Does process actually matter?

[DrPablo]

Intention matters ABSOULUTELY.

Are you so sure?

Intention matters only insofar as it can be executed. Who cares what you intended at the beginning if your end product is not what you intended??

 

[MurrayMinchin]

Are you so sure?

Intention matters only insofar as it can be executed. Who cares what you intended at the beginning if your end product is not what you intended??

Or, then again, what if you attain what you intended yet nobody cares? In this case the process didn't matter at all, except maybe for satisfying some personal end.

Are we chasing our tails????

Murray

 

[jpeets]

You can get your ass coddled up Everest by a high priced guide and a couple Sherpa's, or you can climb it solo without supplemental oxygen. You can jummar all the way to the top of El Capitan behind a guide, or you can climb it rope solo. You can take a beautiful photograph and 'ink-zap' as many copies as you want, or you can make every subsequent print in the darkroom, each exhibiting (hopefully) your mastering the many hurdles in the path towards a fine print.

Therefore, process matters.

I think your climbing metaphors don't really apply, because the end result of the activities is internal (satisfaction/self mastery, whatever).

From my perspective, photography is ultimately about visual communication: the end product, the image, works or it doesn't. As far as process or medium is concerned, there are many practitioners of a medium who have high technical ability, but at best mediocre artistic ability. Conversely, there are those with strong ideas, but poor craftsmanship, which prevents the image from succeeding. The magic happens when artistic vision and adequate technical skills merge.

Personally, I don't care if someone spent 2 weeks in a blizzard, packing a 20X24 wet plate camera, was chewed on by a grizzly and probed by aliens, if the end result is a mediocre image. If someone skilfully uses a point-n-shoot from their back porch to create a stunning image, that's FAR more interesting.

I also don't have a hierarchy of handcoated paper>fiber based B&W > RC B&W > traditional color > inkjet. I have been impressed and bored by prints from any of these media.

I do think staged vs spontaneous is an issue, in that traditional photography implied a veracity that has been undermined by less than scrupulous traditional practitioners (e.g. Doisneau, who I understand maintained that his images were not staged, but eventually recanted) and folks interested in compositing who don't acknowledge their practices. Now, stunning images are often met with a bored "Did that in Photoshop?" response ......

Of course, by its nature, APUG is populated by folks who are process-orientated, so I expect a fair bit of disagreement ....

Jaan

 

[David H. Bebbington]

You can get your ass coddled up Everest by a high priced guide and a couple Sherpa's, or you can climb it solo without supplemental oxygen. You can jummar all the way to the top of El Capitan behind a guide, or you can climb it rope solo. You can take a beautiful photograph and 'ink-zap' as many copies as you want, or you can make every subsequent print in the darkroom, each exhibiting (hopefully) your mastering the many hurdles in the path towards a fine print.

Therefore, process matters.

Then again, the photograph has to be strong enough to stand alone, to make someone stop and ponder it without your holding its hand or explaining anything.

Therefore, process means nothing if they don't care to become engaded.

To add yet another twist, it may become important if the viewer chooses. For example; if I saw two identical photographs, one being 'ink-zapped' and another made by hand, I'll always prefer the one born wet because it has the hand of the artist in it.

Pretty clear eh?

Murray

Yet again, the equation "Wet process = Real photography, Inkjet print = Facile cop-out of inferior quality." Honestly, Murray, have you ever done any high-end inkjet printing? Or maybe you know something that I, after 41 years in the business, don't know? High-end inkjet printing is just as demanding as wet-process printing, the only real difference is that you have to do the fine tuning once only, thus freeing up a considerable amount of time for things other than breathing toxic fumes in a darkroom!

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

Au contraire, mon frere David. There is just as much continuous fine-tuning with inkjet/digital processes as there is with wet darkroom, because monitors drift out of calibration, printers clog heads, inkset manufacture changes, and so on. It all comes down to where you'd rather spend your time- smelling fumes in a wet darkroom, or fattening your ass, turning green under fluorescent lighting, and burning out your eyes in front of a computer monitor.

 

[David H. Bebbington]

Au contraire, mon frere David. There is just as much continuous fine-tuning with inkjet/digital processes as there is with wet darkroom, because monitors drift out of calibration, printers clog heads, inkset manufacture changes, and so on. It all comes down to where you'd rather spend your time- smelling fumes in a wet darkroom, or fattening your ass, turning green under fluorescent lighting, and burning out your eyes in front of a computer monitor.

These things do happen, but nonetheless, using that nice Mr. Epson's products, I do find that if I return to a file I processed in the past and print on the same printer, paper and inks, results are consistent. Mr. Epson would never do anything as vulgar as let his heads clog - that is the purpose of all the programmed cleaning cycles, not to waste ink, no, no, no!

 

[sanking]

My own opinion is that process is very important because it is part and parcel of the final image. If the form did not matter we would be reduced to evaluating images merely on their content, which could be done on the web in cyberspace so prints would not be necessary.

So that my views will be clearly understood I am going to repeat something here that I wrote a long time ago that was part of an introduction I did on pictorial photography. I have modified it slightly for this forum.

