We tend to get so lost in the technical details, and in the details of composition, that we lose track of content. The issues of where to stick the horizon line, how to crop, whether the frame is well balanced, these are all irrelevant if the picture isn't of anything anyone wants to look at. Not to say that you've got photograph clowns balanced on alligators juggling chain saws. You can take pictures of clouds, abstracts, whatever.
But at the end of the say, the picture has to be interesting, or nobody's going to care. Sure, the camera club will applaud the way the tree balances the setting sun, but if it's just another boring sunset picture, nobody's going to actually like it all that much.
Interest, I am having brought home to me, can be wildly contextual. A picture might be perfectly banal by itself, but becomes fascinating in relation to another picture.
I think an argument could be made that perfect formal composition and perfect technique are in fact a royal road to the banal. There are very few of us who have enough brainpower on tap to hit all those details and still have enough brain left over to make a picture with something interesting in it.
Content is King! Or Queen! It is totally gender neutral, but it is definitely in charge.
"I think an argument could be made that perfect formal composition and perfect technique are in fact a royal road to the banal."
ReplyDeleteI agree. This was my beef with the "The McCurry Takedown" article over at TOP, where the technically and aesthetically perfect india pictures by Steve McCurry where set against those by Raghubir Singh. Apparently the overly, perfectly beautiful can become boring and at times outright ugly - some "imperfection" seems to be needed to make the thing live.