Instant film? (When not lacking of visual integrity by design, I mean). No enlarging, no manipulation.
I had never really thought about this, but I guess the daguerreotype is the only form of photography with complete integrity.
Instant film? (When not lacking of visual integrity by design, I mean). No enlarging, no manipulation.
Instant film? (When not lacking of visual integrity by design, I mean). No enlarging, no manipulation.
Just not the hand-tinted ones! No one ever said being a purist was easy.
I'm not a fan of the hipster Instagram thing, but it does seem to argue that there's an audience for aesthetics other than "oversharpened and oversaturated". Like most cultural norms, the oversaturated flowers and sunsets seem to create a certain amount of backlash. So I think there's hope in the broadest aesthetic sense, though how many of those people will come to appreciate the specific characteristics of *film*, as opposed to lo-fi digital capture, is anybody's guess.
Commercial work distorts our sense of people's aesthetics, I think. Bright colors and flash and bling capture people's attention and sell products, so they're kind of self-reinforcing. There's an exactly analogous problem in music, where mainstream popular music has gotten more and more "compressed" in volume and "scooped" in frequency, both of which are good attention-grabbers on the radio but terrible for longer-term attentive listening. But I'm not sure that either case really represents What People Like, so much as What Works To Move Money Around.
-NT
But if you were to step out of your world and into mine you would see that there are almost zero people involved in analog photography anymore. The clients could not care less. They are buying what it on the paper/canvas and not how it was made. They are buying pictures of their loved ones and the emotional impact is built in. In my little world of hundreds of thousands of photographers, we are putting hundreds of thousands of portraits on the walls of people homes. We have no angst, and we have no major concern for process per se. We want the best we can get and we now have it.
I do understand. You have to create a style and products that will bring you business. The world of art photography is very different. Artist usually do work in their own voice while commercial and portrait photographers have to supply what is in demand. And there are some photographers that work somewhere in the middle.
Sure, and I think just about everyone on APUG agrees with all of that, except for quibbling about the definition of "best" in that last sentence. That's a photographic world we aren't talking about here, precisely *because* it's gone almost entirely digital, but I think much of the OP's question would apply there too: Can people appreciate family portraits that have some damn CHARACTER in them, that say something about the people they show, rather than just documenting an image of the person and relying on the viewer to supply the emotional content? I think statistically the answer is "kinda but not very much", and that's not a new thing having to do with any particular medium, it's just that human beings tend to be kind of lazy viewers.
Let me ask you this: Do you do portraiture out of a profound artistic attachment to portraiture as well as for the paycheck, or is it a "just a job" kind of photography for you?
I ask because, if you picked door #1, I'd expect that you might feel some frustration about those philistine customers and how they can't tell a good portrait from a mediocre one, as long as it's in focus and of the right person and the skin isn't green. That's not film vs. digital, I don't think it's even a purely relative aesthetic judgement, it's "investigative viewer" vs. "passive viewer". And I think it's quite understandable that in a crowd like APUG, where people are intentionally taking a particular and somewhat challenging route to a final image, many of us wish we could get a world of more investigative viewers, who notice and care about the details that motivate our choices of process.
-NT
And I think it's quite understandable that in a crowd like APUG, where people are intentionally taking a particular and somewhat challenging route to a final image, many of us wish we could get a world of more investigative viewers, who notice and care about the details that motivate our choices of process.
I often get the feeling here that there is so much concern about process because there is so little being sold. So people obsess with trivia and fiddle with instruments.
99.99% of people don't care what is under the hood of their car. As long as it get the results they want. A lot of people here are like a bunch of mechanics obsessing over the engines and wondering why people don't care. Sorry they don't. They just want their car to do what a car is supposed to do.
My clients just want what a portrait is supposed to do.
This just sounds like seeking the viewers validation to me. Painters don't ask the viewers to have any knowledge of how they mix paints or the brushes they use. This self-consciousness feels like the root of 'the photographic problem' and it's definitely not the viewers fault. If it's there, it's there. It's incidental in the end. Don't burden other people with your fetishes - this is why we have APUG.
I think the causality might go the other way too. Fiddly eccentric activities (which I think we all gotta admit describes much of analog photography) are probably mostly attractive to people who aren't trying to make money at them. I'm not sure how many of the APUG folks would want to shoot film as a day job---I know I wouldn't, because for me it would spoil the fun...
The thing is, I respectfully differ with a lot of people about what a portrait is "supposed" to do, and I think it's possible that you do too. As a dedicated portrait photographer, don't you feel like there's a certain slippery "something" that some portraits have and others don't, that makes them seem inhabited by the character of the subject rather than just being another photo with a person in it?
But a lot of viewers don't make that distinction, right? They're the ones happily patronizing the low-end "good enough" portrait studios. And more power to them for being happy, I guess, but if you really have the equanimity not to wish there were more people who wanted to really *look* at the portraits, you're doing better at equanimity than I am. To your credit, probably.
