The Worst Advice In The World

I've stumbled across this one several times on those horrible web sites with Ten Tips to Improve Your Captures.Why I keep reading these things is a mystery to me as well.

Learn to use your camera in manual mode.

I can think of no advice for a beginning photographer that is less useful, and I say this as a fellow who routinely uses his DSLR in a fashion rather more manual that Manual mode (the meter doesn't even work using my old lenses.)

All these web sites, with their triangles of exposure, their rules of thirds, and their silly advice about seascapes, promote the terrible and damaging idea that photography is about gear, and that mastery of gear is a prerequisite to mastery of the art. A photograph is not a piano concerto, mastering the instrument is not necessary. The instrument, with its controls and modes and programs, is barely relevant. Mastery of the instrument will not actually harm you, but it's not going to make a photographer of you.

The best advice for a new photographer is, of course

Learn to see.

Popular versus Good

This is a theme I have touched on, arguably harped on, in the past.

Here I mean Popular in the sense of "likeable"  not in the sense of "everyone knows about it and likes it" -- the difference between the two is marketing, not photography, anyways.

Popular isn't the same as Good. Good isn't the same as Popular. Good also is not the opposite of Popular -- the fact that nobody likes your work is not evidence that your work is Good. An even more common, but still wrong, idea is that Good has nothing to do with Popular.

Good overlaps with Popular in the following way: In order to be Good a piece has to be able to affect most of its viewers. This implies, obviously, that most of its viewers need to be willing to look at it for long enough to be affected. A Popular photograph is one most people enjoy looking at (by definition).

An un-Popular photograph might still be visually arresting enough to be effective, but it's less likely. One will naturally tend to be dismissive of a photograph one dislikes, but which is aggressive enough to hold one's gaze. A photograph which is Good but not Popular has successfully overcome obstacles in its journey to affecting the viewer.

Good photographs tend, therefore, to be Popular. There are fewer obstacles to effectiveness.

Of course, there are second order effects: Famous Good Photographs tend to garner Popularity by virtue of their fame, and tend also to direct the public's appreciation of which should be Popular. This feedback loop draws Good photographs gradually into the category of Popular, increasing the overlap between the categories.

Photos of Something, Photos of Nothing

Most photographs are pictures of something. There's an object, or a scene, a juxtapostition of shapes, something photographically promising which was recorded in the frame. Snapshots are almost exclusively this. Portraits are by definition this. And so forth.

Some photographs, a few, are photographs of nothing. That is, they're a photograph of whatever was in front of the lens at the time, but the point is that, whatever that was, it was photographically "nothing." Examples might be a texture, a river-smoothed stone indistinguishable from the rest, or a dimly lit green pepper. There might be a subject, but it's sufficiently crappy and uninteresting that it's "nothing" as a subject.

Obviously this is something of a subjective call, and what we're really talking about is a spectrum from "really interesting subject" to "really uninteresting subject" or something similar. Regardless, let us press on, and recognize that for most of us there are photographs we would characterize as "photographs of nothing" although we might disagree on which photographs those are.

Within that realm of photographs of nothing, I distinguish two kinds. This distinction might be completely artificial, or so subtle as to be a stupid bit of trivial parsing. Nonetheless, it's a distinction important enough to me that I tend to like the one kind, and tend to dislike the other kind.

The first kind of photograph of nothing attempts to reveal the nothing as, in fact, something. The very best example of this is probably Weston's "Pepper No. 30" which does, in fact, reveal a humble green pepper as something. Bad examples of this form litter the art galleries of the western world. Endless stupid pictures of abstract crap that the viewer is supposed to, somehow, come to love.

The second kind of photograph of nothing does not attempt to reveal the nothing as something. It lets the nothing alone, leaves it in the frame to be humble, ugly, and not photogenic at all. The successful examples of this form create, in spite of the humble subject, a fine image. A good example of this is Evans' photograph of the Gudger's mantel, from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This is a photograph of a rather unattractive mantel in the home of an indescribably poor family. The mantel has on it many of the family's small possessions, objects which are almost literally garbage. Despite the unpromising subjects, Evans made an iconic and powerful photograph. A good photograph.

Photographs of nothing are absurdly hard to make well. When attempting the first kind, one is likely to fall short. You might find a small audience that gets it, that sees the beauty of mud blobs revealed by your photographs of mud blobs (why are there always a bunch of these photographs instead of one good one?) It's very hard to make images like this that are powerful and evocative for more than a few people. When attempting the second kind, it's even worse, since there is little or nothing to love inside the frame, one must love the frame as a whole. Thus, the photographer has no room for error, the whole must work at once, and must overcome the basic nothingness of the stuff in-frame, or it fails completely.

On the positive side, if you can do it, perhaps you can do anything.

On "Street" Photography

Here are two excellent articles on street photography.

On Street Photography and Why Do Street Photography by Russ Lewis.

Street's not really my thing and I haven't thought a lot about it. You might disagree with Russ over definitions, but what he's describing is definitely a form, whatever you want to call it, and it's the form practiced by many of the greats. Russ does a nice job of describing what he thinks of as "street" and makes a credible argument that what he just described is what Cartier-Bresson and those guys were doing. Then he tells you not how to do it, but at least what some pre-requisites are, and why you might want to do it.

Read 'em, they're worth your time! Russ thinks and writes clearly.

FSA Photo of the Week

I skipped last week for lack of time. Maybe I'll start doing these on Wednesdays. Happy July 4th, US residents!

