Shallow DoF

[plasticman]

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Actually HCB's photos do not have shallow DOF. "He eschews every specialized optical effect, from limited depth of field to ultra-wide angle vision." (Bob Schwalberg

 

Just for the record, that's exactly what I was saying, but I shouldn't really take any more part in the discussion - my posts were flippant and throwaway: more a reflection of my mood at the time of posting, than of any constructive contribution to the discussion.

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[jaapv]

Because HCB placed more importance on photographing something that was visually interesting in the first place. He photographed the relationships between people or things and to do that a certain level of sharpness was needed front to back. In dull light you can see his aperture getting wider, but it's a long way from photographing something visually boring and trying to make it more interesting with photographic techniques like shallow DOF.

 

Steve

If we were to raise the technique of one master to the universal yardstick against which all other art should be measured all paintings would attempt to look like Rembrandts.

[pico]

Actually HCB's photos do not have shallow DOF.

 

Unless he was photographing philosophers.

 

http://www.digoliardi.net/hbc/hcb_camus.jpg

 

http://www.digoliardi.net/hbc/hbc-sartre.jpg

[Peter H]

If we were to raise the technique of one master to the universal yardstick against which all other art should be measured all paintings would attempt to look like Rembrandts.

 

Not at all.

 

If we accept for the sake of this discussion that Rembrandt is a universal yardstick, what is it that makes him so? It cannot be purely the appearance of his paintings, because if it were, a highly accurate copy made yesterday afternoon would be equally worthy.

 

Therefore it must be something more, and if we wish to replicate it, this quality that elevates Rembrandt or HCB, we need to think about what it is beyond the surface appearance that we are trying to replicate.

[pop]

It cannot be purely the appearance of his paintings, because if it were, a highly accurate copy made yesterday afternoon would be equally worthy.

 

Worthy vs. valuable.

 

If one was to paint a picture undistiguishable from a true Rembrandt, that still would be a great accomplishment and quite worthy. However, there are extrinsic properties which make up the greater part of the value of a piece of art; scarcity of the products comes to mind, but also originality of the work with respect to its culture and period. Detecting that is, of course, what curators are very good at.

[Peter H]

Worthy vs. valuable.

 

If one was to paint a picture undistiguishable from a true Rembrandt, that still would be a great accomplishment and quite worthy. However, there are extrinsic properties which make up the greater part of the value of a piece of art; scarcity of the products comes to mind, but also originality of the work with respect to its culture and period. Detecting that is, of course, what curators are very good at.

 

I'm not really talking about financial value which I believe has very little to do with art.

 

I'd say that the thing that makes great artists stand out from the crowd is their ability to create or discover beauty (or whatever quality it is that they're striving for) in ways and places that it hasn't been detected or expressed before. "Originality" alone doesn't do it justice, but one thing we can be sure of is that Rembrandt's undisputed greatness derives not from his ability faithfully to copy someone else. The same applies to all great artists, and to my mind, to all artists of whatever degree of accomplishment.

[Paul J]

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It is certainly about discovering new ways in seeing, establishing new visions and rejecting or adapting old ones. These instances can and have and historically have changed the world, the way it thinks and sees.

 

Every breakthrough in modern art, from the turn of the 20th century and soon before was about smashing rules and conventions. Generally the modern world has been shaped by the sticking up of fingers to the rules. Matisse, Picasso, Dali, Warhol. Everyone of them said "screw you" and changed the way the world thinks and sees despite being shunned, laughed at and humiliated for their works the time. Take the work of Matisse and look around the world today, he instilled a whole new way of seeing and changed the world.

 

As for copying, plagiarism is a fairly modern development but is still largely contested by great artists. It has always been common place for great artists to copy works as part of the their training and development, earlier it was much accepted. It's in doing so that an artist has discovered what they want to change.

 

It was Dali who changed this when invited to "copy" Vermeer's highly regarded lacemaker because a collector wanted his own copy. He agreed and then in protest to much bafflement of witnesses painted his own interpretation of a Dalisque representation of Rhino Horns.

 

Picasso spent the year before he died representing other artists motifs and symbology, taking ownership of pretty much everything he could.

 

Lastly, as for art it was the Duchampian ideal that came to be. That the modern artist will merely point his finger and make something art. Picasso said it best - what is not art?

 

It's certainly not rules!

[pop]

This is not quite how I see it.

 

It is true that the "great" ones were known for dashing existing rules. However, rather than working in disdain of rules they invented their own rules and adhered even more rigidly to those - for a while.

