Alan Edward Klein
Member
If a person viewing your photograph asks you with a doubtful look whether you photoshopped it, and you get a twinge in your stomach, then you're not doing something right.
Why should you get a twinge in your stomach?If a person viewing your photograph asks you with a doubtful look whether you photoshopped it, and you get a twinge in your stomach, then you're not doing something right.
If a person viewing your photograph asks you with a doubtful look whether you photoshopped it, and you get a twinge in your stomach, then you're not doing something right.
"is photography supposed to be reality ?"
My new answer: Yes -- the photographer's reality.
A good photograph has a visceral effect on the viewer, a response from the gut. So many photographs appeal to exclusively photographic instincts, a nice portrait, a colourful flower, a moody sky, a bird caught in mid flight. While those things can be part of the emotion of a photo, they are rarely satisfactory as the whole story. I looked through a wildlife magazine in a waiting room yesterday, full of "stunning" photographs. What I actually felt was entirely aesthetic, how pink the flamingos wear, how the photographer had captured the tiger's leap onto its victim. Well done, a triumph of expensive gear and exotic locale, but emotionally very little, at least for me (and I like animals and the outdoors). A great photograph has the capacity to transcend the photographic language we're all familiar with, and make it's own small permanent truth. The truth may be a lie in the bigger story - especially true of journalism - but it becomes iconic in its own right.A photograph not being reality has nothing to do with telling lies or not telling lies - a photograph is an abstracted representation of what was in front of the camera for the duration of the exposure. You can make that abstracted representation an extremely precise simulacrum of the scene in front of the camera, but it is nonetheless a simulacrum. Photographs have their own language - depth-of-field, shutter speed, and color balance (or grayscale rendering) are all ways of describing the scene in front of the camera, but they are a quasi-linguistic method of description. Reality doesn't have depth-of-field. Reality doesn't have a shutter speed- we see the world in continuous motion, THROUGH time. The peel of an apple isn't pigmented mineral dyes - it's tannins and acids and chlorophyll. Human skin isn't gradations of black and silver.
Any "lying" that happens is 100% the responsibility of the photographer - we accept any given photograph as truthful based upon our trust in the camera operator. It is acceptable within photojournalistic ethics to adjust color, contrast, and cropping - Any photograph is already an abstracted crop of the scene to begin with.
I think it adds to the general feeling of photography as junk currency. The trust in some genres of photography as being anything more than a type of graphic design has never been lower. If I see a landscape at an exhibition I assume it has been at least filtered to emphasise unrealistic visual relationships, and probably chopped up wholesale by digital processing. My own response is a new found respect for landscape photos most judges would find boring, because they resound with the emotion of what it must have been like at the time. There's also a certain laziness about a lot of photography. I remember driving through the hills on a miserable wet day. For one moment the clouds parted, just long enough to allow me to pull over, grab the camera from the passenger footwell where it lives (I didn't go out with photography in mind) and take a few shots, before everything returned to grey driving rain. In those few seconds a beam of light exposed a stony path like a silver thread, and hill fog turned into pearlescent colours. I think most people would create such a picture in post, or if they'd grabbed it as I did, over-dramatize the event in some way that brought it into question.Is adding clouds bad? I do not think it is clear.
Watkins was adding clouds in the 1800's.
Yeah...I can remember scratching my head at the time...And I did not like it then.
Then you're holding photography to a different standard than other art mediums. If we're discussing "art" photography, as opposed to documentary/journalism, there should be no expectation (or promise) of reality.Until they add clouds or other objects, move rocks and trees or remove dogs tails.
Painting comes from the artist's mind. Everyone understands it's not a photo but the artist's imagination. With photography, it's different. Or at least it had been so. Cameras capture a moment of time. The art is by God. We're only trying to capture His imagination in the best light. If we start compositing elements, adding and removing, then it's no longer a photo but digital art.Then you're holding photography to a different standard than other art mediums. If we're discussing "art" photography, as opposed to documentary/journalism, there should be no expectation (or promise) of reality.
Then you're holding photography to a different standard than other art mediums. If we're discussing "art" photography, as opposed to documentary/journalism, there should be no expectation (or promise) of reality.
??Painting comes from the artist's mind. Everyone understands it's not a photo but the artist's imagination. With photography, it's different. Or at least it had been so. Cameras capture a moment of time. The art is by God. We're only trying to capture His imagination in the best light. If we start compositing elements, adding and removing, then it's no longer a photo but digital art.
Then you're holding photography to a different standard than other art mediums. If we're discussing "art" photography, as opposed to documentary/journalism, there should be no expectation (or promise) of reality.
I am holding photography to its OWN standard. It is also the APUG standard. Why is that such a hard concept for you to grasp?
Photography doesn't have a standard - it is a thing, devoid of morals or ethics. It exists, like nuclear fusion. It can be harnessed for good or ill, for creativity or factual approximation. But it by itself is nothing, devoid of judgment. Just because it is capable of more precise, more consistently repeatable and faster approximation of reality than other plastic arts does not make it any more or less noble, truthful or any other -ism we might want to impose upon it. It is just fast, detailed and consistently repeatable.The fact that I can make 100,000 virtually identical copies of an image over an indefinite span of time does not have relevance to truthfulness.
Sounds like a Rod Serling intro for The Twilight Zone![]()
I am holding photography to its OWN standard. It is also the APUG standard. Why is that such a hard concept for you to grasp?
what + whose personal standard is that ?
black and white ?
chromes?
c41? chromeb/w?
solarization? sabbitier?
collage?
no cropping allowed ? straight print?
n+1/-1 development ?
what about burning and dodging or masking ?
there is absolutely no difference between that stuff and what watkins did ...
i find it funny that people believe a photograph is the truth or some sort of approximation of the truth
nothing about photography has anything to do with truth .. the only thing that is true or has to do with truth
is that something might have been in front of the camera, and even then who knows ...
huhI am glad that you are having a good laugh, though I have many, many, many times told you and posted on APUG that my problem is adding and removing OBJECTS, and not the dealing with the rest of the items that you insist on posting every single time you respond to my posts. Please make a note of this so that we do not have to see the same movie every time you respond.
huh
so is using lead to remove a shadow or a blemish on someone's face considered to be removing an object ? or does removing an object
seem to mean something more substantial like removing orthodontic braces ( with lead and retouching fluids ) or swapping heads ( cut and paste and rephotograph like they did in edwardian times )
if those things are allowed and other severe manipulations like exposure + control ( like a slow shutter speed to erase objects ) to processing to printing techniques are allowed but
what you are referring to as object removal is not, this "standard" sounds kind of arbitrary to me ...
not really laughing just trying to come to some sort of understanding why some object removals and heavy handed manipulations and printing and processing techniques that have been done for 160+ years
are not the same as what you refer to as "removing objects" ....
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