Is straight photography dead?

Agulliver · Apr 11, 2023

My photos are sooooo queer!

Nah...seriously, I am a pretty straight photographer. I still try to choose film type according to the conditions and location I'm going to. Image manipulation will be limited to one minute or so tweaking contrast or a colour channel. But then I have never had the slightest interest in entering a photography competition.

It can be a fine line, I know folk who use phones, digital cameras, film cameras and then fiddle electronically with the images for hours. Is that photography? It's almost certainly art. And now the whole AI generated image thing further muddies the water, as the AI was taught by feeding it actual photos....but it generates something entirely different.

albireo · Apr 11, 2023

Rolleiflexible said:
A fellow photographer criticizes my landscape kallitypes as too "painterly," and says I should make photographs that look like photographs. Like Eggleston, he says. But I don't want to be a second-rate Eggleston.

Perhaps I am not clear on what 'photographs that look like photographs' means, because I'd have thought that Ansel Adams photographs (which I intensely dislike) look much more like photographs than Eggleston's photographs (which I love).

CMoore · Apr 11, 2023

albireo said:
Perhaps I am not clear on what 'photographs that look like photographs' means, because I'd have thought that Ansel Adams photographs (which I intensely dislike) look much more like photographs than Eggleston's photographs (which I love).

This has been a rather interesting thread.
I think i need to read it again

Pieter12 · Apr 11, 2023

You need to start from the original post. This thread has veered off the tracks as far as that is concerned. The OP was concerned with physically altered and manipulated photos being selected for an exhibition at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA. Some of those were muti-media and 3D images that are photography-based, but the question was not what style is "straight photography," vs some other type of photgoraphy, such as staged.

DREW WILEY · Apr 11, 2023

Going back to Alex's post Apr 2nd, that AA wasn't aware of certain other things going on.... what th...??? He was one of the key players in those NYC museum venues which selected them, and even personally printed certain negatives of Moholy-Nagy for sake of a major exhibition. You're confusing a popularized stereotype of AA versus his broader influence and connections. He wasn't just a narrow-minded representative of the "West Coast School" or f/64 or "Straight Photography". He in effect had multiple careers : a successful SF commercial photographer, a passionate landscape photographer, one of the driving forces of multiple facets of photography being accepted as fine art at a museum level, as a significant environmental protection advocate, and finally as an appreciated teacher of photographic method. He had in his circle of friends everyone from mountain mule wranglers to US Senator and even Presidents. He became aware of European avante garde trends in both painting and photography early on, due to Steiglitz.
At times he collaborated with Steichen. He ran in the same circle as modernist painters, and had some of the same patrons.

You need to look at the bigger picture. He also had a fairly long career embracing a considerable amount of change in photographic technique itself. You can't pigeonhole him into just one slice of that, like the brief f/64 phase. Sure, there are other photographers and printmakers whom I admire even more. And I've never attempted to mimic AA. I have my own way of looking at things, including in color. But give credit where credit is due.

Alex Benjamin · Apr 12, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
Going back to Alex's post Apr 2nd, that AA wasn't aware of certain other things going on.... what th...??? He was one of the key players in those NYC museum venues which selected them, and even personally printed certain negatives of Moholy-Nagy for sake of a major exhibition.

Drew, that was much later in his life. I'm talking about the early to mid 30s, when the divide between pictorialism and "straight photography" happened. Let me quote from his autobiography (emphasis mine):

"Increasingly, I detested the common pictorial photography that was then in vogue and also questioned the more sophisticated work of some San Francisco photographers because it clung to those pictorial skirts. There was nothing I responded to in this mannered style of photography. In fact I had seen little photography that I felt was art. My knowledge of the important people in the history of photography and the work of other creative photographers was abysmal."

DREW WILEY · Apr 12, 2023

Thanks for clarifying your statement. But I think a lot of that was just another reaction to an overbearing art regime, and was refreshing in its time, until it became a regime of its own. He and certain others noted how fresh and different Strand did things from the "fuzzy-wuzzies". AA's "enlightenment" seems to have come around the time of his Parmelian Print series of the high country, which are the ones Stieglitz first displayed. All this was prior to his Zone System or even the f64 period. But he still did some soft focus lens photography himself, even a few years after that epiphany. Obviously great sharp focus photographers preceded him even in SF itself, especially Carleton Watkins - an even greater photographic composer than AA, in my opinion. Who knows what Ansel actually bumped into, since the vast majority of Watkin's prints were destroyed in the 1906 great earthquake and fire. But I am speaking in terms of his early glass plates phase. By the time of his 30's, any such remarks were either retrospectively autobiographical, or else an f/64 tribal manifesto. Edward Weston was even more outspoken and hypocritical in that respect. They were waving a flag, just like numerous art movements seeking attention have done. It doesn't mean they actually believed everything they loudly preached.

