Allow me to elaborate. Or don't, I shall elaborate regardless!
I've been mashing shutter buttons off and on for something like 40 years. I've been making a stab at Serious Photography for something like 30 years. I did my time as a wannabee Ansel Adams, and read the Trinity and spent a lot of time dorking around in darkrooms. I've read history, and I have aspired to be Stieglitz, and Steichen, and all those blokes. Along the way I have taken a fair number of pictures, and learned a fair number of things about taking pictures. I haven't taken as many as a lot of you probably have, but I've taken a pretty goodly number.
Along the way I figured out enough about Ansel Adams style landscape photography to know that I could probably, by applying myself diligently for a year or two, get good enough to churn out black and white landscapes of a certain caliber more or less at will. Perhaps not Adams, but anyways Picker and a whole lot of other acolytes. Pick up a copy of LENSWORK and you'll see a lot of this stuff. This is not because I am special, it is because I am a normally competent human being. Almost anyone can learn this. There are 1000s, maybe 10s of 1000s of people out there banging out this material on a regular basis.
Basically, though, I am lazy. I don't want to do all that hiking, and I don't want to arrange my life such that I would be able to do all that hiking. It takes more than normal abilities with the camera, it takes a commitment and a lifestyle that I found unappealing.
The same story can be applied to, say, photographs of models. Again, I learned enough along the way to see that if I applied myself for a year or two I could get Quite Good at it and then I could churn out Fashion Styled photographs, or Figure Studies, or whatever. Again, the skills necessary to grind out the pictures are a minor part of it, it's the business of rearranging my life to make room for a lot of hired models and lights and enormous octoboxes that I found uninteresting.
Ditto macro photography. I never did make a serious attempt at wildlife photography, but by now I see the pattern. I could buy the gear, devote some time to learning some skills, and then I could rearrange my life, and lo, I could churn out endless Birds In Flight or whatever.
The question arises naturally: if I am so damned serious about photography, why am I so unwilling to rearrange my life a bit in order to do it better, to produce better photographs?
It is, essentially, because I perceive the kinds of pictures I could have made down any of those paths as not worth the trouble. They would have been fine pictures, but they would have been just like a lot of other pictures put out there by a lot of other normally competent people who applied themselves rather more diligently that I am willing to apply myself.
It's a bit like making a good quiche. Lots of people never make a quiche at all. Quite a few people make lousy quiche. Some people make excellent quiche. To make good quiche there's a bunch of skills you need to have: you should be able to handle a pie crust, you need to have a rough grasp not only of how to reliably crack eggs without getting shell bits everywhere but also some grasp of how eggs cook, etcetera. The point is that the ability to make a good quiche is perfectly teachable. A few people may have some mental block which renders them incapable of learning these skills, but almost anyone could learn to do it. Most people don't.
It happens that I have learned it, and that furthermore I am perfectly happy to bang out a good quiche more or less on demand, despite the fact that there isn't anything particularly special about a good quiche. I am not a quiche snob, at least not in the sense that I refuse to do it because it's something that anyone could do. I am perfectly happy to be an everyman who happens to have and to exercise the relevant quiche making skills.
Where photography is concerned, however, I am a snob.
The fact that my quiche exists does not mean that the restaurant French Laundry does not exist, and the existence of French Laundry does not make my quiche non-existent, or even bad.
Neither could I pretend that a dinner I prepared of my quiche and a salad is equivalent to dinner at French Laundry. These are not the same thing, at all. Almost anyone could, by applying themselves with a little diligence, produce the former. The latter is rather more involved and, in very real ways, a superior thing. My quiche dinner would be excellent, I assure you, but it would not be in any way equivalent.
If the French Laundry dinner included quiche, the quiche would not be much better than mine. That, however, is not the point. French Laundry is doing something other than sticking a slice of good quiche on a plate.
Where photography is concerned, rather than quiches, I am much more interested in the French Laundry version of the thing than the homemade quiche version. The analogy could be stretched a bit more to note that it is not the quiche which makes the dinner ordinary or great, it is the way the quiche is contextualized. But that is maybe a bridge too far.
Do I do the French Laundry version? No, of course not. But it's what I am interested in. It's what I want to do. It is the object of my study, it is my aspiration, it's what I write about and think about.
I am a snob. Your quiche photographs, and my quiche photographs as well, are perfectly nice, but I am not very much interested in them.
I prefer chicken pot pie. My wife makes a superb one every year for my birthday. It actually takes her two days (not two solid days of work, but it's a process). I'd be surprised if the French Laundry makes one that's much better. Anyway, I think you are too hard on quicheography.
ReplyDeleteBut it's good to be picky if you want to get better, whether it's your own photography, or your criticism of photography. I used to teach photography to middle school kids, and I would tell that that a lot of it is just learning to become picky. Not so picky that you produce nothing, but just picky enough so you squeeze some good stuff our of your memory card every so often.
I think perhaps a shorter way to say this is:
DeleteThere are things which are excellent, without being exceptional. I adore many excellent, but not exceptional things. Like good quiche. Or, chicken pot pie! Also a delight.
