Stargazer said:
Ah - point of disagreement there, see thread on Haikus
All fair points on poetry, you point to a solid tradition. I had 'free verse' more in mind, i.e. modern poetry since the twentieth century. Of course you can analyze it, and of course it is built on structures - even when supposedly without structure. I didn't say otherwise, I was comparing it to prose story-telling, and finding it less rooted in literary conventions. It is also, often, to do with "the moment" in the way a photograph is.
I think the hard thing with free verse vs. traditional prose is that the more recent form has not been visible enough yet so that people can discern patterns in it. Surprisingly, if you are a lit student (like me) and you spent too much of your time at poetry readings, you become sick of it because they all have the same leitmotifs (disjointed syntax, images of emptiness), the same words (bones, dust, articulations), and the same prosody (meant to be read in a neurotic tone).
Classical poetics surely didn't spring exclusively out of the mind of a master designer. People try stuff, it works for some reason, and then they rationalize it, and pass it on to the next kid, etc. But after millenias of evolution, it stabilizes into specific, and recognizable patterns. It would be an essentialist fallacy to claim that prose (or poetry) is by definition more structured than poetry (or prose).
Stargazer said:
The initial creation of a photograph IS a matter of seconds - that is, if you wish to ignore the hours of setting up that can be involved. However, in my experience anyway, producing the final print you are happy with can take endless amounts of time. My comparison of photography and poetry-writing is based on personal experience, and I can say, that I find the two very comparable, both in terms of conceit, of 'capturing' the moment or moments, and of darfting and re-drafting. I have also written short stories, and I find that very different. However, I'm not altogether sure of the value of going too deeply into comparing writing and photography.
I agree here, but I would add a nuance: despite all the implicit decisions that are taken by the photographer before picture-taking, there is a moment at which the whole picture is set into place in terms of composition. Tones, contrast, I agree, are a matter of further, slower work. But composition in particular, the relative placement of visual elements to each other, that is frozen very quickly. What I mean is thus that the composition of a realistic picture can be left to chance in photography, if one wishes so. With painting, unless you are working from a photo, you never have the same relationship to chance, in a realistic context.
Stargazer said:
As far as I know, no-one on this thread has denied the value of "rules" or conventions. I certainly haven't. If I am an "intuitionist" (I don't mind being called one) I have my feet firmly on the ground.
Cate
Oh I wasn't pouncing on you; rather rambling in general. But reading back the thread, I would say that many people are distrustful of design. You said yourself that rules are meant to be broken. What I want to clarify is that you can't get away from these rules, even if you must break them.
To apply proper composition to a photography, I think one should look to sports as a better practice than analytical geometry. If you are an athlete, you have embodied in yourself patterns of behaviour, reflexes, the geometry of a jump, or the hydrodynamics of water. All of these are principles, explainable and perfectable by science. But when you are in a swimming competition, you don't analyze the water like a scientist. You act in guidance with the principles your body has learned, yet stay alert to any disruption that would require you to break the rules.
Ole was right to point that whenever he tried APPLYING the rules of composition his pictures dissatisfied him, whereas when he let himself work unburdened, they were better. Here goes the inevitable dictum: "Chance favors the prepared mind," and Moonlight, Hernandez. The rules one absorbs have to travel to a lower level of cognitive processing, closer to reflexes than the active mind to be effective. But they're still there, regardless of what they are.
With science, I tend to believe that there should be a coherent, rather unified set of basic principles; with art my belief is that one strives towards coherent principles, but the domain as a whole is not unified around them.
The pluralism of esthetic rules/principles/whatever should be something to be relished, and not a source of conflicts. I don't there one should find "The Rules" of photography, but I am always curious to hear what other guiding principles people follow, and learn a lot from it.