"Soul"

Ming Thein asks a good question over on his blog. His answer is not wrong, but I don't think he's really on the right track. I am going to essentially ignore what he wrote, but obviously you can and I think you probably should go read it. There are really two questions here. The first is "Why do people say Ming's pictures lack soul?" and the second if "what is soul anyways?" and I think that pondering the first can be helpful in mulling on the second.

First, let me dispose of some other details. I read a handful of blogs and other resourses, and much of what comes to mind is a response to something I read in one of those places. This means that my blog posts will often take the form of "so and so is wrong, here's why" or, occasionally, "so and so is not wrong, but here's an interesting point." If you would prefer not to read this sort of commentary, you will find yourself often disappointed at photothunk. I intend to do more of this, to be honest. While I could be, and have been, coy and simply say "well, I was thinking" that's no good. You deserve to be able to check my work and form your own opinions based not only on what I write, but also on my antecedents.

I'm not a lone genius pulling this brilliance out by the power pure reason. I am a lone genius who exists in a constantly shifting mileu of the other ideas and writing.

Onwards. Let's look at some of Ming's pictures.

How does he shoot these things? Well, it's pretty clear that he sets up someplace, and then he waits. In one case he's got this diagonal shadow line pointing down to a spot on the pavement, and he needs someone in light clothing to pass over that spot so they'll pop out against that deep vertical shadow. In the other case, he needs someone to stand against that patch of light, clearly delineated, and silhouetted (or silhouettable in post). Then he waits. A few people comply before the light changes and that magic spot he's picked out isn't any good. Have you spotted the problem?

Ming's moment depends on the position of a person in motion, which person will be the "subject". He's setting that person up to be The Thing You Look At, and he's not allowing that person to do anything worth looking at. They have to behave at exactly the right moment and place.

Once you see what's going on, you might reasonably wonder "does Ming do better with stationary people?" and you will find that, by golly, he sure as hell does. Look at this thing:

This is a cracking picture. It's very good, and it has tons of soul, whatever that even is. He was waiting for the gesture, the literal gesture, rather than the position. So we see a truthful human moment. Ming, having his subject already isolated as a relatively darker figure on a relatively lighter background, can wait until an actual picture turns up instead of an exercise in geometry. His best pictures, and some of them are really good, are of seated people, doing something. Talking on phones, working, etc. He can set up, isolate them in his standard "dark on light" or "light on dark" and set up whatever geometrical games he likes in the frame and then he can wait for something interesting to happen.

We can understand, we can relate, to the the tired woman(?) rubbing her eyes. The woman in the white dress isn't anyone we can connect with. She has her back turned and she displays no emotional cues at that moment. She's just a person walking down the street, who happens to be located at a cute intersection of lines. The silhouette is very distant, but there is a little body language. We might guess that he(?) is looking at some art, maybe? But we can't see what he's looking at, he's small in the frame, and featureless. Not as generic as the woman in white, but hard to connect with.

Ok, but it's not all people. What about architcture? Watches? Whatever?

Ming still exhibits the same problems. His attention to formal qualities of the frame gets in the way of any genuine emotional content. He may well have some ideas about this building, or that watch, but he doesn't share it with us because too focused on the formal aspects, and given a choice between an angle that shows off how he feels about the thing, or one that shows of the thing's essential character, or an angle that creates some formal arrangement of bits and pieces in the frame, he picks the latter every time.

This is essentially the magic of street photography when it is done right (that is, almost never). The moment that expresses the emotional content coincides with the moment that produces the formalisms, because in the first place the photographer has predicted it and is already in place, and in the second place the photographer is very very lucky (and shoots an incredibly number of frames to produce that luck).

The photographer is balancing the two sides of the equation, constantly. She's plugged in to the situation, to the area, she's taking time there. She is not flying in for a weekend every now and then, she's out there every day becoming sensitive to the kinds of situations that unfold. She knows, in broad strokes, what these people are likely to do in the next few seconds.

