Makers or Takers

[cliveh]

Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so he probably wasn't refering to photography and Cartier-Bresson hadn't been born.

 

[MattKing]

Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so he probably wasn't refering to photography and Cartier-Bresson hadn't been born.

But their spirits - Wilde's and Winogrand's - seem to still be amongst us

 

[Don_ih]

Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so he probably wasn't refering to photography

Doesn't make that quote less true.

Cartier-Bresson

chose very carefully what to show the world. That wasn't reality: it was an interpretation of it.

 

[cliveh]

Doesn't make that quote less true.



chose very carefully what to show the world. That wasn't reality: it was an interpretation of it.

HCB images were a much closer version of reality than 99% of images taken today.

 

[BrianShaw]

HCB images were a much closer version of reality than 99% of images taken today.

Prove it. Put some substance in support of your statement.

 

[Don_ih]

HCB images were a much closer version of reality than 99% of images taken today.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Like Brian suggests, you can't possibly prove that.

Anyway, reality sucks. Photos don't smell like sewerage. They don't fire bullets at you. They don't drop dead in front of you. They don't burn your hands. They're not reality.

 

[MattKing]

Photos don't smell like sewerage. They don't fire bullets at you. They don't drop dead in front of you. They don't burn your hands. They're not reality.

And they are always something that someone makes to create an approximation - usually in two dimensions - of a reality that has three spatial dimensions and often a temporal one as well.

 

[BrianShaw]

Even “3-d photos” are 2-d approximations.

 

[awty]

Should only be in camera positives, anything on a negative is too many steps from reality.
Once more I don't trust pixels either, too much weird stuff going on there.

 

[jvo]

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are. - minor white

 

[reddesert]

Although Cartier-Bresson fits into a certain kind of "realistic" photographic tradition, he chose to photograph in black-and-white, even centuries after color painting had become commonplace. If he had wanted to make closer representations of the reality we think we see, he could have taken up painting, but he did not.

 

[jvo]

...I don't trust pixels either, too much weird stuff going on there.

yeh, what are those pixie things anyway???

 

[cliveh]

In this world of fakery and lies we are now living in, isn't it good that some of us should try to be near to factual reality?

 

[fdonadio]

Photos don't smell like sewerage. They don't fire bullets at you. They don't drop dead in front of you. They don't burn your hands. They're not reality.

I can prove this point of yours with a photo I’ve taken:

This is a very busy avenue in São Paulo, Brazil. There’s not a single car in this picture. It isn’t cropped and there was no manipulation, except for white point, black point, contrast and brightness.

There were lots of cars passing by, I have just shot in between them.

 

[reddesert]

In this world of fakery and lies we are now living in, isn't it good that some of us should try to be near to factual reality?

What if there were no rhetorical questions?

 

[Don_ih]

In this world of fakery and lies we are now living in, isn't it good that some of us should try to be near to factual reality?

It's fine. But a photo isn't reality. The closest it can be is a chosen perspective on a scene that actually occurred. But like the photo above from @fdonadio , that perspective can be so chosen to misrepresent what would normally be viewed as the reality.

And that's not a problem. It's what cements the photographer as being responsible for the photo. A photo should never be seen as being true itself - it needs to be authorized. The person who took it needs to be available to say, this is an accurate record of what I saw. Even then, it doesn't allow for those aspects of the "factual reality" that the photographer neither saw nor recorded.

 

[Don_ih]

Also, think about Cartier-Bresson. Was he interested in presenting reality or was he more interested in getting good photos? I think it's pretty obvious what his main interest was.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

In this world of fakery and lies we are now living in, isn't it good that some of us should try to be near to factual reality?

We've lost our way when we can't tell the difference. Only photographers are confused while the rest of the world understands it simply.

 

[Don_ih]

We've lost our way when we can't tell the difference. Only photographers are confused while the rest of the world understands it simply.

Not true. More and more, non-photographers are less likely to assume a photo is factual. The average person now believes nothing they don't want to believe.

 

[Vaughn]

It's fine. But a photo isn't reality. The closest it can be is a chosen perspective on a scene that actually occurred....

And that's not a problem. It's what cements the photographer as being responsible for the photo. A photo should never be seen as being true itself - it needs to be authorized. The person who took it needs to be available to say, this is an accurate record of what I saw...

I easily accept that providing an accurate as possible record of what they saw is a valid motive of many photographers. It is not mine. I record my impression of the reality of being in a place, and how the light defines that place through my experience. All with the goal of somehow transmitting that to the viewer by the means of an image on paper.

Something I consider is that we do not see as a camera sees...instants stopped in time with a fixed field of view, plane of focus, and DoF. Instead we have a fluid visual system of auto adjusting aperture and auto focusing lenses that build and maintain an image-construct in our mind that is always optimally lit and in focus. So it is this mental construct I am trying to represent with my images, something more personal than the reality of the instant captured by the camera.

My main photographic process is single-transfer carbon printing. This yields a print that is always reversed left-right (like a mirror image). So much for reality!