Urban Photography

I shot this thing on the way back from the YMCA where I had taken my daughter for a swim lesson.

I am reasonably certain it would do well on certain internet venues, especially if I claimed I'd done it on film.

Of course I didn't use film. I used my phone. The observant reader will also note that it is facile and stupid. It's a 'cool thing' of the sort every city is littered with.

It ticks off several boxes on the 'street photography' bingo card, though.

Any fool can bang this crap out all day long by the simple expedient of opening his or her god damn eyes. 

Short Form

When your work is good, you'll know. At some point you'll just know that what you're doing is good. You will no longer care much about feedback from other people.

Congratulations. You are now an Artist. Or a monomaniac.

Not that there's a lot of difference.

Short Form

A photograph is whatever is in front of the lens at this instant

If you manipulate the objects beyond certain limits, you destroy what it is to be a photograph.

But, you can manipulate the apparent instant arbitrarily.

What power!

Photography as Art

I admit it. I am fascinated by Ming Thein's blog. Well, more by his legion of fanboys. Mr. Thein is just chugging along thinking about stuff and writing about it. Obviously I have no particular problem with blogs that contain half-formed thoughts, or poorly assembled ideas, and so on (e.g. this blog).

His fanboys seem to think that he is issuing wisdom from the mount, however, which can be pretty entertaining. See, for instance, this thing which is about equal parts gibberish, incomplete statements, and perfectly correct statements. But the comments, my word. You'd think someone would step up and point out some of the dumb.

Anyways. That's not what I'm writing about today, not mostly. It's this other thing Mr. Thein wrote. I think it's sort of silly, but that's just me. More to the point, it's an interesting thing to ponder, and opens up some questions, and so I thought about them a bit.

I've actually written about this a bit, right here, and I managed to get it at least partly wrong. I'd like to spend 1000 words trying to rationalize why my wrongness is actually rightness in disguise but.. meh. I dropped the ball.

Mr. Thein's assertions include, as I read it, that photography is unique in that it is a direct representation of a real thing, unlike, say, painting, and unlike all other art. I have said essentially the same thing, and we're both wrong. Duchamp's readymades (and legions of more recent artists doing essentially the same thing) do photography one better. They're not a representation of a real thing, they are the real thing. Don't photograph the urinal, pry the urinal off the wall and declare it to be art. Go in any modern art museum and you'll see similar pieces.

But more than that, Mr. Thein (and perhaps this author) seem to assert that because photography is of real things, this separates it from the rest of Art. It does not.

Sculpture creates a real thing. A piece of music performed is another real thing, albeit not usually one you can kick. A painting is (sometimes) a visual representation of a thing, as interpreted in paint by a painter. A readymade is a real thing. And a photograph is a.. photographic copy of a real thing. And so on.

It's not as if all of Art is huddled in one corner, and photography huddled in the opposite one, because it dares to begin as a literal representation of the real.

They're all huddled together, partaking of reality in different ways. From their individual characteristics, they derive their strength.

Obviously a photograph derives its power from the fact that it is -- or at least began as -- a representation of a real thing. It is the nature of photographs. If a photograph is to have power, strength, where else shall it derive this from, except from its own nature? It is almost silly to say it.

Photography can certainly be Art, this isn't even a question any more.

But also, it's not a special category of Art. It's just Art.

Short Form

Don't look for "your art" with a camera.

Art, particularly photographic Art, is in the idea. Therefore, nurture the place where ideas grow. Till the soil of your mind. Care for the seedlings. Pluck out the weak and malformed, nurture the best and strongest.

Then shoot.

Short Form

A visual style evokes or supports an idea. Therefore, only if your ideas tend to run in similar paths will you tend to develop a signature style.

Local Maxima

In mathematics you find this idea of a "local maximum" which is, roughly, a place where everything nearby is lower down. Some of us call this a "hill".

The point is, though, that it's the highest place nearby, but not necessarily the highest place there is, or even the highest place in a somewhat larger area.

The thing about local maxima is that these are what iterative processes of improvement find. If you're out walking and you try always to walk uphill, you'll find a local maximum. Sometimes you have to go downhill and cross a valley to find a higher peak.

So you just got a camera and you're taking pictures. Probably they're not that great. You might start out making sweeping changes every day but pretty quickly you're likely to start making small changes. You work on getting focus right. You're engaged in an iterative process of improvement. You change a little thing, you see if the result is better. If yes, keep going. If not, make a different, small, change.

If you're in a camera club or online sharing venue, or really anything that lets other people who don't necessarily love you tell you stuff about your pictures, they're going to help. They'll offer single suggestions "too dark" and so on. They will create an environment of what "uphill" means for you, and they'll guide you iteratively, step by step, up that hill.

So you're going to find a local maximum. At this point making changes will tend to make your pictures worse (in some sense).

Let us imagine the world of all possible photographs. There are higher areas that represent "better" pictures, and lower areas that represent "worse" pictures. It doesn't matter what you mean by better or worse. Whatever you like, really. Popular? Artistic? Thought provoking? Anything. It doesn't matter.

If you find yourself on a hill labelled "flickr Explored" you're at a local maximum. You are simply not going to iterate your way, tentative step by tentative step, to something better.

If you want to make powerful art, or whatever, anything that is both "good" by any definition you like, and which is also not instantly recognizable as "flickr Explored", you've got two choices:

• Iterate your way step by step through some valley of bad pictures, trying, probably at random, to find a new, higher, peak somewhere on the other side. Ugh.
• Line up on a higher peak, back off 10 steps, run like hell, and take a gigantic flying leap.

Either way, you have to make a radical change. Small changes are just going to produce crap.

Don't like where you are? Stop fiddling around, and start lining up on some higher peaks.

And get ready to fall.