That guy is gonna step out into the street and throw his hand up in a second, I'll move to place his sunlit hand against the black van.. there he goes.. clickclickclick..a little left..click. That's the shot.

This process might be unconscious, but it's happening. Note that the photographer isn't parked waiting for something sunlit to appear in front of the black van, she's finding the black van in the moment. She's pasting together the formalisms in the moment by moving the camera.

For people not doing this, trying to make purses out of fluid sow's ears of life, it's somewhat easier. But they're still trying to balance the formalism and the relatable emotional response.

Edward Weston spent, as far as I can tell, all his time working out how to make whatever it is look kind of like a female nude. That would probably be a neat and useful exercise, to be honest. Anyways, his emotional response seems to have been kind of one note, and his method was to balance formalisms with "make it look like sex" and by golly, it worked pretty well.

Sally Mann, as near as I can tell, wanders around looking for things to put in front of the lens (her kids, the bones of a dog, a battlefield) that mean something profound to her. Then she sticks them in front of the lens and moves stuff around until it feels right, balancing god only knows what internal criteria she has. Then she shoots it, and looks at the results, and shoots it again, and again, and again, until it feels right. She's not not unconscious of formal details, and she goes to considerable lengths to correct that sort of thing as well, but in general it's obvious that the emotional result is pretty much the only thing that matters. Doses of sentimentality that would be fatal to non-Southerners.

Ming Thein's problem, if indeed it is a problem (his commenters seem to think it's not, and they are legion), is that given a choice he will always choose formalism over emotion. It is only when he consciously chooses the other way, or is shooting a situation when he doesn't have to choose one over the other, that he does well. In those cases, he does very well indeed. Many of us feel, though, that you'll do better sacrificing formalism first.

If you shoot for emotionalism first, then you may find that the formalisms are good enough, or serendipitously just right after all, or that they at least fall perfectly in to place on their own sometimes.

Laziness

It is incredible to me the laziness embodies our public discourse. It's not that hard to be non-lazy, all you have to do is do a bit of work, after all. But, nope.

Consider the majors. PetaPixel is just a press-release transcribing organization, and is one of the more popular "news" sites for photography (which tells you everything, really. Why work when not working produces just as many clicks?). Recently they published a review of a cookbook with recipes collected from famous photographers. A couple of lines noting that the book existed and where it could be purchased, I count 127 words of original content, and ten pages of content copied from the book, as well as ten iconic photographs which PP now gets to publish under the protective cover of "reviewing" a book that actually obtained the rights to the photos. Of course, everyone is happy, because even this shitty non-review is going to generate a bunch of book sales.

It'd sure be great to see, I dunno, an actual review. Are the reproductions any good? Did you try out any of the recipes? Is it witty? Dumb? Do you have any ideas at all Michael Zhang?

There are some copycats out there, less successful. There are tons of blogs that mostly republish other people's redundant "street photography" with occasional top-ten lists. And so on.

Nobody pays for content, although some places have staff that work hard to grind out actual content.

Most of that is still supremely lazy, rehashed blather about why you should, or should not, shoot film or one of about 20 other standard topics. Reviews of the latest drone thing that are in no useful way a review "It flies, and has controls that let you tell it to go up and down, and take a picture, it costs this much, here is my affiliate link to amazon."

Of course, there is ToP, and there is VSL, where the lone authors work quite hard to write about things that interest them. Both do what they do very well indeed, but neither one proposes to be turning a critical eye on photography as a thing, really. Which is a shame, because there ought to be more of it.

And then we have guys like the hapless Lewis Bush, who seems to have run out of things to say. He's still more of a thinker than most of these bozos, but mostly he stops when he gets finished mouthing the standard leftie/artist political positions.

