Is it really just about the image?

Those who can do it, do it.

Those who can't do it, teaches it.

Those who can't teach it, manages.

I fully expect, any day now, the following to appear on the nightly news: "Mount St. Helens has erupted leaving devastation over the entire Northwest.... But first, an update on the Michael Jackson trial and an exclusive interview with Martha Stewart following her recent release from federal prison."

Fashion and celebrity are superficial anyway. No reason to expect anything more from Annie and company. The image is all that matters here to the exclusion of the process completely.

Nothing wrong with a dose of pop culture. After all, it's popular. But we really don't know how to differentiate what's really important and what's entertainment for consumption.

jdef said:

I am grateful for the rich and poignant legacy of Kurt Cobain's short, troubled life. Cobain was truly an artist, and is missed by millions.

Jay

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I guess I would have more respect if he had not taken his own life and left his kid with no father. As it stands he lost credibility when he wimped out. Just my View though.

All
I think Roteague's question spoke to the creator and whether the process was most important or if it was about the image, not the audience.

I definately agree that, for the majority of the audience, the image is all that matters. As a person who is in love with the process I do tend to think about that when I look at others' work, but only after the image has caught my attention.

I think most of us believe (even if only implicitly) that the process does in fact matter, even if we disagree about what part of the process is important. This becomes evident when you ask yourself: "do I like photography, or do I simply like nice images?" If you simply like nice images (i.e., the end result of photography), then you should view time spent crafting images as roughly equal to time spent, for instance, exploring stock photo archives for images. In either case, you are unlikely to get exactly what you envisioned, but you can probably get something fairly close. Furthermore, to the extent that learning to craft images and executing that craft is probably much more time consuming, you might prefer to scan archives. If I want a stool (only for the end product), for instance, I would prefer to buy one, since making one would cost more, require more time (including the time to learn to make stools), and likely result in an inferior product. When I make a photograph, I do it because I want to make something, not simply because I want a photograph. For me, the end product is almost incidental. And as far as doughwok's "proof" is concerned, having a photograph doesn't prove you made it anyway. I think most of you agree with me in some sense. Let me give an extreme example. Imagine you have made an image of some amazing landscape or of some incredible human moment. Now imagine that you have made this image under one of the following conditions: 1) You trekked for a week and made this image exhausted, in driving rain, in a moment when you had almost given up on your journey; 2) You bought a simple robot outfitted to take photographs, set it to take pictures at some regular interval, and payed someone to set it in a particular location. The image mentioned above is one of the (unmanipulated) photos generated as a result of this process.

Ask yourself honestly under which of these circumstances you would value the image more. If there is a difference, then the process does matter--whether it's effort spent in a darkroom, or working in photoshop, or climbing mountains to get a shot.

djklmnop said:

Those who can do it, do it.

Those who can't do it, teaches it.

Those who can't teach it, manages.

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Yes well some of us do all three.

David.

Robert has posed a question to which there can be no one true answer. He may as well of asked which religions-cults-aboriginal groups God is the right God, or does God exist at all?

On one hand, each of us obviously feels the process is central to our way of seeing, of how we can most clearly express through photography our interpretation of the world...or else we wouldn't have searched out then stayed with APUG. On the other hand, each person who views our work interprets it through *their* accumulation of life experience and expectations, and may not give a damn about our images...or how they were made.

Murray

MurrayMinchin said:

Robert has posed a question to which there can be no one true answer. He may as well of asked which religions-cults-aboriginal groups God is the right God, or does God exist at all?

On one hand, each of us obviously feels the process is central to our way of seeing, of how we can most clearly express through photography our interpretation of the world...or else we wouldn't have searched out then stayed with APUG. On the other hand, each person who views our work interprets it through *their* accumulation of life experience and expectations, and may not give a damn about our images...or how they were made.

Murray

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Murray,
I think it does matter how it was made. For example, I'm thinking of someone else's image that matters to me; Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother." As someone who teaches the history of photography ( and has just been told offensively that he "can't do it"), I know the circumstances behind the image.
I have been deeply touched by the image long before I knew anything about it. Yet, part of what makes it so affecting is the assumption that it was a photograph of real people in real life; not a staged tableau that was perfected digitally. There is something about seeing a great landscape, like an Ansel Adams Yosemite icon, and being able to assume that, yes, that cloud really was there. It just doesn't have the same emotion when you have to wonder if the cloud came from Wyoming, and that tree was from Colorado, and ten different negatives were used in creating the print.

Of course, some will observe that Jerry N. Uelsmann has created some wonderfully imaginative images by using several images spliced together; but they are done with humor, imagination, and, somehow, honesty. They are obviously what they are, with no attempt at subverting the senses dishonestly.

When the final image is everything, and is totally divorced from the process, we have lost something that is really valuable. We will have traded creativity for mere cleverness.

Hi Steven,

I too believe that, as Marshal Macluhan (sp?) said, "The medium is the message". For me, a hand made object be it a piece of furniture, a quilt, or a photograph will always be imbued with an extra *something* that a machine or computer made object just doesn't have...the hand of the artist/craftsman.

The thing is, that when our work goes off into the real world on its own without the benefit of our explanations of process, I'd guess that less than 5% who look at it will even care to wonder how it was made...the other 95% will only think about the image. For that 5% however, it will make all the difference in the world!

Wasn't it Edward Weston who in his daybooks talked about Leonardo DaVinci complaning that painters weren't considered real artists because their hands were removed from the surface they were painting by a brush, and that the piano was shunned by real musicians at first because the hands of the musician were removed from the strings by levers and hammers? This debate will never end.

My point is that for some the process will have great meaning, for others it will make no difference, and still others couldn't care less either way...an unanswerable question. For those who do care I state on the back of my prints how they were made. I believe as technology rolls over us and grinds us down to the lowest common denominator, hand made objects will be increasingly respected. Having said that, great art, purely seen and honestly expressed no matter how it was produced, cannot be denied.

Murray