A good portrait is a piece of mental origami. It should be a complete narrative, a story of a person, a circumstance, a life, folded up into a neat little visual package that your mind unfolds back into that story.
The neat trick is that it might unfold into a different story for everyone who looks at it. But, if it works, it unfolds.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Saturday, September 8, 2012
So it's Propaganda. So What?
I am instantly suspicious of people who want to "raise awareness". Raising awareness does not actually cure cancer, or feed hungry people. In the case of propaganda, which is entirely about manipulating your thoughts and emotions, awareness is actually the thing though. Be aware of what truth and what falsehood inheres in a photograph.
Art is supposed to manipulate your thoughts and emotions. That's how you know it's working. Let it!
Be liberated from worry about truth and some phantom of journalistic integrity. Consider a photograph of a poor man in his home. Is he really poor, or is he the photographer's college roommate? Is that house a set? Who cares! We know for certain that the photographer, if at all competent, framed the image to maximize the sensation of poverty. We know for sure that the photographer chose not to publish the photographs of the man smiling happily, showing off his new watch, his new car. Why worry about whether the man is really poor? The point is to make us empathize with the poor, to remind us that there are poor people. Are there poor people? Why yes, there are. In that sense, the photograph is true and accurate. It may be propaganda, but like much propaganda the narrative it is supporting is in fact pretty much true. Incomplete, but true as far as it goes.
The only time to really worry about it is when a photograph is trying to change your mind or change your vote or change your bank account. If you feel a photograph doing those things -- this is where the awareness comes in -- you can stop and consider what might have been just outside the frame. What was in the frame 10 seconds earlier, and 10 seconds later? Someone shot this and selected it to change your mind, your vote, or to lighten your wallet.
Maybe they're right, maybe your mind and vote should change. Maybe your wallet has too much money in it. Maybe they're wrong. You get to decide that, really. Stay sharp and don't let the bastards manipulate you. At any rate, don't let them manipulate you too swiftly and easily.
Art is supposed to manipulate your thoughts and emotions. That's how you know it's working. Let it!
Be liberated from worry about truth and some phantom of journalistic integrity. Consider a photograph of a poor man in his home. Is he really poor, or is he the photographer's college roommate? Is that house a set? Who cares! We know for certain that the photographer, if at all competent, framed the image to maximize the sensation of poverty. We know for sure that the photographer chose not to publish the photographs of the man smiling happily, showing off his new watch, his new car. Why worry about whether the man is really poor? The point is to make us empathize with the poor, to remind us that there are poor people. Are there poor people? Why yes, there are. In that sense, the photograph is true and accurate. It may be propaganda, but like much propaganda the narrative it is supporting is in fact pretty much true. Incomplete, but true as far as it goes.
The only time to really worry about it is when a photograph is trying to change your mind or change your vote or change your bank account. If you feel a photograph doing those things -- this is where the awareness comes in -- you can stop and consider what might have been just outside the frame. What was in the frame 10 seconds earlier, and 10 seconds later? Someone shot this and selected it to change your mind, your vote, or to lighten your wallet.
Maybe they're right, maybe your mind and vote should change. Maybe your wallet has too much money in it. Maybe they're wrong. You get to decide that, really. Stay sharp and don't let the bastards manipulate you. At any rate, don't let them manipulate you too swiftly and easily.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
It's All Propaganda
Here in the western world, we periodically have a little flurry of news surrounding some obviously faked photograph released by a foreign government, or occasionally by some foreign stringer. Two missiles in flight when only one was launched, and so forth. We get to have a little fun laughing at the foreigners and their lame photochop skills, but mostly we get to feel superior. Our guys don't do that!
To be sure, we're perfectly correct. Our guys don't do that. Our guys propagandize just as hard, but almost never with badly faked photographs. A side effect of these bad fakes, which our guys are no doubt quite pleased with, is that photographs which are not faked get an extra little boost of credibility. Our media organizations usually have some policies in place about not publishing fakes, to further boost this credibility. The policy will say that only certain types of edits are acceptable in photographs for publication. This is completely silly, any propagandist worth his pay can lie as effectively with a crop (moral, decent, acceptable) as with an erasure (immoral, unacceptable, and just plain wrong).
News Corp.'s papers, the New York Times, and everyone else obscures parts of the truth by selecting which photographs to display. They, and we, select photographs to support at best a partially true narrative, eliding things we do not wish to show and emphasizing things we do wish to show. You and I do it too. In this sense, every photograph uploaded to Facebook is a lie.
I recently attended a more or less typical American wedding, complete with a professional wedding photographer and a second shooter. I also took some photographs. The professional's images are entirely typical, and portray the wedding as a beautiful and idyllic event with at least one important deletion: the ever-present pacing specter of the photographer and his pop-pop-popping flash. My photos were mostly of my daughter, who is two, and of the photographer and other workers making the wedding happen. My images present another, equally false and incomplete, narrative of the wedding.
It is a poor propagandist who cannot thoroughly and effectively promote any desired narrative by commissioning and selecting the right images. The FSA/OWI archive is a 100,000+ photograph paean to this very idea.
A straight photograph tells the exact truth of the instant the shutter was released, right up to the edge of the frame. And that is no truth at all.
To be sure, we're perfectly correct. Our guys don't do that. Our guys propagandize just as hard, but almost never with badly faked photographs. A side effect of these bad fakes, which our guys are no doubt quite pleased with, is that photographs which are not faked get an extra little boost of credibility. Our media organizations usually have some policies in place about not publishing fakes, to further boost this credibility. The policy will say that only certain types of edits are acceptable in photographs for publication. This is completely silly, any propagandist worth his pay can lie as effectively with a crop (moral, decent, acceptable) as with an erasure (immoral, unacceptable, and just plain wrong).
News Corp.'s papers, the New York Times, and everyone else obscures parts of the truth by selecting which photographs to display. They, and we, select photographs to support at best a partially true narrative, eliding things we do not wish to show and emphasizing things we do wish to show. You and I do it too. In this sense, every photograph uploaded to Facebook is a lie.
I recently attended a more or less typical American wedding, complete with a professional wedding photographer and a second shooter. I also took some photographs. The professional's images are entirely typical, and portray the wedding as a beautiful and idyllic event with at least one important deletion: the ever-present pacing specter of the photographer and his pop-pop-popping flash. My photos were mostly of my daughter, who is two, and of the photographer and other workers making the wedding happen. My images present another, equally false and incomplete, narrative of the wedding.
It is a poor propagandist who cannot thoroughly and effectively promote any desired narrative by commissioning and selecting the right images. The FSA/OWI archive is a 100,000+ photograph paean to this very idea.
A straight photograph tells the exact truth of the instant the shutter was released, right up to the edge of the frame. And that is no truth at all.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Reproducibility
Stories are told of musical prodigies who could, on hearing a piece of music performed, could write down a note-accurate score of the piece. Ansel Adams famously referred to the print as a performance of the "score" inhering in the negative.
Happily, we needn't be a photographic Mozart to write down the score of a print. We need be merely a competent technician with fair observational skills. In general, a moderately skilled photographer can, with an existing photograph for reference, reproduce it. With landscapes there are, of course, issues with weather and growing trees and so forth. With a model you probably have to hire someone else, and their makeup will never be quite the same and so forth. Although carbon copies are possible, what I am really interested in is photographs that function in the same way as the original, the light falls the same way, the mood evoked is the same, and so forth. One places a light here, a light there, tries such-and-such a focal length -- oh bother, I need to be a little longer -- and so on. The amount of hacking around depends on the reference image and the photographer, but it can be done.
Let us not forget post processing, of course. The actual printing of the negative, the monkeying about in a digital photo editor. Let us nod to it, and wave it past as all, essentially, technical details which can also be seen in the print and emulated.
Shooting a fake, albeit minor, Avedon isn't even particularly hard. Painting a fake Sargent that would pass even casual muster is a substantially more challenging proposition.
Essentially, most photographic ideas and looks can be reduced to a formula, which is then more or less straightforward to follow.
The professional photographer, being first and foremost in business, is selling a product. The essence of a product lies in reproducibility. The ability to create photographs per a formula is, then, more or less essential to the business of photography. If the pictures from each wedding came out quite differently, the wedding photographer would shortly be out of business (or at any rate, would suffer). There are many reasons people rarely pay to have their weddings painted, but surely one of them is that you haven't a clear idea what it is you're likely to get in the end.
The best professionals will, of course, create their own formulae, new formulae. These will become products in their portfolio, a new "look" the clients can purchase. There is originality here, albeit usually evolutionary, but the professional is forced by business reality to reduce it to formula.
It follows that original work in photography lies mostly in the domain of the amateur and the artist. Professionals and amateurs can, of course, be artists. Earning one's bread with the camera does not exclude one from the exclusive club of original thinkers. Rarely, though, will the professional be able to express those original thoughts while simultaneously earning that bread.
Happily, we needn't be a photographic Mozart to write down the score of a print. We need be merely a competent technician with fair observational skills. In general, a moderately skilled photographer can, with an existing photograph for reference, reproduce it. With landscapes there are, of course, issues with weather and growing trees and so forth. With a model you probably have to hire someone else, and their makeup will never be quite the same and so forth. Although carbon copies are possible, what I am really interested in is photographs that function in the same way as the original, the light falls the same way, the mood evoked is the same, and so forth. One places a light here, a light there, tries such-and-such a focal length -- oh bother, I need to be a little longer -- and so on. The amount of hacking around depends on the reference image and the photographer, but it can be done.
Let us not forget post processing, of course. The actual printing of the negative, the monkeying about in a digital photo editor. Let us nod to it, and wave it past as all, essentially, technical details which can also be seen in the print and emulated.
Shooting a fake, albeit minor, Avedon isn't even particularly hard. Painting a fake Sargent that would pass even casual muster is a substantially more challenging proposition.
Essentially, most photographic ideas and looks can be reduced to a formula, which is then more or less straightforward to follow.
The professional photographer, being first and foremost in business, is selling a product. The essence of a product lies in reproducibility. The ability to create photographs per a formula is, then, more or less essential to the business of photography. If the pictures from each wedding came out quite differently, the wedding photographer would shortly be out of business (or at any rate, would suffer). There are many reasons people rarely pay to have their weddings painted, but surely one of them is that you haven't a clear idea what it is you're likely to get in the end.
The best professionals will, of course, create their own formulae, new formulae. These will become products in their portfolio, a new "look" the clients can purchase. There is originality here, albeit usually evolutionary, but the professional is forced by business reality to reduce it to formula.
It follows that original work in photography lies mostly in the domain of the amateur and the artist. Professionals and amateurs can, of course, be artists. Earning one's bread with the camera does not exclude one from the exclusive club of original thinkers. Rarely, though, will the professional be able to express those original thoughts while simultaneously earning that bread.
Monday, September 3, 2012
A Theory
I have the theory, which I don't actually think is literally true but which I try to hang on to anyways. It's this: there are technically good photographs everywhere. At any moment, anywhere, there's something in view which would make a graphically strong image. Not necessarily good art, not necessarily an emotionally powerful image, but a strong composition.
As I say, I don't think it's literally true -- if you're in the middle of the ocean under a cloudless sky, the options are gonna be a little limited. Generally, though, most of the time, there's something. You might not be able to get physically close enough to shoot it with the lens you have, or you might not have a wide enough lens, or whatever. The equipment might make it impossible, but there's usually something there.
So what? Well, nothing much, but the following strange corollary occurred to me over the weekend. Well, it's not really a corollary, since it doesn't quite follow logically, it's more of a similar idea that's probably just about as true.
In any sufficiently wide angle deep field of focus photograph, there's a strong composition that can be cropped out of it.
Again, not really true all the time, but I feel like it's true a lot of the time. This obviously hearkens back to my earlier remarks in which I suggest that shooting with a lot of pixels, a very wide lens, and a very very twitchy shutter finger is a valid approach to photography. In that approach, you're just grabbing vast amounts of raw material, and then doing the "photography" as such in post, by cropping and processing.
This theory boils down to "that approach will work" but comes at it from another angle.
As I say, I don't think it's literally true -- if you're in the middle of the ocean under a cloudless sky, the options are gonna be a little limited. Generally, though, most of the time, there's something. You might not be able to get physically close enough to shoot it with the lens you have, or you might not have a wide enough lens, or whatever. The equipment might make it impossible, but there's usually something there.
So what? Well, nothing much, but the following strange corollary occurred to me over the weekend. Well, it's not really a corollary, since it doesn't quite follow logically, it's more of a similar idea that's probably just about as true.
In any sufficiently wide angle deep field of focus photograph, there's a strong composition that can be cropped out of it.
Again, not really true all the time, but I feel like it's true a lot of the time. This obviously hearkens back to my earlier remarks in which I suggest that shooting with a lot of pixels, a very wide lens, and a very very twitchy shutter finger is a valid approach to photography. In that approach, you're just grabbing vast amounts of raw material, and then doing the "photography" as such in post, by cropping and processing.
This theory boils down to "that approach will work" but comes at it from another angle.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Light, Wrong or Right
There are techniques in play amongst amateurs which render the light in a photograph muddled, wrong, or completely meaningless. Chief amongst these is HDR, but you can do the same sort of thing with localized adjustments of various sorts. You can also do it in-camera by hosing the subject down with strobes.
The goal generally seems to be to reveal detail all over the subject. The result is weird looking "light."
What's really odd is that a lot of people like the result. They literally don't seem to see that the light is all wrong. My theory (which I've mentioned before specifically with regard to HDR) is that the younger generation has grown up with video games and animation, which often seem to render with everything lit from nowhere. There might be key lights in play, but shadows are more often added for effect than allowed to fall naturally as empty regions in the frame.
So what if I don't like it? So what if old buggers with ideas hate it? If pretty much every actual person sees no problem with this bizarro lighting then, more or less by definition, there is no problem with it. In a way we already see this in commercial photography, but subtly applied. The real skill -- today -- in a pro is revealing all the detail without making the light look wrong. Is the not-wrong requirement about to vanish? Arguably it should. If nobody in the market cares or can even see when light is weird and wrong, why bother making it look right? Will American Apparel come out with a campaign that makes it look like the models are all in some first person shooter? To be honest, I hope so. That would be bitchin'. I'd hate the work, but I'd love the concept.
The goal generally seems to be to reveal detail all over the subject. The result is weird looking "light."
What's really odd is that a lot of people like the result. They literally don't seem to see that the light is all wrong. My theory (which I've mentioned before specifically with regard to HDR) is that the younger generation has grown up with video games and animation, which often seem to render with everything lit from nowhere. There might be key lights in play, but shadows are more often added for effect than allowed to fall naturally as empty regions in the frame.
So what if I don't like it? So what if old buggers with ideas hate it? If pretty much every actual person sees no problem with this bizarro lighting then, more or less by definition, there is no problem with it. In a way we already see this in commercial photography, but subtly applied. The real skill -- today -- in a pro is revealing all the detail without making the light look wrong. Is the not-wrong requirement about to vanish? Arguably it should. If nobody in the market cares or can even see when light is weird and wrong, why bother making it look right? Will American Apparel come out with a campaign that makes it look like the models are all in some first person shooter? To be honest, I hope so. That would be bitchin'. I'd hate the work, but I'd love the concept.
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