Let us take a moment to correct his latest post. He pretends to be commenting on visual culture, but it's a very very thin nod. He notes some superficial resemblances of the RNC stage to some of the well-known stills from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". I will note in passing that in the first place there's a great deal more to the film than the still we all associate with it:

And also that when you actually do the side by side comparison:

well it's a bit embarrassing, isn't it? Yes, the one evokes the other in a small way, but it's got nothing to do with Hitler or Trump specifically, this is just standard Big Politics Theater, they all kind of look like that with, in this case some little differences that Lewis misses completely. What distinguishes Hitler is that he did it on a monumental scale that we seem to be actually incapable of remembering. Every time I see that still from the film I have the same "Holy Shit!" reaction.

No, what Lewis (and his citations) are all doing is simply, lazily, regurgitating the "Trump is awful, why, he's basically Hitler" line without bothering to perform any of the relevant analysis. Neither political, nor visual.

Let me dispose of the Trump/Hitler comparison. Hitler was a lot worse than this, and every, stage of his career. Trump is in comparison a completely benign presence. Go look it up. Hitler's awfulness is another thing we seem to have trouble remembering except as a sort of abstract notion of more awful than anything. While Hitler is a pretty good standard for Worst Case Awful, we tend to lump everything more awful than free ice cream as Worst Case Awful, and we forget the gradations.

And now, let me proceed to do Lewis' job for him. He purports to be interested in visual culture, so let us actually look at the iconography of the Trump acceptance speech, and think about it a bit.

First of all, most of what we're looking at is political-staging boilerplate: the flags, the seething mass of political operatives on the floor, the tiny podium on a big stage. In different angles we would no doubt see tons of Make America Great Again signs and so on. What jumps out to me is the large word TRUMP over the stage, and the weirdly Academy Awards styling of the stage. This thing doesn't look like "Triumph of the Will", it looks like an awards show, and in a way it is.

Poking around the interwebs, I find many pictures of political speeches none of which feature these styling notes. While it's possible there was a giant BUSH logo or CLINTON logo suspended over the candidate, it didn't get photographed, which is the salient point here. The vaguely art deco sculptural gold paneling is completely absent from the political stage until now, as near as I can see. But it is absolutely SOP for an awards show, innit?

The parallel that does exist between Trump and Hitler is this: They both rose to power pandering to the disenfranchised, those people who correctly see that the structures of power are exploiting them. Trump is to Bernie Sanders what Hitler was to the Communist party in the Weimar Republic.

It turns out that when you have two bodies pandering to the weak and disenfranchised, the latter tend to align with the one that looks strongest, almost regardless of what it actually said.

The iconography of Trump's acceptance speech becomes clear, then.

It's styled like an awards show, a populist invention if ever there was one. It has very strong branding, TRUMP, in huge letters across the top. Trump has crushed the Republican Party and bent it to his indomitable Will, hasn't he? And he's made the RNC into a Awards Show! It's pretty much the same as the Grammys! Just for you! Two big thumbs up! How great is that!

Hey Donald, imma let you finish, but first I wanna say that Hillary Clinton had one of the greatest acceptance speeches of all time!

His role as a panderer, and as the strongest one, is well established.

That is what the iconography surrounding of his acceptance speech says. That is what the photos and the video communicate to We The People.

Why am I so mad?

So why am I so mad at Zvereff and his Rajput Ride photos?

Essentially, it is because of the amazinging falseness of them. This is partly my fault. I looked at the pictures alone, without any context, and came to some conclusions. Those conclusions were wildly wrong, and part of that is surely my fault. That doesn't change the fact that I'm mad.

Further, I think I am justified in much of my assumption.

While a more astute eye than mine might well have identified the skaters as foreign. I don't think anyone could identify the photos as "a behind the scenes, and a rather slanted one at that, of a Red Bull sponsored event." The video, interestingly, is much more balanced. You see that India is not a bunch of narrow alleys populated entirely by elephants, scooters, and picturesque old men. You see that, despite Zvereff's remarks to the contrary, there's plenty of beautifully maintained and nearly new concrete to be "shredded" by the skaters.

