Faking Reality

[david strachan]

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It's one of the endearing qualities of Ansel Adams...his rich body of books and instruction for self help. Nice prose to boot. His technical understanding has few peers.

Not many of our photoheroes were so keen to share techniques helping to  advance photography.

...

[Ouroboros]

Putting the questionable concept of photographic 'superheroes' aside, most of this debate comes down to the fact that there are two kinds of photographer;

1. Those who are inherently creative.

2. Those who might need to find their creativity

I spent a glorious day at Westonbirt Arboretum yesterday.  The acers and maples are magnificent at the moment and there were quite a few photographers around.  Most of them appeared to be constantly photographing  the foliage from below against the blue sky.  Nothing wrong with that, but the habitual pursuit of 'reality' is in danger of becoming cliche.  Especially for the viewer.

 

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[jaapv]

Thank you for finally finding that interview for me. I have been dissed on forums for saying that Ansel Adams foresaw the development of digital photography in the early eighties.

6 hours ago, cboy said:

In a interview Ansel Adams was excited of the future of photography and how his negatives would be reinterpreted in the darkroom (digitally)

https://youtu.be/rdCq-1MJmHw

 

[250swb]

6 hours ago, Jeff S said:

Adams wrote and spoke freely about techniques employed and circumstances involved in the making of his photos.  The book, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, is but one and includes this and other well known works.

https://www.amazon.com/Examples-Making-Photographs-Ansel-Adams/dp/082121750X

Jeff

It can be taken as just a word in the title of a book but the word 'making' or 'make' runs deep in American landscape photography of the twentieth century.

It's no coincidence that Adams came from a background in Pictorialism in the early 1920's where emotional content and manipulation of the image was preeminent, yet after being seduced away from Pictorialism  by the 'straight' photography of the f/64 group he still felt the need to suggest what he felt about the landscape in the image. His photographs were never only records of the landscape.

I was fortunate to attend lecture by Adams when he visited England on a lecture tour in the 1970's, and before then I'd 'taken' photographs, after then I 'made' them. This was hammered home by a regular visiting lecturer Thomas Joshua Cooper just in case the terminology ever slipped. For him if there was no special connection to make with the landscape he walked away without making an exposure, but if he did hours and hours would be spent in the darkroom dodging and burning to make the perfect print. I'd never realised or understood the work ethic behind the landscape photograph before, from visualisation, to technique, and finally to creation. Not to mention the intellectual stimulus that makes the photographer want to go out and say something about the landscape in the first place. But it makes perfect sense when it is only what any artist would do, a painting is preceded by the hard work of sketches, success and dead ends, and finally by paint on canvas. And it was the cross pollination of ideas between the arts in America that first gave photography it's wider 'art' status and allowed photographers to talk about the same things as other visual artists and even spilled over into photography as a visual narrative for the literature of the post Pictorialist era.

 

[cboy]

24 minutes ago, jaapv said:

Thank you for finally finding that interview for me. I have been dissed on forums for saying that Ansel Adams foresaw the development of digital photography in the early eighties.

 

It wonderful how he speaks of his photography practice like an interpretation of a sheet of music from a master composer of the past since his background was a classical pianist ; those nuances in pitch, tone etc are the fingerprints/signiture of the artist playing, and likewise in photography the conceptualisation of the image from the minds eye of the photographer is realised in the darkroom (digital).

[Guest BlackBarn]

This is what Leica say is one of their intents..to ‘offer unparalleled creative freedom’.

And here Auguste Rodin.   Art....It’s the reflection of the artists heart upon all the objects that they create....it is the smile of the human soul’.

I think Leica try and make the best possible tools to make us smile........and sometimes we smile at the same things and sometimes different and sometimes we surround ourselves with do’s and do nots which makes those smiles smaller.

[pgk]

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27 minutes ago, 250swb said:

..... before then I'd 'taken' photographs, after then I 'made' them.

I think that this is a significant differentiator within photography. I would say that I still 'take' a lot of photographs, but when I am able to do so, I do 'make' them. It does depend on what is being taken and why of course and there will be grey areas but I do like this as an explanatory differentiator. This thread has reminded me that I must reread some of my AA books too!

[pgk]

2 minutes ago, BlackBarn said:

‘offer unparalleled creative freedom’.