In his book “The Death of the Author” Roland Barthes, repeating a concept expressed nearly a century earlier by the French poet Mallarmé, wrote: “it is language which speaks, not the author.” Although Barthe’s observations were directed toward illustrating the concepts of the “signifier” and the “signfied” they remind us of the artificial separation between form and meaning that has characterized much of western art and literature since the age of Romanticism. Artificial in my opinion, because the vessel into which meaning is placed inevitably alters the meaning itself. Artificial, too, because it is an axiom that meaning without form is only potential. These concepts, pertinent even to the more traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture, are especially important for a more technologically derived medium such as photography.

How does a photograph speak, i.e. communicate? Like all art and literature a photographic print communicates through a language which may be called its syntax. The language of syntax relates to the manner in which information is recorded on the photographic emulsion (camera syntax) and how it is subsequently transformed into a print (printmaking syntax). Both types of photographic syntaxes are limited as to what, and how, they convey visual information because unlike other art forms photography always starts with what “is”. Camera syntax is therefore fairly limited. For this reason photographers have tended to place greater emphasis on the syntax of printmaking, so it is primarily through the syntax of printmaking (texture, sheen, contrast, image color and tonal scale) that meaning is conveyed. Photographers use the syntax of printmaking in the same manner and for the same purposes that poets use words and painters use brushes: to present in individual and subjective interpretation of nature.

William Crawford, in The Keepers of Light, presents an extremely interesting section on the subject of photographic syntax. It is worth reading even if you never plan to do any type of printing other than digital inkjet.

Sandy King

 

[JBrunner]

In the grand scheme, nothing matters, except to yourself. You can have opinions, beliefs, hopes, plans, methods, intentions, etc. and yet all those things matter only to you, in the truest senses. You might think it matters to other people, but what actually concerns them is what they think, from their perspective, which you will never truly understand. If you think you do, you are fooling yourself.

I like traditional process, and process matters to me. More than once I have seen an image that had allot going for it, and was saddened that the method and medium fell far short of the what would have been possible, had a better method and medium been employed. I don't have any problem with ink as a medium, but I do have trouble understanding the mindset that seems to often go with it, and I have gotten to the point where I just pretty much ignore it, because the signal to noise ratio is, for me, unbearable.

Decide what is important to you, and follow yourself.

 

[Papa Tango]

Sandy, I think that Scott summed it up best with his succinct comment on the first page of this thread--that it matters more to photographers than to anyone else.

I just finished reading a NYT story in which Errol Morris was in pursuit of the exact camera location of Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" shots. A great deal of debate centered around the light and shadow composition on the cannonballs themselves, and other such trivia. This is just another rehash of Sontag's authenticity debate in "On Photography."

We care because it's how we relate our art. At the least common denominator, technical details in photography are akin to talking to your mechanic and having him rave about the performance of his latest BlackHawk wrench set and how it expedited the repair of your vehicle. Driving down the road, others care little about the mechanic or his tools.

I challenge anyone in this list to gather together 10 people completely unknown to them and exhibit 5 photographs all made using different techniques. These folks are not collectors or trendy souls who must roll in the cachet of "fiber based, archival, gum bichromate, or any other elite buzzword.

Similar, show the same 10 people 5 other artistic images created with brush or pen. Make sure that they are representations of famous images easily recognized and ask them what medium they were originally rendered in. Very few care--rather it is the image and to use the pomo deconstructionist language that this thread has adapted--its narrative which displaces any physical contextual or artifact syntax that the philosophic soul may attach.

KISS, it's the image that matters to the viewer--not what developer or paper we used to derive it. These are matters for the artist, scholar, and the overly pretentious.

 

[sanking]

Sandy, I think that Scott summed it up best with his succinct comment on the first page of this thread--that it matters more to photographers than to anyone else.

But that would be true for any art. The word craftmanship of a poem is primarily understood and appreciated by other poets, the ability to play a violin is most appreciated by other violinists.

The problem with photography is that the entry requirements to comment about it are very low. So people who don't understand anything about photography feel that their opinion is as valuable as that of any other person.

Sandy King

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

Not everyone who views (or otherwise senses) a work of art can articulate why it affects them the way that it does (or doesn't, as the case may be). It's not necessary to understand the process to be affected by it, and even if one does understand the process, the understanding may be quite separate from one's emotional reaction.

 

[JBrunner]

Not everyone who views (or otherwise senses) a work of art can articulate why it affects them the way that it does (or doesn't, as the case may be). It's not necessary to understand the process to be affected by it, and even if one does understand the process, the understanding may be quite separate from one's emotional reaction.

Indeed, I have witnessed this while anonymously eavesdropping at my own exhibition last year. Some people might really get it, some didn't. Some made up really amusing analysis of my work and what I was "trying to say" that was dumbfoundingly far from any reasonable interpretation.

The work was most genuinely appreciated by other photographers, and they were also the only people really interested in the process.

I did have an amusing experience with one patron, a gentleman in his 80's with a DSLR hanging around his neck, who knew they were 8x10 contact prints, called me a "dinosaur"

 

[dpurdy]

No absolute answer except to a degree. If someone is selling their work as special because it is a special process then I call BS and say the the process has to be justified in the aesthetics. If someone is saying they care nothing for process, only the concept, then I call BS again. There has to be intent and craft for it to be honest.

If you bill your exhibition as Platinum prints, you will get people who are interested in Platinum prints. If you bill your exhibition as Art, you probably will only get your friends to come.

I am having an art show. What kind of art? Good art. What is the medium? I don't think process matters. But what do you do? I make art.

Welcome to my show. Oh now I see you are a photographer, I thought you made art.
DP