No, what Zvereff gives us is the same fake McCurry fake India, only this time with skateboarders. What are we to make of this? The tropes are all there indicating True Culture Documentary (in the National Geo style). While one might not necessarily read this as "Indians are skating in Jodhpur" but one can surely be forgiven that assumption. It is, I think, completely impossible to realize that these photos are actually a Red Bull ad.

Did they get all the required permits? Irrelevant. Persuading bureaucrats that the fee you pay makes up for your obnoxious behavior is not at all the same thing as not being obnoxious. As a former resident of San Francisco where you can get a permit for anything, I can attest that paying the relevant fees does not make you beloved by the residents, and it doesn't make you not an asshole.

Did the locals actually love them? Well, that's surely the narrative they would promote, and it's largely un-checkable. And again, it's largely irrelevant. The Indians thought the British were pretty funny with their silly hats and the standing around outside all afternoon "guarding" things, too. In any case, the standards of the locals are not the only standards in play here. By the standards of the west, this sort of thing is pretty shitty and, as westerners, they should answer to those standards as well.

Of course, let's be honest. It's Red Bull and skateboarders, statistically, we're most likely talking about awful, self-absorbed, egoists. Do you really think they made sure to get all the permits that might apply?

There's just no way this wasn't a bunch of foreigners, permitted or no, loved or no, charging around in a foreign country grinding the edges off of various people's concrete objects, getting in the way, and generally being pushy and obnoxious, all in the service of selling an unpleasant beverage to frat boys.

And that is not even close to what the photos said to me when I first saw them.

And that is why I'm so irritated.

Rajput Ride

Daniel Zvereff, whose work you can see over at his web site has a photoessay up called Rajput Ride, which caught my eye.

Most of what Zvereff does is pretty pedestrian. He's got an appealingly gritty aesthetic (push a big toe into the tone curve to give a lot of rich dark tones, lots of midtone contrast, maybe push the saturation up a fair bit, and whale on the clarity slider) that he uses to show us appealingly gritty subjects. Ho hum, we've seen a lot of this stuff.

Rajput Ride jumps off the page. Zvereff is clearly in India for Holi. The signs are there, although he does dodge the nearly-inevitable standard Holi photos. And there are these skateboarders running around! It's crazy! If you're inattentive, as I was the first few times through, one can take this as an essay on a recently arisen skate culture in India, how great is that! Except, sadly, it's not. It looks like that, but it's not. More about that anon.

The pictures look like pictures of India, a slightly crowded, cramped, version of McCurry's India. Decrepit, ancient, colorful. Both the people and the buildings. Having seen other pictures of India, I can deduce that much of India does not in fact look like this, but evidently it's not very hard to find this material since everyone does. Without the skateboards this is just yet another cheap McCurry knockoff, but with the skateboards it's pretty awesome looking.

One imagines Zvereff discovering these rogue skateboarders bringing this thing to India. Appropriating the American sport, and making it, one supposes, their own. One imagines Zvereff following these guys around, the lone wolf, photographing this phenomenon. The skateboarders don't look particularly Indian, but the subcontinent is wide and contains many peoples.

It turns out not so much.

Red Bull imported some guys to skate around India, with a fucking crew of video assholes to film the whole thing while these guys charge around during Holi doing the usual "grinding the shit out of everything and wrecking it". We don't actually see them wrecking stuff, but anyone who's not lived under a rock knows that skateboarding tears shit up. Now, if they were actually Indians, that would be one thing. Still asshole kids, but I can kind of get behind it, at least they live there. But no, Red Bull actually flew in assholes from other continents to go smash up the Indians shit with their boards. And Zvereff came along for the ride to shoot this thing.

Holy crap.

