The Failure of Straight Photography

I'm using the phrase "straight photography" fairly loosely here. What I mean is pictures that look like photographs. They might be heavily manipulated or not, but if so the manipulations are more or less convincing.

There is a lot of this stuff out there.

Much of it is extremely aesthetically pleasing. We have schlubs on 500px that nobody has ever heard of who can assemble a balanced and attractive frame. We have people who who sell large canvas wraps of beautiful flowers. We have Alain Briot and a whole category of people who operate modest galleries filled with this kind of work. We have the Caponigros and similar artists who are taken very seriously indeed, shooting this kind of thing.

There is indeed a whole branch of photography that concerns itself with this work, and considers this work to be the true work of photography (I contrast this, mostly, with the MFA Fine Art crowd who are doing, um, something different; but we should not forget the snapshootists and so on.) This is a branch of photography that considers its work to be exclusively putting subject matter into a frame in an aethetically pleasing way. They do not philosophize, they eschew any notion that they have anything to say as such. Often, they consider the idea of saying something to be effete and undesirable.

This is, I think, the legacy of, mostly, Ansel Adams. The man was a serious educator, and led the charge on any number of fetishes: archival processing, full range of tones, extreme sharpness. I suppose he didn't invent these things, but he was a very successful teacher of these ideas.

Ansel Adams, of course, was hanging around with a bunch of Modernists. As I bang on about a lot, he and his friends had strong philosophical ideas about what a picture ought to do. Weston tries to show us the essence of the pepper, Adams reveals to us his Experience Of The Rock, and so on.

The trouble is, with straight photography, this stuff doesn't really read. Yeah, I see the soul of the pepper in there, sort of, but is it only because I know what Weston was trying to do?

God help me, Barthes was right about one thing. What photographs are best at is simply witnessing: There was a pepper.

Straight photography explicitly throws away all the crutches and devices that make it easy, or perhaps possible, to say more than there was a pepper. The acolytes of Adams, which is most of us, have simply given up on anything else.

So now we have an entire genre of what is allegedly Art, which says nothing, which means nothing. It simply witnesses that a pepper, a rock, a flower, a model, was there. It is aesthetically pleasing, and that's about it. We have commentators spanning a spectrum from idiot to erudite who tell us that's pretty much all there is, and any attempt to imbue a photograph with more than that ought to be rejected. What baffles me is that roughly the same commentators bemoan that photography is not taken serious as Art.

Of course your preferred photography, sir, is not taken seriously as Art. It says nothing, it means nothing, and furthermore you insist that it continue to say nothing, and mean nothing. What on earth are we to make of this? You want me to expand my collection of this work because it is... pretty? Is this intended as some sort of jest?

What separates Weston's pepper, and I do consider it to be separated, is that we do in fact know what Weston was attempting. This knowledge affects how we (or at least I) see the picture, and I see it as more, perhaps, than it is. My point here is not that photography as a genre is limited only to witnessing that the pepper was. My point is that if you limit yourself to the frame, photography is so shackled. If you, as a photographer, consider yourself limited to putting things in to the frame, than you are also shackled. Your chosen tool has a profoundly limited range of expression.

Curiously, we continue to have a heirarchy.

500px schlub is less than Guy Tal, who is less than Paul Caponigro, who is less than Ansel Adams.

But at the end of the day, all their pictures look pretty much the same. Sure, there might be a style note that reveals that this one if Briot, and that one isn't. But both pictures are about equally appealing, about equally pretty. Both witness the same there it was fact. Neither has any meaning beyond that witnessing.

Rather to my own delight, I have dubbed this as Serious Decor. It's decor, but we are socialized to take it seriously, for some reason. Oh, it's a picture of a dandelion, yawn. Oh, wait, it's a Caponigro! Well, well, then. It's an amazing and important photograph for, um, reasons you would not understand.

Just trust me.