 

Clearly, every one of the great ones (and also most of the not so great ones) can be said to have invented their own language. In the absence of constraints, gibberish would have been the result and you could not tell a Chagall from a Picasso.

[Jeff S]

 

Clearly, every one of the great ones (and also most of the not so great ones) can be said to have invented their own language. In the absence of constraints, gibberish would have been the result and you could not tell a Chagall from a Picasso.

 

Sometimes it takes two to tango, or to tango better, or to switch dances. The Matisse/Picasso relationship, for example, as described by this past exhibition (and many other places) shows how two great artists used 'competition' to surprise each other, to shift emphasis and to elevate their game.

 

I have no idea, though, how this relates to shallow DOF.

 

Jeff

[Paul J]

This is not quite how I see it.

 

It is true that the "great" ones were known for dashing existing rules. However, rather than working in disdain of rules they invented their own rules and adhered even more rigidly to those - for a while.

 

Clearly, every one of the great ones (and also most of the not so great ones) can be said to have invented their own language. In the absence of constraints, gibberish would have been the result and you could not tell a Chagall from a Picasso.

 

The work of Chagall and Picasso are each defined by their own point of view, not by rules. I would argue that the great artists did not invent their own rules but found their own voice and worked within their own totality and style. They were not bound by the rules and voice of others and it lead to their own greater discoveries.

 

While rules have often been put in place, my point is they have been continually broken and do at times lead to far greater things. It therefore becomes quite pointless to limit what is potentially limitless.

 

Perhaps you can give a specific example to the contrary, otherwise I will always maintain that while people will continually concoct rules, they have no place in art and the development of art.

[pop]

The work of Chagall and Picasso are each defined by their own point of view, not by rules. I would argue that the great artists did not invent their own rules but found their own voice and worked within their own totality and style. They were not bound by the rules and voice of others and it lead to their own greater discoveries.

 

While rules have often been put in place, my point is they have been continually broken and do at times lead to far greater things. It therefore becomes quite pointless to limit what is potentially limitless.

 

Perhaps you can give a specific example to the contrary, otherwise I will always maintain that while people will continually concoct rules, they have no place in art and the development of art.

 

My very small point is that both Chagall and Picasso (and all the others) did indeed place constraint on the way they created their paintings. I'm not speaking about rules imposed by others but about rules in force for a given artist and body of work.

 

Take a painting by anyone else, let's say Kirchner. You will see right away that it is not done in the language of Chagall. You recognize the presence of foreign elements and ways of painting and the absence of signal style elements you have come to expect from the works of Chagall. It's not as if each piece of work was in separation of each other piece of work of any given artist.

 

What you call above "totality and style" is what I call "rules": a set of (in this case) self-imposed constraints on the way a work of art is shaped and presented. We are certainly in agreement that artists usually manage to break a rule or two, be they accepted foreign or self-imposed ones.

[Peter H]

Sometimes it takes two to tango, or to tango better, or to switch dances. The Matisse/Picasso relationship, for example, as described by this past exhibition (and many other places) shows how two great artists used 'competition' to surprise each other, to shift emphasis and to elevate their game.

 

I have no idea, though, how this relates to shallow DOF.

 

Jeff

 

Jeff, I think it's to do with the whole question of "rules', or perhaps accepted practices, as they relate to the expressive arts, and whether the use of shallow depth of field has become a sort of short-cut to a perception of quality where nothing of greater interest exists. Not exactly a rule, but sort of one in the sense that it may be something we fall back on as an accepted practice when we run out of good ideas.

 

There have been other threads where this sort of thing has been discussed, but I think that in its widest interpretation it's a matter of perpetual interest to any photographer: are there any rules when it comes to photography? Of course, in the context of this thread in isolation, the question would need to be confined to the use of shallow depth of field.

[pgk]

..... I think that in its widest interpretation it's a matter of perpetual interest to any photographer: are there any rules when it comes to photography?

For some reason we seem to like 'rules' and 'categorisation'. Once pronounced and accepted, these can eventually all too easily become millstones around our necks and we all too often use them as yardsticks to 'measure' imagery and its success/viability, rather than simply accept the images just because we like them.

 

With the advent of digital imaging there are less technical limitations to photography and more potential for images not to obey 'rules' nor to fit into 'categories'. Whilst we appreciate 'creativity', all too often I suspect that new and different material struggles to be accepted until it has been 'categorised' and the 'rules' concerning its acceptability have been thought out.