I never met him. I was chosen as a direct one to one counterpoint to the largest display of his big mural prints ever assembled, very soon after his death. All my own prints were in color, highly detailed Zen-like Cibachromes which drew viewers nose-up, despite their large size, whereas AA's big prints were soft and poetic, and not very sharp at all that degree of scale, causing viewers to back off to appreciate them. It was an especially well-done show, but one of my last. My prints, which I specially framed myself, were on neutral gray panels, and in between every one of those were dark brown panels for sake of Adam's big prints. I love it when curators have the courage to break traditional rules, but not when they go to silly extremes of novelty to stir up controversy and sell tickets.

Arthurwg · Apr 12, 2023

Ansel Adams was also a "pictorialist" IMHO. Although his pictures were a departure from earlier forms, they were also highly manipulated and tortured to achieve a specific look from his "pre-visualized" imagination. They have little relationship to what the naked eye would see, which is closer to my definition of "straight photography."

Alex Benjamin · Apr 12, 2023

Arthurwg said:
Ansel Adams was also a "pictorialist" IMHO. Although his pictures were a departure from earlier forms, they were also highly manipulated and tortured to achieve a specific look from his "pre-visualized" imagination. They have little relationship to what the naked eye would see, which is closer to my definition of "straight photography."

Since the naked eye doesn't see in black and white, doesn't frame in 3:2, 6x6 or any other ratio, has different color sensitivity than color film, sees in three dimensions and not on a single, flat plane, etc., etc., has there ever been a photograph in the history of photography that has come close to your definition of "straight photography"? Where do you draw the line? And, more importantly, if "straight photography" is to be a near-perfect reproduction of what the eye has seen (or is it how the eye sees?), what interest or relevance would it then have? Would photography still be about looking or just a reenactment of the act of seeing?

Sirius Glass · Apr 12, 2023

Arthurwg said:
Ansel Adams was also a "pictorialist" IMHO. Although his pictures were a departure from earlier forms, they were also highly manipulated and tortured to achieve a specific look from his "pre-visualized" imagination. They have little relationship to what the naked eye would see, which is closer to my definition of "straight photography."

You are stretching the definition of pictorialist well beyond the elasticity of its definition. Pictorialists were in their own world, an example it Mortensen.

snusmumriken · Apr 12, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
I think a lot of that was just another reaction to an overbearing art regime, and was refreshing in its time, until it became a regime of its own.

Isn’t that exactly how fashions in art evolve and move on? Successful styles hold sway until people get sick of seeing the ‘same old’. That makes space for something fresh to take root and flourish, until that too becomes passé. And then years later we look back and see that the styles that thrilled our grandparents, but which our parents despised, were actually rather good. Art is inescapably ‘of its time’.

Oops, I hope I haven’t just provoked a debate about whether ‘straight’ photographs somehow avoid being art…

Chuck_P · Apr 12, 2023

Arthurwg said:
.......which is closer to my definition of "straight photography."

It's a problem imo, that so many have their own definition of "straight photography ". I view the the whole concept as being so profoundly bastardized at this point.......I try to keep my own thoughts on it in line with the original concept put forth back in the day.

Dodging and burning do not render a photograph as "not straight".......but there is yet just another opinion. Artistic dodging and burning may render some print values as not real, but it's the sharpness and crispness of the subject matter as portrayed by the optical quality of the lens that is the mainstay.....imo....of what a straight photograph really is.....a piece of photographic art that can, in no other way, be representative of some other form of art. Perhaps I take too much of an "old fashioned" view toward the subject.

Hassasin · Apr 12, 2023

@Chuck_P What is the original concept of "straight photography"? I am not aware of any that would be clear cut objectively indisputable. Maybe back in the day of new kids trying to blow off old kids things were clearer, but lots of things have changed, and not just methods of manipulation.