Whilst I would agree that the simplicity of the interface offered by Leica (the 'M' series specifically) helps in not being intrusive, if you look at AA and many others, they used large format cameras which were both simplistic(focus. aperture, shutter) and yet highly complex (movements and awkward practicality of field use). The solution is, of course, to know your equipment. Which is why I use my Sony A7 series cameras pre-set and in manual mode, because their complicated menus and plethora of 'controls' is very capable of getting in the way. I don't find them to be intuitive tools at all whereas I can pick up an M and be concentrating on the composition instantly.

[pippy]

1 hour ago, 250swb said:

...I was fortunate to attend lecture by Adams when he visited England on a lecture tour in the 1970's, and before then I'd 'taken' photographs, after then I 'made' them. This was hammered home by a regular visiting lecturer Thomas Joshua Cooper just in case the terminology ever slipped...

Odd that you should mention Thomas Joshua Cooper. His volume "Between Dark and Dark" was issued when I was a first-year student and, as you might imagine, his treatment of - and approach to printing - these images was the centre of a great deal of discussion between we students and our lecturers.

It must have been fascinating to have him as a regular visitor!

Philip.

Edited October 15, 2020 by pippy

[rob_w]

Great question by the OP.  As others  have said in very interesting responses, all photos - indeed all pictures - are made and therefore creative acts.  The oddity with photography is the assumption that is more 'real' than, say, a painting, when in truth a photograph, too, is not a pipe.

I will add that with the evolution of digital photography we have been seduced by ever greater sharpness, vividness, dynamic range etc. to demonstrate the technical wonder of each new generation.  That seduction has militated against genuine emotional and artistic response to the subject and finding a way to express it.  It is rare today to see a 'high key' picture, for example, or something blurred or hazy.   Sharpness is all.  God forbid your inadequate equipment cannot deliver it!

[pgk]

17 minutes ago, rob_w said:

.... all photos - indeed all pictures - are made and therefore creative acts.

Ummm. I'm far from convinced. I've spent a lot of my working life recording things photographically, sometimes to a brief, sometimes for stock. The 'creative' element in such work is often minimal, and intended to be so. Obtaining a clear, well-defined photograph of a specific (type of) subject is fundamentally a technical exercise, even down to knowing the angle to shoot it at and the appropriate lighting. I think that the problem with the vast majority of photographs we now see is actually that they lack any real creativity whatsoever and so are 'snapshots' - technically excellent though they may be. Hence to obsession with technical perfection. We've argued this before but I don't see that selection of viewpoint and composition have are inherently creative  because all too often they are poorly considered or formulaic, and they frequently fail to achieve their purpose (believe me I know as I have to look at many in order to try to identify the subject - which is often far from easy because of viewpoint/lighting/composition/technicalities). Just pointing a camera at something and pressing the shutter button is not a creative process, its a technical exercise.

[Gerbs]

8 minutes ago, pgk said:

Ummm. I'm far from convinced. I've spent a lot of my working life recording things photographically, sometimes to a brief, sometimes for stock. The 'creative' element in such work is often minimal, and intended to be so. Obtaining a clear, well-defined photograph of a specific (type of) subject is fundamentally a technical exercise, even down to knowing the angle to shoot it at and the appropriate lighting. I think that the problem with the vast majority of photographs we now see is actually that they lack any real creativity whatsoever and so are 'snapshots' - technically excellent though they may be. Hence to obsession with technical perfection. We've argued this before but I don't see that selection of viewpoint and composition have are inherently creative  because all too often they are poorly considered or formulaic, and they frequently fail to achieve their purpose (believe me I know as I have to look at many in order to try to identify the subject - which is often far from easy because of viewpoint/lighting/composition/technicalities). Just pointing a camera at something and pressing the shutter button is not a creative process, its a technical exercise.

The camera on top of a Google vehicle that is documenting the view from a road is not a creative process, it is a technical process whose goal is mapping. Vastly different than what a human with a camera in their hands is doing, even if they are trying to document an event. A snapshot of the family may not have much "excellence" but is on the human scale of a creative process. That snapshot itself can change over time, a photograph of my ancestors in a horse drawn buggy carries much more emotion, for me, than it might have as a "snapshot" for them, which makes me think about the power of an image, and making a judgment of an image, and how these things pass out of the control of the photographer and into the life of the viewer. Documentary photography can be extraordinarily filled with emotion, so what seems like a purely technical exercise changes, in retrospect, into a creative act as soon as the result is seen by another set of eyes, I think.

[250swb]

1 hour ago, pippy said:

Odd that you should mention Thomas Joshua Cooper. His volume "Between Dark and Dark" was issued when I was a first-year student and, as you might imagine, his treatment of - and approach to printing - these images was the centre of a great deal of discussion between we students and our lecturers.

