"the world as it is" -- to depict the scene with the light that was there....If the members of f/64 were not attempting to depict the reality of the scene, what is meant by their desire to depict "the world as it is"? Also the f/64 school clearly favored images that were in sharp focus. It would seem that that is going in the direction of hyper-realism as opposed to the dreamy, soft-focus approach of the pictorialists.
An impassioned argument indeed but it can't cohere under the sort of critical analysis it might get in a first year Philosophy 101 class. A big hurdle right at the beginning is to define your terms. What is "art", "photo", "image", "manipulation" ? Not so easy.All art photo images are manipulations. .......
There is no such thing as "a perfect visual duplication of the original subject". All things looked upon by a living being are subject to conditioning and the perceptions that result from that conditioning.All photos are manipulations in the sense that they are not a perfect visual duplication of the original subject, at most they are an interpretation of the original.
Photographs aren't truth and can't even be truthful.Manipulation has a negative and deceptive meaning. I would prefer using the word adjustment. I think contrast, cropping, and exposure settings are regularly accepted adjustments, not manipulations. Manipulations would be cloning objects like the sky in or out which changes the truthfulness of the picture. If you crop a picture for better aesthetic considerations, that's adjustments. If you crop out an object to change the meaning of the photograph, that's manipulation and deceit. There is a difference.
It is not hard to make the argument that the aesthetic ideology of the f/64 school has dominated art photography the last 70 years. The f/64 school itself was party to the trend in art called Modernism, which is long forgotten in other art disciplines but has the remained the stagnant paradigm in photography. The f/64 school and the earlier Pictorialist School were attempting to make photography a legitimate art form, which is to say that photography has felt inadequate compared other art disciplines. The Pictorialist tried to make photos that seemed more like paintings and more artistic and less a mechanical process. The the f/64 group felt that photography had arrived as a discipline and not longer needed to mimic other art forms. Their view was the essential esthetic of photography was one of hyper-realism and that we ought embrace that and those that did not were heretics that did not grasp the the true potential of art photography. My point is the f/64 group was fundamentally wrong and we should no longer blindly act as slaves to the misguided precepts of their seventy plus year old ideology. So what has this to to do with what has happening today with Photrio? A great deal. Many of comments and evaluations of photos are based upon values systems derived from the f/64 school without acknowledgement or without examination of where they come from. There is also the possibility to embrace a greater diversity of aesthetics including those that were suppressed by the f/64 school. For example, Jim Galli has led a resurgence of in interest in soft focus images which the Pictorialists would have loved and the f/64 school would seen as work of the devil. Lest you think I am being hyperbolic Ansel Adam publicly denounced the man he considered the arch enemy to the f/64 school, William Mortensen, as "The Anti-Christ" You may say, "Who cares about that doctrinal struggle many years ago?", just as who cares about the War of the Roses in English or who knows who Red Rose and who was the White Rose. That is PRECISELY my point. Although consciously few know about the ideological battles of the f/64 school and ultimate conquest of its opponents, unconsciously in our values and actions we frequently act as though the war never ended and we need to defend to death the precepts of f/64 school without even knowing why. Diversity is good and we have not had as much diversity in photography as we might think the last seventy years because it has dominated by single ideology which itself was not logically coherent.
Not if you want to get paid.Photographs aren't truth and can't even be truthful.
...
Is it truly bad to retouch out a pimple or two on a high school graduation portrait?
Got to say, you could really use some "carriage return" function to make your posts easier to read. As is I see it more like another post with main purpose of "muddying the water".
As for the apparent premise of this thread ... for one, "manipulation" can be interpreted in different ways. Two, by today with resurgence of traditional techniques, it is a moot point altogether.
Third ... f64 never meant by "straight photography" as one lacking "manipulation". If they did, it would have been a pure mechanical process with compositional component being the sole tool at photographer's disposal. We all know that was practically never the case. And how Adams "faked" up his "straight" photographs had been discussed openly by Adams himself.
Painting lies.
Well, you are wrong because at least one person does not manipulate the image shape to make an art photograph. Me. So now you can throw that argument in the trash as it has been proven false.
I only occasionally use filtration over the taking lens, I contact print my negatives with no burning, dodging, or cropping. I make art. The scene in front of my camera has been inspected, abstracted, projected, detected, corrected, instigated, and confiscated...so yes, manipulated....maybe that is your intent but manipulation is inherently part of the photographic process.