Or could it just be - if it ain't fake it is straight?

Arthurwg · Apr 12, 2023

Alex Benjamin said:
Since the naked eye doesn't see in black and white, doesn't frame in 3:2, 6x6 or any other ratio, has different color sensitivity than color film, sees in three dimensions and not on a single, flat plane, etc., etc., has there ever been a photograph in the history of photography that has come close to your definition of "straight photography"? Where do you draw the line? And, more importantly, if "straight photography" is to be a near-perfect reproduction of what the eye has seen (or is it how the eye sees?), what interest or relevance would it then have? Would photography still be about looking or just a reenactment of the act of seeing?

For one example, and there are many, have a look at Lewis Baltz. In his case, the "relevance" can be found in the idea.

Alex Benjamin · Apr 12, 2023

Hassasin said:
@Chuck_P What is the original concept of "straight photography"? I am not aware of any that would be clear cut objectively indisputable. Maybe back in the day of new kids trying to blow off old kids things were clearer, but lots of things have changed, and not just methods of manipulation.

Or could it just be - if it ain't fake it is straight?

The original concept:

Straight photography - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Ansel Adams offered a pretty clear definition of what was meant by it in his autobiography. I think someone already quoted it in this thread.

DREW WILEY · Apr 12, 2023

Well, mere "ideas" generally look half-baked to me; and that would describe much of the more academic side of the work of Baltz. It seemed like a fishing expedition for some art project grant. At one time, grants mainly went to already proven artists and were visually based. Then at some point, they started being based on "what about this" written resumes, or "fishing expeditions". I saw quite a few of the results in museums. One could tell. And it's exactly that kind of pandering to armchair pontification which caused many of us to avoid academic art careers like the plague. Glad I did.

Hassasin · Apr 12, 2023

Alex Benjamin said:
Since the naked eye doesn't see in black and white, doesn't frame in 3:2, 6x6 or any other ratio, has different color sensitivity than color film, sees in three dimensions and not on a single, flat plane, etc., etc., has there ever been a photograph in the history of photography that has come close to your definition of "straight photography"? Where do you draw the line? And, more importantly, if "straight photography" is to be a near-perfect reproduction of what the eye has seen (or is it how the eye sees?), what interest or relevance would it then have? Would photography still be about looking or just a reenactment of the act of seeing?

I'm not sure if @Arthurwg meant this at all, only he can clarify that, but that is not what I read. Don't we easily connect a black and white photograph to a scene even if that scene was not precisely as depicted in that photograph, yet clearly showing what things look like out there, with perspective, shapes, lights and shadows?

I don't think there is a bottom to lying to define "straight photography" and reading into the 'memoranda" of the days I am not sold anyone ever actually managed to define it, nor even tried to be that precise. Straight was then an easy change in photography, it was a dramatic change in some aspects of it.

Perhaps it all just boils down to straight as make it as what technology allows do achieve, in a technical sense. If subject is in reality differed by sharp demarkation lines, photograph should show that.

But going as far as to say whatever eye saw is not in line with how human eye sees. We don't really employ depth of field effect in what we see, until we look at a photograph that threw some objects into defocused state and forces as to react to that.

Chuck_P · Apr 12, 2023

Alex Benjamin said:
The original concept:

Straight photography - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Ansel Adams offered a pretty clear definition of what was meant by it in his autobiography. I think someone already quoted it in this thread.

Yes, I believe that was me.

DREW WILEY · Apr 12, 2023

Fakes have been around a long time. The Spanish American War was jump-started by a newspaper sketch of a nonexistent event. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes detectives series, was ironically fooled by a prank composite photo concocted by three little girls. Some like Jerry Uelsmann have made very precise and intriguing composite images, yet it was fully transparent he was doing so. But today, the average junior high kid can fiddle around on a computer a little while and possibly cause a major panic or world war, or throw an election. That stretches the very definition of what "straight" photography means.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 12, 2023

Alex Benjamin said:
Since the naked eye doesn't see in black and white, doesn't frame in 3:2, 6x6 or any other ratio, has different color sensitivity than color film, sees in three dimensions and not on a single, flat plane, etc., etc., has there ever been a photograph in the history of photography that has come close to your definition of "straight photography"? Where do you draw the line? And, more importantly, if "straight photography" is to be a near-perfect reproduction of what the eye has seen (or is it how the eye sees?), what interest or relevance would it then have? Would photography still be about looking or just a reenactment of the act of seeing?