Yeah, yeah, I know. "Skateboarding is not a crime" but you know what is? Wrecking other people's shit is a crime. Yep, it actually is a crime to break, damage, or mar things that don't belong to you. As a former teenager I feel your amazement at this revelation, but I swear it's true. Going to foreign countries to wreck people's shit on film to promote a god damned sports drink should be a capital offense. I'm not the most politically correct dude, but I'm not an animal.

Honestly, I love the pictures. The pictures are uniformly pretty good, and there are a few with real poetry to them. But the context is too savagely horrible to contemplate. I hate these people, and I wish them the very worst possible outcomes for this shit.

Dan Zvereff, fuck you, fuck Red Bull, and fuck the whole shitty enterprise.

You suck.

The Monument and the Thing Itself

Guy Tal is a fellow who angers me every single time I read his blog. I think you should probably take that as an endorsement, though. He's tackling the Big Issues all the time, and I am pretty sure that I find him irritating because he's not me.

Anyways, he's got a piece up recently (which, incredibly, turned up on PetaPixel, a place not exactly famed for publishing think pieces). He's trying to apply Russell to an idea of photography. Now, as I noted in a comment over there, you gotta be careful with Russell. His philosophy was kind of self serving.

I could (and in earlier drafts of this remark, did) have some fun disintegrating Guy's arguments, but really, it's just a guy noodling out loud so doing that is wildly unfair.

However, there's one thing worth calling out specifically.

Guy notes that as time unfolds all is washed away. Nothing is permanent, nothing will remain eternally. Like many people, he feels that this creates a problem with doing things of value, and falls in to a version of the nihilism/hedonism trap. He thereby betrays that he is confusing the thing itself with the monument.

If someone performs an act of great heroism, and a statue commemorating that event is duly erected, where does the value lie? Is it in the monument, or in the act itself? If the monument is washed away, does the value of that act of heroism dimimish?

It does not, and only a fool would imagine it. It follows, inexorably, that the ultimate dissolution of the universe cannot have any effect on the value of what we do, or do not, do. If we make Art, if we make a child laugh, if we scratch a dog's ear, these acts will have value per the socially constructed value system (and there is nothing else, unless you defer all to God or similar, and you will tend to find that God's Objective Will often bears a startling resemblance to the constructed social system).

That value occurred, and it was real. When the dog dies, when the child forgets, when the Art vanishes in the heat death of the universe, the original value will still have been. Despite Guy's efforts, the fact that all things will pass is irrelevant to whether you take pictures strictly for yourself, or for others.

The argument I have made, and which I stand behind still, for making pictures for yourself is that nothing else works.

Words Matter

As most of my readers ought to know by now, Ctein and Mike Johnston have had a falling out over, proximately, whether or not we should have a different word for photographs which have been, to some unspecified degree, modified from the original scene. This dirty laundry isn't my concern, although I found the episode to be mildly tragic and I wish it hadn't happened.

I want to think about whether Mike's right, and why we might need such vocabulary now. It seems, on the face of it, that perhaps we've been getting along just fine for 160 years or so, so why now?

Here's a thumbnail of the relevant history, told through the lens of my ignorance and opinion. Don't quote me on any of this, although of course I will try to be as accurate as possible.

For roughly the first 40 or 50 years or so of photography, people are largely thinking of this new thing as a kind of painting. It's a way of making a really accurate (in some senses) painting without having to learn all that business about brushes and mixing colors and whatnot, although there is a whole host of other things you might learn. While there is a certain amount of railing against people who are "merely lousy painters" and so on, this is pretty much what people think. You might even mention the zeitgeist here.

Somewhere in there we have Emerson (and probably others who have not benefited from Newhall's PR campaign) trying, kind of, to invent straight photography. He's against manipulation, but he still thinks he's making paintings of a sort. He's making Art, Impressionistic Art at that.