I like the dynamism in the man's pose, and expression. He's poised, for what, we're not sure (although obviously it's some mundane thing to do with corn). The backdrop of stacked corn is a nice texture, his clothes are great too. Possibly the legs and feet upper right screw the whole thing up, but possibly they anchor the scene in reality a bit making it clearly not staged.

William Singer, homesteader at Hightstown, New Jersey, helping to store corn for the dairy herd which is soon to be acquired by the colony. Russell Lee, Nov. 1936.

Text and Photographs

Photographs often come with accompanying text, particularly in "art" settings, such as museums and online galleries and so on.

• title
• descriptive text
• artist's statement

It's very difficult to write a piece of accompanying text that does not affect the viewer's reaction to the photograph. The only examples seem to be purely descriptive titles, such as "Nude" and then only if the photograph is obviously a nude. If the photograph is not obviously a nude, this title abruptly provides a new interpretation, affecting the viewer's experience substantially. Even a title like "Nude #3" adds context, by implying other nude images in a series and connecting this one to those. Titles like "Sorrow" more explicitly direct the viewer response.

Longer texts like an artist's statement will tend to have more impact, even if they don't address the image directly.  Having that text in mind, whatever it talks about, will surely affect the way the viewer sees the image.

Viewers will always come to an image with a large set of other material already present in their minds. We have all seen many photographs and images, we all have seen a lot of real things. We're probably been exposed to some art, somewhere along the line. We come to a photograph in a mood, with the memories of the morning drive to work, last night's dinner. All these things also affect how we will view an image, just as the accompanying text will. Text plays a role, but it can only hint, suggest, influence. It cannot control the viewer's response to the image.

Adding text to an image is an explicit acknowledgement that the image alone cannot carry the message. Perhaps the message, whatever that means, is too large and detailed (see, for instance Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) or perhaps the photograph is simply too weak. Perhaps the photograph is incapable, by its nature, of carrying important information; a documentary image might require a date and a location to serve its documentary purpose.

One can argue that the more text there is to accompany the photograph, the more the artist recognizes the inability of the photograph to carry the desired meaning. Why else have all that text? Even if the photograph exists to support the text rather than the other way around, the intent is clear: the photograph cannot carry the piece. We see shows, from time to time, of abstract or banal images accompanied by a one or more substantial texts that essentially tell us how to react to the images. Is this photography, writing, or some sort of multimedia thing? Parsing this out in any kind of detail is probably a waste of time, but it's clear that we should not view this kind of thing as purely photography.

Beware, I think, of writing too much after the fact. If your image cannot support itself without text, adding text afterwards might make something, but it won't make a photograph.

On A New Aesthetic

I don't think this post has any clear conclusion, it's just some ruminations and ideas on aesthetics and how they might evolve, and be evolving.

I speculated last week or so that flickr (and more generally the online community) might be in the process of developing one or more new aesthetics with their super high contrast, their ghastly Silver EfEx 2.0 Pro effects, and so on.

What do I mean by an "aesthetic" here? The word has a definition, and my usage falls under that, but let us be quite clear. The aesthetic of a photograph for the purposes of these remarks means the overall look of the photograph, and includes any elements which are not a part of the underlying composition. Things like contrast, saturation, tone mapping, vignetting. These all contribute to what I mean by the aesthetic of the photograph. The fact that it is a picture of a flower, or an abstract, or a nude, these are not considered part of the aesthetic, here. Some things arguably fall in a middle ground -- is a strong vignette part of the composition? Let us agree to live with these ambiguities.

What does the aesthetic of a photograph actually do?

1. it can exhibit effort, showing that the artist worked on the image.
2. it can demonstrate personal artistic taste and ideas, simply showing off a look that the artist likes.
3. it can emphasize certain elements of the image, and de-emphasize others.
4. it can connect the photograph to other photographs that have been made, if those photographs applied a similar aesthetic.

There are probably others, but I cannot think of any offhand. The first two are important to a degree, visible effort makes some viewers happy and expressing personal artistic taste is a large part of what making art is about. I want to focus, arbitrarily, on #3 and #4, however, because they're more important and they're connected in interesting ways.

New aesthetics come along pretty regularly, I suppose. Every photographer, perhaps, brings some new ideas about how a picture ought to look. Some of them get tried out and copied by friends and family, perhaps.

An aesthetic succeeds as a new thing, I think, if eventually some good work turns up that uses it, when that good work gets more or less widely recognized. Ansel Adams is the most obvious example, his black and white landscapes have a specific look that is widely, widely copied. These days we see wildly exaggerated versions of that aesthetic rampant on the internet, to the sorrow of us all. Adams applied his aesthetic to emphasize and de-emphasize -- he wanted to make the clouds and rocks dramatic, he wanted his shadows to be shadowy and his highlights to be bright, to reflect the drama he felt looking at these landscapes. The contrast increased the sense of overal "sharpness" in keeping with the f/64 ideas of photography. He also simply liked the look of it, I imagine.

When some aesthetic does succeed, we see it copied widely, because photographers wish to refer to it. They are quite literally citing the previous work in their work, connecting their photographs with known-to-be-good work from the past. They are borrowing successful ideas, like every competent artist, and most incompetent ones. This is surely what's going on with the Silver EfEx 2.0 gone bad crowd, with their jet black skies. Whether they know it or not, they're quoting Ansel Adams in a gigantic and very ugly font, and the intent is that we should react to their landscapes in the same way.

It will be interesting to see if some good work eventually turns up that uses HDR, either in an effective way, or at least in conjunction with some effective and lasting work. Will it always be a gimmick tyros try out for a while before discarding it for something else, or will we see it as a visual trope that lets us cite a body of powerful work in our own photographs?