Finding your subject. How?

Seriously, you write with intelligence, you struggle with your own concepts of high standards, you search for visual meaning, and you apparently desire advancing the medium, or at least equating what has been done by others according to your belief system. So, I'd go make 10,000 bad photographs.

Edit:
Btw; Post them here and we'll tell you if they suck.

ParkerSmithPhoto said:

When you watch the American Idol top ten, you can already pick out the top three, because everyone else looks like a chump by comparison. Sad, but true.

Click to expand...

Yes, but isn't that because pop stars are judged for 'the whole package'? If it was a straight singing competition, the final decision would be much more difficult. We judge everyone in the performing arts today, firstly, on their personality, like dates - because we might have to get used to seeing them a lot! It's not quite like that in photography.

Is there a photographic equivalent to an affected delayed vibrato? As soon as I hear that, "I'm out." Oh... that's Dragon's Den.

Michael R 1974 said:

Agree, American Idol is not a good example. That's a pop star competition, which has relatively little to do with singing in the end. Intonation, for example, is lousy in virtually every case.

Click to expand...

Completely agree.

But the argument of comparing music with photography seems wrong to me. Photography is both an art and a craft. Greatly artistically people may or may not be great craftsmen and people with great craft and technique may not be overly artistic. Both can, and are, learned talents to some extent as well as inborn gifts.

I think both types of people can flourish in photography.

I've always called this the engineering mind vs the artistic mind when it pertains to photography. Some people have engineering minds, love equipment and technique, whether capture or darkroom, and excel at learning photographic theory.

The artistic mind really doesn't care that much about equipment or darkroom chemistry but love the process of taking photographs, and only care to learn enough to duplicate what their brain envisioned the picture to look like.

And of courses you have people that are a blend of these two types.

We're not all going to be great or rich and famous, but we can all still make good photographs and have fun doing it.

blansky said:

We're not all going to be great or rich and famous, but we can all still make good photographs and have fun doing it.

Click to expand...

That would be a good signature line.

batwister said:

Yes, but isn't that because pop stars are judged for 'the whole package'? If it was a straight singing competition, the final decision would be much more difficult. We judge everyone in the performing arts today, firstly, on their personality, like dates - because we might have to get used to seeing them a lot! It's not quite like that in photography.

Click to expand...

Of course they are judged that way, and many of them are human dog whistles and/or screech owls.

The point I was trying to make is that in any endeavor there are many who are called and few who are chosen. Not everyone gets to sing at the Met; someone has to sing on the cruise ship.

ParkerSmithPhoto said:

Not everyone gets to sing at the Met; someone has to sing on the cruise ship.

Click to expand...

Does this mean there are people who reluctantly sing on cruise ships?

many of them are human dog whistles

Click to expand...

and

Michael R 1974 said:

NT: No argument there. I'm certainly not suggesting people should simply give up things they aren't great at. Rather that they should be realistic about what they are trying to achieve or accomplish.

Click to expand...

I'd agree with all that, and unfortunately I didn't have time to be clearer when I wrote my previous post.

His goals appear substantially more serious than someone just wanting to enjoy an artistic pastime to the best of his ability.

Click to expand...

In that light I think I get where you're going, and I'd agree---a lot of people (in photography and music and probably every other art) seem to get bogged down in an overthought, external preconception of What Is Required To Be An Artist, rather than just getting out and doing whatever it is they do. I tend to think that more people perpetrating art that works *for* *them* is a good thing, and asking "how do I find my subject?" seems like a reasonable question to ask en route to that goal.

You know, I think there's a fairly common perception---and I'm not sure if the OP is having this problem or if I'm just going off-topic a bit---that there are "right" and "wrong" choices of photographic subject, that some subjects aren't photographic enough, or pretty enough (or ugly enough), don't (or do) convey an unambiguous Message, and so on. Somewhere out there, there are impassioned photographers of kittens and sunsets, and damn it, they're entitled to find their passion and play it as it lays!

As far as music goes, I still don't think it is much different. Perhaps it is because my background is in orchestral/"classical" music. Anyway that's a discussion for a different thread.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm partly speaking from the punk/no-wave "anyone can do this" soapbox, and I tend to agree with those who feel that the Western classical tradition has become more restrictive than most of its strongest voices would ever have intended. Photography has less of that problem, IMHO, because of the widespread acceptance of casual vernacular photography, but basically I see a similar dynamic in both worlds.

I've told more than one person "The only people who think they can't play the harmonica are sober", which I think is a good principle to live by in all versions of art.

-NT

ParkerSmithPhoto said:

Of course they are judged that way, and many of them are human dog whistles and/or screech owls.

Click to expand...

I bet you really like Ute Lemper.

The point I was trying to make is that in any endeavor there are many who are called and few who are chosen. Not everyone gets to sing at the Met; someone has to sing on the cruise ship.

Click to expand...

That's probably not a bad gig. The ones out to whom my heart goes are the unfortunates who have to sing in commercials and sound wildly, orgiastically excited by a brand of dish soap. I'm not sure what the photographic equivalent would be---a lifetime of product shots, I suppose?

-NT

ParkerSmithPhoto said:

Batwiser, put "On Being A Photographer" at the top of your reading list!

Click to expand...

My reading list is large and always growing, but On Being a Photographer has been there for some time. Pretty expensive compared to similar small books, but it's in the post now. Unfortunately, I don't think they understand the word 'photography' in my library. What can I say, I live in a one horse town. And, as someone else alluded to, that was the stimulus for a cynical project at one point. The camera can be a weapon, and in that case, it felt like the barrel was in my mouth.

I'll read the book and actually start concentrating on subject matter that moves me. As unpopular as that ideal is in contemporary work, it's simply the only way I can make effective pictures. The naive art I made earlier on in the landscape came from a good, honest place, if a bit superficial. Maybe I'm ready to go back, but perhaps to new places, with a fresh perspective and visual vocabulary. Context of course is very important to me, but shouldn't have to become a stifling intellectual conceit.

I've finally booked my tickets to London to see Ansel. I'll also be seeing 'Island Stories: Fifty Years of Photography in Britain' at the V&A, for anyone who isn't aware of the exhibition, which starts this month. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/i/British-photography-since-1945/

I thought I wrote a response to your problem, but I guess I deleted it before I posted, as I often do. At any rate, I can't say it any better than Arno, who is a fantastically intelligent man and a heck of a nice guy-

http://www.petapixel.com/2013/03/13...heory-finding-your-own-vision-in-photography/