So throughout that time, manipulation is more or less baked in. With orthochromatic emulsions you have to paste in the sky anyways, always. One of the mainstream approaches is to composite multiple negatives together for everything (pace Emerson) and we're about to roll forward into the "Camera Work" era of hand work in a big way. It's "painting for dummies" and the idea of the photograph as indexical has not really been born yet, although there are glimmers in Emerson's thundering rebuttals of Robinson.

Then we have "Camera Work", gum bichromate, hand work. Art Photography is if anything more wildly manipulated, and it's still simply baked in as part of the normal process. Also, in 1888, we have Kodak introducing their camera for the people. 100 exposures, send the film away to be developed and printed. The snapshot is born.

We start, I think, to see a split in the zeitgeist at this point. On the Art side manipulation is part of the process. These people are still "painters" and nobody expects their photos to be indexical. In fact, it's somewhere about this time that the idea of "indexical" is invented but it naturally remains the province of eggheads and wonks for some time before leaking out, in some form or another, to meet a similar idea held by the masses.

The Kodak camera, I feel, cannot help but have launched this idea in the minds of the public. They begin to take snapshots, and surely the idea that a photograph is a record of what truly was begins to rise to consciousness, more or less broadly.

We're somewhere around 1900 when I think these ideas really begin to take root, the idea that a photograph can be something with an inherent truthiness built in to it; the photo is a new thing, an objective visual record which has its own distinct and unique value.

Next up, a few decades later, we see Straight Photography rise up and dominate, the idea of indexicality is quickly central. It is, allegedly, absolutely vital to a photograph. While Straight Photography was more of an idea than an actual practice, it was the important idea of the era. Photography in America converges largely around this business, and manipulation is shunned. I think that in Europe we still see a lot of manipulation, but it tends to be quite obvious. Multiple exposures and so on. Man Ray is running around at this point, and so on. Adams famously thunders extensively at Mortensen.

For most of the 20th century, it seems to me, one could make Obvious Art photographs with heavy manipulation, compositing, multiple exposures and so on, and not be too deeply sneered at. At least in the USA the high ground was, and would remain for some time, straight photography. No removing telephone wires, and so on. In between, one could make photo-realistic manipulations, but one was a dirty animal and when caught you'd be roundly abused.

Furthermore, while one certainly could make photo-realistic manipulations, most practitioners lacked the skills and anyways it was a huge pain in the ass even if you knew how. While people could and did do all sorts of things in the wet photography era, it was rare, and it simply wasn't the sort of thing decent people did. Stalin did it, for god's sake, we don't.

Enter digital.

Abruptly the entire spectrum of manipulation possibility fills in and becomes equally easy, almost trivial. Anyone can remove the telephone wires, move the lamppost, delete three men in a rickshaw. Anyone. Whatever you fancy might "improve the composition" is trivial. Ideas shift, with dizzying rapidity, to "and if you think it will make it better, you should go ahead and do it." Photojournalists are supposedly the last bastion of straight photography, but everyone knows that even that is a farce.

No longer do we have a clear visual and social distinction between "manipulated, probably Art" and "straight photography".

I think this argues strongly for a need -- a new need, here and now -- for artists and viewers to have vocabulary to talk about these things. While none of these things are new, as such, the social context in which they occur and the frequency with which they occur, mean that, arguably, we can no longer get along with a few assumptions and, as necessary, talking around the issues.

Are "photoart" and "photograph" the right words? I dunno. I don't care, and most importantly, I don't get to decide. Terms will arise if they are truly needed. We could simply use "photograph" and "straight photograph", borrowing some more or less appropriate terms from the past. This has the advantage that "straight" naturally permits a usage implying a degree of straightness.

This photo is straight
This photo is mostly straight, it's pretty much straight. I just erased a wire in the corner.
This photo isn't really straight, I moved a bunch of stuff.


I dunno. Like I say, I don't get to decide. We're probably all going to walk off cliffs and die trying to catch imaginary monsters in our phones anyways.