In photography, though, I distinctly prefer the exceptional.
That makes sense. If you were an ok jazz pianist, but not exceptional, would you make your own personal albums and spend long hours listening to them? Likely not, unless you were kind of strange. But you would listen to the masters, I bet.
DeleteI think that for an artist it's ultimately counter-productive to cultivate snobbery.
DeleteHistory plays a part in what makes something exceptional in any field. Today, photographic technique is quite easy to learn, but expressing something creatively...not so much. The bar goes ever higher with the passing of time.
ReplyDeleteThat said, you really are a photo snob - try getting out more....
"Do I do the French Laundry version? No, of course not. But it's what I am interested in. It's what I want to do. It is the object of my study, it is my aspiration, it's what I write about and think about."
ReplyDeleteSounds like the perfect recipe for frustration ...
Best, Thomas
I'm aiming high, you know? I think that's supposed to be a good thing. It is frustrating, but the alternative was (for me) worse.
DeleteThis is certainly a noble quest. But like in the quest for the hole grail, you're chasing something that's highly evasive. Since there are no objective benchmarks for Art, you can only perfect your things to your own satisfaction and after you're finished you can only hope that others will appreciate what you did. But you have to be satisfied in the first place, and aiming at a lofty target will prevent satisfaction. It's like one of these "Zen in the Art of Archery" things, the harder you aim the more likely you'll miss.
DeleteI wish I could explain this better, but it'd be hard even in my native language, and attempting it in English is like playing jackstraws with mittens on.
Best, Thomas
Contrary the advice in the comment above, I'd stick with the snobbery - it's the only way to keep your head above water in the tsunami of images that are newly visible every day. While drowning may become peaceful as you let go, you still end up dead.
ReplyDeleteEither way, you still end up dead.
DeleteThis post is one reason I keep coming back.
ReplyDeleteIs there not a danger of then never taking a picture for fear that it will not be exceptional? But if you don't take pictures, don't you kind of forget how?
ReplyDeleteWell, there are two parts to my response here.
Delete1. This is the system, the philosophy, I use to judge other people's work. It is, essentially, the belief that some work is better than other work, together with the idea that there is some very very good work indeed.
So, that part impinges on my picture-taking not at all!
2. It does affect my aspirations for my own work as well, of course. If we take as my personal Mt. Everest something like "to make something as good as Minamata" well that's pretty demoralizing on the face of it.
Still, I am having a good time doing a lot of practice climbing and summiting smaller peaks and so on. If I continue to work my way up, making better work, well, I may never end up at the top of Everest, but I will still be pleased with myself.
Having a very high goal maybe just means never running out of things to do?
You call it quiche I call it photographic club tennis. All good fun, but it ain't gonna get you a US Open title.
ReplyDeletePhotography is many things but last I checked, it's neither a pricey restaurant nor a competitive sport, all the phony awards and earnest reviews notwithstanding. Best of my ass.
DeleteAnalogies are occasionally imperfect, imagine!
DeleteRecommended ingredients:
ReplyDelete- Being able to recognise which types of quiche have been baked in the past.
-Desire to make a quiche that says something about the provenance of it's ingredients.
- Work on finding a recipe that for both your current tastebuds fulfills the objective stated above while still being connected to all or at least some types of quiche made in the past.
Most people won't like your concoction. Doesn't matter, eat your quiche and have it anyway.
For me it's only a little bit like making quiche. Your quiche, if it's anything like mine, turns out pretty much the same every time (acceptable) because I follow the same process; same ingredients, same timings, same procedure. Maybe photography is rather more like cooking. Most people can make toast because the ingredients are basic and the process runs on rails. But with a little enthusiasm comes Welsh Rarebit, Croque Monsieur and all the other slightly-burnt-bread based variations. If you're keen on toast the sky really is the limit, but you need to have toast commitment, to enjoy the toasting process and most importantly to allow that sometimes, often probably, you'll burn it in your attempts on toast nouveau. But every so often on your journey of toast you'll make something sublime and you'll forget all the crumby (haha!) stuff in the bin. You may even decide it was worthwhile.
ReplyDeletewonder full post
ReplyDeleteCare to mention a French Laundry exemplar or two? Just curious.
ReplyDeleteI consider Gene Smith's "Minamata" to be such a thing, and some of this other essays that appeared in Life Magazine.
DeleteI don't know if Frédérick Carnet is all the way up at French Laundry, but I find his better work to be palpably, distinctly, *better*, than most of the technically excellent pictures I see out there. He's reached for something more, and from time to time gets it.
Sally Mann's pictures, especially in groupings (sometimes, but not always, only in groupings) are also palpably *better* than almost all photography.
Just found your blog. This post is insighful, and really on the money. Some of it is very funny too. I guess you have to be of a certain age to crack up about a reference to the Holy Trinity that isn’t about 3 zoom lenses or Christianity. Thankyou!
ReplyDelete