It must have been fascinating to have him as a regular visitor!

Philip.

I have the book. The 'small dark print' was something I'd never seen before and the quality of print media (or nowadays the internet) doesn't do it justice. It's often difficult working out what is going on until the real thing is in front of you when the deep tones glow and there is detail right into the darkest of blacks. He's an intriguing photographer and continues breaking conventions in landscape photography which I find both a challenge and a delight in equal measure.

[adan]

Quote

......they took twenty-seven 8 x 10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was, to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner, the southwest corner - And that's not to mention the aerial photography!

Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant

It is and has been the case that photographs can be so true-to-life that they are admissible as legal (or scientific, or journalistic) evidence. That is a useful feature.

I was a juror in a drunk-driving case about a year ago in which a photograph of the suspect at the time of arrest was introduced, to demonstrate his flushed red face as evidence of drunkeness.

In our court procedures, jurors can submit questions to witnesses via the judge, and I specifically asked the arresting officer, and maker of the photograph, what safeguards were taken to insure the (digital) photograph's colors were not affected by camera color profile, white-balance, post-processing, etc. etc. (Whether a flushed face actually is evidence of drunkeness is a subject for a different thread).

He 1) was highly offended that anyone thought the picture might have been manipulated, and 2) testified under oath as to the processes involved. Which was what I wanted to get "on the record."

There are techniques, such as checksums, or penalties for perjury, to insure that even a digital photograph has not been altered from the moment it was written to the SD card within the camera, by so much as one pixel, and is a "fair and accurate" representation of the subject.

But as pgk says: at least in law and science, they are often pretty boring pictures.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=8451aeb6-b353-47af-920d-badbdba86906

[LocalHero1953]

If the Streetview cameras, and some of @pgk's photographs are not creative, what does one say about the New Topographic Movement? As I've said before art doesn't have to be good art, not does creativity have to create anything worth keeping. But someone has to decide where the camera points, its focal length, its focus. In the Streetview case, these were decided at one stage back from the pressing the shutter button. These are creative acts (IMO); if you don't agree then you will inevitable get into endless arguments about where art begins and ends, or whether an act is creative or not. Far better (again IMO) to forget such terminological matters and look at the merits of the work (image) itself.

[pgk]

Pressing keys on a piano does not make one a pianist even though the notes played may individually sound the same as if an actual trained and musical pianist played them .... Can you look at the ('non-creative' or 'creative') act of pressing down the keys as being inherently creative - I don't think so. In the same way, pressing the shutter button on a camera does not make one a photographer even though the end result is of photographic appearance. And trying to determine the merits of a work are at least as problematic. "Taking' or 'making' photographs is a worthy distinction, but I'm certain that many who 'take' photographs cannot see it.

[LocalHero1953]

35 minutes ago, pgk said:

Pressing keys on a piano does not make one a pianist even though the notes played may individually sound the same as if an actual trained and musical pianist played them .... Can you look at the ('non-creative' or 'creative') act of pressing down the keys as being inherently creative - I don't think so. In the same way, pressing the shutter button on a camera does not make one a photographer even though the end result is of photographic appearance. And trying to determine the merits of a work are at least as problematic. "Taking' or 'making' photographs is a worthy distinction, but I'm certain that many who 'take' photographs cannot see it.

In the end, as I implied, I'm not that interested in defining whether someone is a photographer or not, creative or an artist.

[pgk]

30 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

In the end, as I implied, I'm not that interested in defining whether someone is a photographer or not, creative or an artist.

You may not be but any viewing of photographs necessitates context. Otherwise, as I have said before, there are no bad or good images and there is no point driving to produce 'better' imagery.

[jaapv]

49 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

In the end, as I implied, I'm not that interested in defining whether someone is a photographer or not, creative or an artist.

But you can certainly decide whether photographs resonate with you or not and to what extent.

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[LocalHero1953]

43 minutes ago, pgk said:

You may not be but any viewing of photographs necessitates context. Otherwise, as I have said before, there are no bad or good images and there is no point driving to produce 'better' imagery.

 

25 minutes ago, jaapv said:

But you can certainly decide whether photographs resonate with you or not and to what extent.

Definitely. It's the exercise of deciding where on the side of the border of good/bad, creative/mechanical, art/not-art that I find futile.
I spend much of my photographic life, like most people here, trying to produce 'better' images.

I actually do have a personal dividing line between two groups of my own images: it's how I decide whether to delete an image or not - about 2/3 to 3/4 of all those I shoot. Whether the survivors are 'good' I leave to others to decide.