That said, Ctein is also right. Once you create these categories, people will line up in one camp or another and start hating on the other guys. However, note that we already have that, we just don't have the words for the categories, and also, so what? Welcome to humanity. Trying to force everyone to get along by controlling language is just silly. The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis isn't completely wrong, but that doesn't mean that you can actually force people to get along by forcing them to use the same words for everything.

Serendipity

My earlier post about copying deserves a little clarification. I wrapped up with a "be judicious" throwaway remark. Not that what follows is necessarily clarifying, but it unpacks things a bit, I hope, and perhaps provides some food for thought.

I think that what this really means is that you should automate and hide whatever makes sense for your work. That means that you need to know what your work is about, in this moment, and really think about what you should and should not tuck in to an action, a macro, a preset. Since your concepts can change, you probably need to try to retain some notion of what you're automating. Perhaps review your actions, presets, macros, at the beginning of every new project just to refresh your mind about what your fingers have learned to do automatically.

An example.

I could, without much effort, develop a collection of methods for producing a convincing Wet Plate look to a digital photograph. I could crank out beautiful fake ambrotypes all day long with it.

But there's absolutely no way I could reproduce the glorious disasters that fill the pages of Sally Mann's What Remains. This book delights me despite being remarkably hard material to look at because of these disasters, and also the little note on the back talking about "technical brilliance." On the one hand, sure, Mann is excellent at a lot of stuff and it a fully competent technician etc and so on; but on the other hand this book is entirely made of up beautiful examples of the infinitude of horrible ways wet plate can go wrong. In the movie of the same name, she mentions (probably somewhat tongue in cheek, to be sure) that she lives in fear of mastering the wet plate process, because so much would be lost.

Make no mistake, I love the book (duh, insert girlish squeal).

Of course there's a reductio argument here if you're not careful, and you wind up having to manually adjust every pixel by hand, and that's just silly.

But somewhere in there, there's a degree of automation that makes sense.

Over at LuLa there's a tempest in a teapot. Apparently Adobe managed to break hyper-accurate printing in the most recent editions of their software on Macs. Mostly, the differences manifest when you print out a test chart, and then measure it, because the differences are, in most cases, quite near the edge of visibility. Obviously this is a problem for a few people, but for most of us, eh, whatever.

But it illustrates clearly what a certain class of people doing color printing are up to. They've got a bunch of technology in play to make the printing process automatically hyper accurate. Most of the people who are calling for Adobe to abase themselves and Fix This Instantly are not, I will warrant, people with any particular external need for hyper-accurate color, they're just convinced that their boring landscapes will be ruined if the blues are a trifle off.

An aside. Mark Segal wrote a piece up on this TECHNOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE in which he provides test swatches illustrating correct color and wrong color. I read the piece first on my phone and there was literally no difference between correct/wrong visible. Now on a different screen, there's a difference visible in the blues, but not in the greens. Not sure what the hell Mark was thinking attempting to illustrate these differences with a JPEG on the web.

Those of us with wet darkroom experience surely all recall that time when we botched up the timer, dropped something, mishandled something, and got a print that was not at all what we had in mind but which pointed the way. Oh my god, we'd say, that's why it was looking insipid. I need to print the whole damn thing way darker. How could I have not see it?

With properly functioning color management that will literally never happen. It can't. The purpose of color management is, literally, to prevent that from happening. Digital technology enables, encourages, methods of ensuring repeatability. It encourages us to convert the entire process of Art Making into a sort of assembly line. It, essentially, leaves you all alone in the process of Art Making. You have to make all the choices yourself, you have to know a priori what you're trying to do. A proper muse knows when to knock over a paint pot. A proper artist should know this, and not nail the paint pots to the bench. Too many paint pots too firmly fixed and, I claim, the muse simply leaves in a huff. Figure it out yourself, asshat, she says, and like mist she is gone.

Automate what seems right to you, but from time to time, throw it all out and start anew. Give your muse a little room to work.