Oh really? So all the decisions you make leading up to the hanging of the finished print on the wall are not manipulations of reality in some way? Your decision to shoot square (human vision is definitely NOT square), to crop certain parts of the scene out and include others, the angle at which you shoot, the time of day and weather conditions in which you shoot, the film you choose (Portra vs Ektar vs Velvia vs Tri-X), the lens you use, the aperture and shutter speed you choose to use, the paper you print it on, how dark or light or contrasty or flat you choose to print it... none of those are manipulations? If you think they're not, then you lack either comprehension or imagination, and you're also highly arrogant to think you're exempt from a universal.Well, you are wrong because at least one person does not manipulate the image shape to make an art photograph. Me. So now you can throw that argument in the trash as it has been proven false.
One of the problems with over manipulation is that we become jaded. Photographers good at computer art and photoshop can dress up a photo that a normal photograph recording the original scene cannot reach. After a while, like drugs, you need another hit. Pretty soon it has no effect and nothing will satisfy you. The skills required to take a good picture are lost. We try to get better at computer art which is a different craft than photography. You know you lost the battle when you show someone your photo proudly and they ask disparagingly, "Oh, did you Photoshop it?"
Oh really? So all the decisions you make leading up to the hanging of the finished print on the wall are not manipulations of reality in some way? Your decision to shoot square (human vision is definitely NOT square), to crop certain parts of the scene out and include others, the angle at which you shoot, the time of day and weather conditions in which you shoot, the film you choose (Portra vs Ektar vs Velvia vs Tri-X), the lens you use, the aperture and shutter speed you choose to use, the paper you print it on, how dark or light or contrasty or flat you choose to print it... none of those are manipulations? If you think they're not, then you lack either comprehension or imagination, and you're also highly arrogant to think you're exempt from a universal.
There seems to be this huge hang-up about 'manipulation' as if it were some kind of mortal sin when in fact every moment every one of us is alive we are actively and passively manipulating the world around us. Even the most mechano-documentary photograph of something like a crime scene is a manipulation - it may be showing objects in a volume as they relate to one another, and be able to provide evidence of where the body was found and in what condition, and where the blood spatter ended up, etc etc, but as an image, it is absolutely manipulated - nobody sees a three-dimensional scene in two dimensions, and nobody sees that scene in flat, direct, point-source light the way you photograph that crime scene for evidentiary purposes. But because we have a specific reason for it, we WANT to look at it that way. If you took a crime scene photograph with beautiful natural window light, it would look totally different, even if photographed from the same camera position, and the photograph would have no value as evidence. But it would be in the rawest sense the exact same photograph.
You have to be careful with an intellectual glitch like this. If everything is a lie then the statement "EVERYTHING" is a lie,.... (and statements are certainly part of everything) is itself a lie. This implies that everything is not a lie; a self contradiction. A treatise based on an initial premise that involves self-contradiction is doomed to be either wrong or meaningless. Similarly, assertions like "Everything is manipulation" can be used to imply that nothing can be trusted to be truthful. And again the argument is on the swampy ground of self-contradiction.*EVERYTHING* is a lie, ,,,,,,.
You have to be careful with an intellectual glitch like this. If everything is a lie then the statement "EVERYTHING" is a lie,.... (and statements are certainly part of everything) is itself a lie. This implies that everything is not a lie; a self contradiction. A treatise based on an initial premise that involves self-contradiction is doomed to be either wrong or meaningless. Similarly, assertions like "Everything is manipulation" can be used to imply that nothing can be trusted to be truthful. And again the argument is on the swampy ground of self-contradiction.
Basic logical reasoning is mildly interesting as far as it goes but discovering true things about photography is a much richer journey. For example, what true statements can be made about the relationship between illuminated subject matter and the real optical image that a lens will make from it? What about the interaction between the image and the light sensitive surface; what can be said to be true there? And so on through the entire chain of photographic production culminating in the viewer experience when confronted by the final photograph.
A guiding principle that informs traditional photography is that of indexicality, the obligatory one-to-one correspondence between elements of one step in the photographic process and the elements of the next step. Contrast this with picture making processes where indexicality does not apply: painting, drawing, and computer assembled images.
Just because you don't structurally alter the scene as constructed by you at the time of exposure doesn't mean you don't manipulate it and that it is somehow "true". It may be a factual reproduction of the scene you encountered, but it is still your interpretation of the scene you encountered. Google Street View is closer to photographic truth than any single still photo because it has no depictional intent - and even then, it is a far from accurate representation.I never cut tails off dogs nor do I delete other objects nor do I ever add objects into the composition. That is for wantabees using FauxTow$hop adding pixies into photographs, thinking that they are the first ones to think of that. That is for wusses.
So for us old guys, it seems that photography is basically out-of-the-camera. That's "truth".
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?