The cars are a good analogy, I think. Most people consider that what a car is "supposed to do" is get you and your stuff from point A to point B. Some people think it should be fun to drive while it's doing it, and they go around wondering why so many people are happy with their Camrys, and starting threads with titles like "Can people appreciate drivability and road feedback in an automatic transmission age?", I suppose.
-NT
I think your understanding of portrait photography is pretty limited. Coming up with new and different styles is a constant.
(in response to my desire for viewers "who notice and care about the details that motivate our choices of process")
I'm not sure I get your point. I'm talking about the details of the result that *motivate* us to use film, not the self-conscious fact of using film. I don't care if a viewer knows or cares that the way I got the grain to look like that involved Tri-X and Diafine, or whatever, but I'd like them to see and appreciate the sense of grittiness that showed up in the image at the end of the day.
Which I suppose is "seeking the viewer's validation", in the sense that wishing people would see and like one's work is *always* seeking validation. Is it really desirable to be a photographer (resp. painter, writer, musician, whatever) who really doesn't care one little bit if they manage to communicate to anyone?
-NT
I find this intervention of Blansky about his "market" very interesting.
I think the question of the OP could be slightly twisted in saying he asked whether the average user understands subtleties, cares for details, looks with a "choosy" attitude at photographic works, or whether he's only satisfied with the first impression, good enough. High saturation - fake skin etc. usually satisfy the viewer at first glance, but gives him after a short while an aftertaste of fake and unnatural.
I think this question could have applied to both film and to digital but, ultimately, the thread shifted toward the old same and beloved "analogue vs digital" debate, under this assumption: oversaturated = digital, subtle nuances and quality work = analogue.
Blansky reconducted this I think to a more interesting ground: clients do look for quality, and subtle nuances, but they don't care about the process, just like - I would say - the average woman wouldn't care about the engine under the hood.
The average man, though, does care about the engine under the hood!
An aspect of appreciations of objects is in the mind. A nice article about a luxury watch I read once talked about how a rich watch collector one day opened a certain woman watch (there is people who actually opens them to look at them with a loupe, just like we do with slides, and observe the accurate craftsmanship of each cod etc.).
Well, the man found that the quartz movement was kept, inside the case, by a horribile dictu plastic support. When he reassembled the watch, and since that moment on, even if the plastic was not visible inside the case (no sapphire back), the mind knew the plastic was inside there and that made that watch somehow ugly. Every time he looked at the watch he saw the plastic with his mind.
I understand him. Most of us do not stop at what we see because we cannot ignore what the mind knows. The most perfectly imitated synthetic pearl will not have breathed on the sea bed. The most perfectly imitated synthetic diamond will not have been forged into perfection by unimaginable heat, pressure and time. We simply cannot afford to ignore our mind.
This goes back to Blansky observation: 99.99% of people don't care about film or digital. I understand that.
But I think that is also because their mind doesn't see the difference. For some people, rightly or wrongly, analogue means "handmade" and digital means "machine forged" in a sense. Our question is: why the people who would appreciate "handmade" in let's say marble work would not care about it in a family portrait?
I don't have an answer.
Maybe really there is no difference to see and all the "handmade" thinking can be reduced to mental masturbation by a few Luddites who have a bad relationship with death (us).
But on the other hand maybe our culture is beginning just now to discover "handmade" qualities in photography, just like what happened in watchmaking during the Quartz revolution: for a few years quartz movements completely obliterated mechanical ones, and it took several years before the mind of people would begin again being attracted by the tiny cogs dancing in a metal case.
Quartz watches are more precise. But most of those portrait buyers would learn to love a mechanical watch if they were somehow introduced to its magic. "Under the hood" counts a lot to some people.
Possibly, those same portrait buyers would learn to love and understand "the process", and not just the result, if they were somehow introduced to the world of analogue photography and its "magic", "craftmanship", "handmade" flair. Maybe one day somebody will make a TV documentary showing enlarging in the dark and suddenly portrait photographers will begin having to use film again
I have an anecdote. The wife of a friend of my sister is a professional photographer, IIRC a portraitist. He told me that around 10% (IIRC) of her clients ask them specifically for analogue work. That was in Paris last year.
Europe, more than the US, is "tied" to analogue photography, and probably to analogue watches as well. And I imagine that in Europe, broadly speaking, what "the mind" sees is probably culturally more important than in the US. That might explain the 99.99% vs 90.00% of digital portrait in the two cases (not that I think this can be defined a statistically significant sample).
* by the way, watchmaking has its hybrids, the electro-mechanical movements.
We don't delve too deeply into the pimples of the various relationships or the fact that mom is a drunk and dads a philanderer. That is someone else's job.
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?