photography, as with many other fields of human activity, is subject to fashion. There's currently a fashion for high-resolution, high-contrast (and frequently high-cost) lenses. I applaude Sean, who craftily slips an old lens into his reviews, to gently point this out (I hope somebody listens). My new M8 has to suffer the indignity of being fitted with screw-thread Leica lenses most of the time - but the results are worth it. Much closer to my own view of the world.

 

And I'm with Eric too in that you can theorise until you're blue in the face (or even until the cows come home, whichever comes first) but this is no good unless it helps you to take a better photograph. And I'm well past the stage where I care what other people think about my photos.

 

David

[FMB]

Please more, more...

 

It's the first thread, since I began to read them, I enjoy in deepness.

 

Thank you.

 

Francisco.

[sean_reid]

we're just picking up a camera and, unlitmately, just deciding what to put the frame around.

—Mitch/Paris

 

Hello Mitch,

 

Is that what you meant to write? I'm sure you realize that there is far more to strong photography than that.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[sean_reid]

This series of article by my friend Ben Lifson is the perhaps the best and most useful writing (for photographers) on photography as an art form that I have ever read. I strongly recommend the series to all serious photographers. RAWWorkflow.com - Make better pictures from your pixels™

 

For those who care about credentials, Ben's are here:

http://www.benlifson.com/lifsoncv.pdf

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[smokysun]

hmm, does formal beauty equal emotional impact? i don't think anyone would argue for it. yet i often feel it is a hidden assumption.

 

and color is easy? hcb didn't think so. he was glad he didn't have to try it! (interesting that he turned to drawing just as the photo world was turning to color. is this just a coincidence?)

 

Amazon.com: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Biography: Books: Pierre Assouline

 

i think what we're discussing is levels of achievement in the world. for example, sean has said nan goldin not formally expert, yet she's one of the most known of photographers. her work had enormous influence on fashion photography and life-style in the 80's and 90's, not to mention her furthering of gay toleration thru showing the gay community as human, and suffering. her aids photos very compassionate and moving.

 

Amazon.com: Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror: Books: Elisabeth Sussman,Nan Goldin,David Armstrong,Hans Werner Holzwarth,Whitney Museum of American Art

 

i've mentioned falkland road. very different from anything else mary ellen mark has done. technically it could be called crude, but that certainly doesn't make it any less affecting.

 

Amazon.com: Mary Ellen Mark: Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay: Books: Mary Ellen Mark

 

for most of the world 'subject matter' is important. true, formal considerations can raise or lower it's impact, but a boring story is going to be boring.

 

what i really think matters is talent plus a very personal commitment. for example, three videos of william eggleston, james nachtwey, and helmut newton show three very different photographers, both in personality and work, but their commitment and brass is obvious.

 

Amazon.com: William Eggleston In the Real World: DVD: William J. Eggleston,Michael Almereyda

 

Amazon.com: Helmut Newton - Frames from the Edge: DVD: Candice Bergen,Tina Brown (III),Catherine Deneuve,Faye Dunaway,Robert Evans,Karl Lagerfeld,Helmut Newton,June Newton,Charlotte Rampling,Sigourney Weaver

 

Amazon.com: War Photographer: DVD: James Nachtwey,Christiane Amanpour,Hans-Hermann Klare,Christiane Breustedt,Des Wright (II),Denis O'Neill,Christian Frei

 

perhaps it's like when gauguin stopped being a sunday painter and went fulltime. yet someone like eugene meatyard did it on weekends. but, boy, was he focused and detailed in his project.

 

don't you think the worst assumption we can make is that we have no more to learn?

 

thanks,

 

wayne

 

side note: charles sheeler's gallery rep made him quit taking photos because it was lowering the prices of his paintings!

[Guest malland]

...Is that what you meant to write? I'm sure you realize that there is far more to strong photography than that...

No Sean, that is out of context: I was just addressing the idea that, in photography, we're not choosing between line and shape (color), between Ingres and Manet. Instead, we're framing a scene; and, in framing that scene, there is obviously a lot more involved to achieve a "good" photograph, or one that can approach art.

 

—Mitch/Paris

[sean_reid]

No Sean, that is out of context: I was just addressing the idea that, in photography, we're not choosing between line and shape (color), between Ingres and Manet. Instead, we're framing a scene; and, in framing that scene, there is obviously a lot more involved to achieve a "good" photograph, or one that can approach art.

 

—Mitch/Paris

 

I figured you didn't mean that on its own.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

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[sean_reid]

i think what we're discussing is levels of achievement in the world. for example, sean has said nan goldin not formally expert, yet she's one of the most known of photographers. her work had enormous influence on fashion photography and life-style in the 80's and 90's, not to mention her furthering of gay toleration thru showing the gay community as human, and suffering. her aids photos very compassionate and moving.

 

As I think about it, Nan Goldin's pictures, at least the work I saw on the wall that went with "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" form almost a kind of photojournalism. They showed us her world and their description seems to be honest and largely uncensored...in the many senses of the word. She reported to us on her world, a world no photo editor was sending her to cover. The content is there, for sure.

 

As photojournalism, its interesting work (to my eye). Since you've mentioned her again, we might remind anyone reading (should they go looking for her book) that the pictures are often quite explicit and would not be to everyone's taste. In fact, some here might dislike the book quite a bit.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean