A Gross Oversimplification

I'm muddling around thinking about Art, and Kitsch, and things of that sort. Here's a gross oversimplification:

• Fine Art gives us the old content, old ideas, old meaning, with a new look or style.
• Commercial Art gives us new content, new ideas, with the same old look or style.
• Kitsch gives us the same old content with the same old look or style.

Something, presumably, gives us new content in a new style.

Fine Art pretends to do this, but generally does not. To succeed, Fine Art is generally a mass of references (but heavens to Betsy, it certainly isn't derivative, it's referencing previous work in a knowing fashion, not simply copying ideas. Ahem.) only this time in welded steel that has been corroded in the artist's own urine for 12 months.

Commercial Art presents new clothes, the current bride, the next generation car, almost always in an existing style or look. The PR firm pulling it together has selected a look, perhaps with a tweak "but make it more blue, and with more motion blur", and wants the artist to present the new object with the old style.

Kitsch is just the same dogs playing poker as ever, the same porcelain figurines in the same color palettes, over and over.

I suspect that anything that gives us new content, new ideas, new meanings, dressed up in a new look, a new style, is simply incomprehensible.

Truth at the corner of Design and Meaning.

This will likely be a somewhat rambling essay. I'm just trying to think some things through. By "design" here I mean, I guess, composition. Perhaps I mean it as the result of the process of composition or something. I feel like saying "design" today, rather than "composition" in any case.

Most fine artists have direct control of the design. The painter puts paint wherever he or she wants it, the sculptor removes marble or welds on steel similarly. Where randomness is used, it is used on purpose. The dancer may not be fully aware of her eyebrows, but has certainly spent a great deal of time developing such awareness.

The photographer is stuck with what's in front of the lens. You'd think that a still life photographer, like me, would be in better shape. We are, but it's not perfect. There are always things in the frame that surprise you. The still life photographer is, perhaps, in the same general area as the actor or dancer. In theory we have total control, in practice we strive for total awareness and fall short. Things turn up in every frame which we did not expect, and did not notice while shooting. Shooting anything but still life moves the photographer more and more into the realm of having to find design, rather than to create it.

What about meaning? Let us consider meaning to be whatever a piece of art communicates to the viewer, and let us assume that as an artist you have some sort of meaning in mind that you'd like to communicate.

In well made art, the design supports the meaning. Design emphasizes the parts that are important, and de-emphasizes the rest. Design directs the viewer's attention in the appropriate ways, to create the appropriate sequencing of what is experienced, and to create whatever sensations are desired.

The painter perhaps places light paint next to dark paint, to create a region of highest contrast, where the most important thing is. The photographer would like to do the same, but must wrestle with the real world to accomplish it. The photographer must wait for the light or the model to behave, or move a strobe. At best, the photographer can manage many of the elements well, and must leave a few to their own devices. Design in photographs tends to approach the ideal, but never to quite get there.

As for truth, we seem to take pleasure in found designs, in design which was not staged. Much of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work gives us this joy. There are whole genres of photography devoted to witty juxtapositions, which is really about truth in design. The dog shaped like the fire hydrant isn't as amusing placed next to the fire hydrant when we learn that the dog was in fact placed there for the picture. We can measure the degree to which we enjoy these designs as found rather than made my examining our ire when it is revealed that something was staged or in any way other than simply found as-is. As with all truth in photography, we're quite irrational about it.

Somehow, it's honest to fashion the design by moving the camera but dishonest to move the objects in the frame. Regardless, we are nearly as annoyed to learn that the design was fashioned rather than found as we are when we learn that the meaning is not literally true.

Photographs more than most other arts balance meaning and design. A poorly designed picture with potent meaning can stand well, like a technically poor singer with great emotional presence. A beautifully designed picture we permit a certain paucity of meaning, like a technically superb dancer who connects tenuously with the emotion of the piece.

The most iconic, the very best photographs, combine all three: design, meaning, and truth.

Think of a great photograph. Was it staged? Is the design excellent? Does it create an immediate and powerful emotional response in you?

Prize Winning Photographs

Camera Club prize winners, blue ribbon winners from the state fair, photos that made Explore on flickr, trending photos on 500px, and so on, and so on, and so on. I hate them all so much.

How many crisp and clear, pretty, colorful, empty frames of despair can a man stand? The landscapes are so lush and green, with perfect little clouds. The macro bugs are so sharp and colorful. The various pets are so charming, as are the children. It's like visiting an expensive suburb, but not too expensive, with the strip malls all done up with columns and red tile roofs so you hardly notice that they're strip malls with the same collection of Starbucks, Supercuts, Walgreens at one end, CVS on the other, and the funky little indy bakery that's going to go out of business pretty soon.

I haven't the heart to scream at the photographers in question as they accept their accolades, but the whole awful enterprise makes me itch.

Truth and Photographs

In my ongoing quest to grasp how we think about photographs, I have devised the following thought experiment:

You visit a gallery, online or in a venue. It doesn't matter. You view a portfolio of serious black and white work, perhaps photographs of people. Each photograph has a title and a lengthy caption that fills in the story. Taken as a whole, the portfolio teaches, it reveals, it makes you feel, it connects you to something bigger. Universal truths are more open to you now than before. It's not news, it's not a documentary essay, it's not depicting important Things or Happenings. It's more universal and abstract, but it is mighty. It is powerful, profound, and it moves you.

At the end of the gallery, you learn that the portfolio is a work of fiction. The photographs are of models or actors, the captions tell invented stories. How do you feel?

Probably you feel cheated, lied to.

Why? You might claim that the work was misrepresented, but it was not (let us suppose). You simply assumed that it was not fiction. You're not enraged by the revelation that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is fiction, are you? Or Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird?

The point is that we view, by default, photographs as true. This is why the press uses them, not because they are true, for they are not, but because we believe them to be true.

What does it matter that a powerful image with a powerful caption is fiction? If it's not misrepresenting itself, why should we either assume that it's true, or be upset when we learn it is not? Isn't it enough that it tell its powerful story well?

I hold no moral high ground here. I'd be as mad as the next fellow. But I'd be just as wrong.

ToP Strikes Again

The Online Photographer doesn't always overlap much with things I like to write about, but from time to time Mike really writes something that I wish I'd written. This post is definitely one of those.

I will add to what Mike wrote, to point out that what really has meaning, what the piece is, if you will, is the photograph plus some text. The caption, the title, or both. Any combination creates a piece with real depth. Without any text at all, the picture is, while slightly enigmatic, not much of a picture.

This is a truly stellar example of how attached text can violently alter our perception of picture, or a piece of art. In this case, the alteration is a complete transformation from bland to powerful.

Editing

In what follows I do not mean digital photo editing with photoshop etc. I mean picking out the good ones.

Two facts.

Most writers of any understanding know perfectly well that they cannot edit their own work with any effectiveness. There are editors out there that do this for you. There's some notion of objectivity, some notion of distance from the work, that seems to be mostly required to make most writing good, and any writing truly excellent.

When you make a photograph, you know what you intended. You know what the important things are, you know what doesn't matter. When you look at a picture you made, generally speaking, all that stuff comes back to you and you see the picture you meant to take. Sure, there are methods for getting some distance. Put the picture away for so and so many days, weeks, years, and come back to it. Those help, but unless you have a very poor memory or a very large number of pictures, you'll never quite shake the picture you meant to take, and that's what you'll tend to see instead of the picture you actually took.

Why do photographers think they can edit themselves? We all do. Many professionals are even required to. Wedding photographers shoot, edit, and produce the final set of pictures, all in one for the most part. Arguably things like weddings are easier to edit, since there's the required shots and you simply pick the from the instances of the required shots those that have the fewest technical problems, and best embody that well known picture. Arguably, though, that's a problem. Probably the results would be better if someone else did the editing.

I have argued that some photographers may be almost entirely creations of that editing process (Winogrand, Maier). We don't know, but we know that they certainly did not edit themselves, and that their work at the very least benefitted immensely from that third-party editing process.

This is an area in which critique can really help. The simple information that some picture simply isn't very good might be the most valuable thing a photographer can look for from others. When you get that, respect it. It might not be true, the viewer might be missing it, or not "getting it" or something. If you've chosen someone sensible, someone you trust, to look at your picture, you should not dismiss their view lightly.

Your editor is your friend, your editor is how you get from good to great.

Instagram's Failure

I've argued in the past that instagram and its friends are having a positive effect on.. something. One-touch art-ification software has the potential to alter the perception of a photograph from a record to a piece of art. Not necessarily good art, just not a record any more. An instagram user begins to see a picture as an artistic expression, not merely a picture of a plate of sushi.

Similarly, plugins, add-ons, and various bits of software that will make your picture look like an oil painting, or a pencil sketch, or an etching, whatever. These all have, potentially, the same perception altering effect.

What is lacking is any kind of next step. I apply a Wingo effect to my picture of my cat. The scales drop from me eyes as it were, and I begin to grasp the idea of photography as art. What do I do now? How can I do more of this? Quite briskly I will see that the Wingo effect is trite and overdone. Perhaps I move on to some other effect, but the whole thing will dry up shortly. What is the point of it all? Either I am permanently trapped in a cycle of ultimately cheesy effects, or I bore of the whole thing and the scales return to my eyes.

There is no ArtHistoryGram app for my phone that can lead me anywhere interesting.

This is in part because any reasonable next steps are hard. As I have noted over and over and over and over again, there is no royal road to Art. There is no one-click app for strong composition. Quick Tips will only go so far. However, the makers of the various "make this artsy in one click" software have abdicated any responsibility to lead their users anywhere. They provide no easy next step, however small, except perhaps in the form of an advertisement for some other one click software, or perhaps a sketchy educational establishment which will, for a fee, fill you up with Quick Tips gleaned from various web sites filled with Quick Tips gleaned from other web sites.

I have no particular solution. It does seem unfair to give people a taste of art without then offering them, if not a full meal, at least a snack.