Cloning things in and out are a lot different than those things you mentioned.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 12, 2023

Maybe authentic is a better word than straight.

Alex Benjamin · Apr 12, 2023

Chuck_P said:
Yes, I believe that was me.

Indeed. Found the quote (post #299) : "The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form."

Ansel Adams used "straight" and "pure" interchangeably. The last part, "derivative of any other art form" (emphasis mine in the quote), is what's missing here when discussing the original meaning of the term.

I think it's important to keep it in mind, as, even though there's been almost a century of photographic history since Adams' position and the OP's question, I do feel that the latter still refers in some way to the former (only OP could validate), albeit in a modern, or contemporary context.

Of course, after that, all fine if everyone gives his or her own definition of "straight photography." But discussion then becomes impossible, as opinions never discuss, only argue.

Alex Benjamin · Apr 12, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Cloning things in and out are a lot different than those things you mentioned.

I know.

Let's say we use the historical definition "Pure photography is defined as no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form" as a working hypothesis—as a common ground, so to speak, to further our investigation.

When dealing with traditional photography, we can try to eliminate all "qualities of technique, composition or idea" that does not belong to photography and keep the rest. Easy with technique, so we can keep everything that has to do with choices made on the field (aperture, lens, filter, etc.) or in the darkroom (developer, dodging, burning, contrast filter or paper grade, etc.) as they only belong to photography.

Not as easy in terms of composition or idea, as we can sense the influence of some painters (Edward Hopper comes to mind) on some aspect of photography, but still, the differences between the two art forms are still important enough — the frame, for example, works in a subtly different manner in photography than in painting — to fit the original definition.

Problems arise when dealing with contemporary practices. Does cloning, for example, only belong to the art of photography? If so, then it would have to fit in the original definition. But cloning seems to also belong to other art forms, those that deal with image making, related, but not necessarily similar to photography, and for which there isn't really a name, even though they are at times referred to as the "visual arts". In that case, anything photographic that has cloning, or any other "quality of technique, composition or idea" that would belong to another art form would exclude it from being "straight" or "pure photography", according to the original definition.

Pieter12 · Apr 12, 2023

Alex Benjamin said:
I know.

Let's say we use the historical definition "Pure photography is defined as no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form" as a working hypothesis—as a common ground, so to speak, to further our investigation.

When dealing with traditional photography, we can try to eliminate all "qualities of technique, composition or idea" that does not belong to photography and keep the rest. Easy with technique, so we can keep everything that has to do with choices made on the field (aperture, lens, filter, etc.) or in the darkroom (developer, dodging, burning, contrast filter or paper grade, etc.) as they only belong to photography.

Not as easy in terms of composition or idea, as we can sense the influence of some painters (Edward Hopper comes to mind) on some aspect of photography, but still, the differences between the two art forms are still important enough — the frame, for example, works in a subtly different manner in photography than in painting — to fit the original definition.

Problems arise when dealing with contemporary practices. Does cloning, for example, only belong to the art of photography? If so, then it would have to fit in the original definition. But cloning seems to also belong to other art forms, those that deal with image making, related, but not necessarily similar to photography, and for which there isn't really a name, even though they are at times referred to as the "visual arts". In that case, anything photographic that has cloning, or any other "quality of technique, composition or idea" that would belong to another art form would exclude it from being "straight" or "pure photography", according to the original definition.

So replacing a sky would qualify as "pure photography" (a BS term as I have ever seen).

Sirius Glass · Apr 12, 2023

Alex Benjamin said:
...

Problems arise when dealing with contemporary practices. Does cloning, for example, only belong to the art of photography? If so, then it would have to fit in the original definition. But cloning seems to also belong to other art forms, those that deal with image making, related, but not necessarily similar to photography, and for which there isn't really a name, even though they are at times referred to as the "visual arts". In that case, anything photographic that has cloning, or any other "quality of technique, composition or idea" that would belong to another art form would exclude it from being "straight" or "pure photography", according to the original definition.

Why are you straining to define what is clearly already defined as not add or removing a significant object that is on the negative or slide? Cloning is merely a method for adding or removing an object, nothing more.

Is straight photography dead?

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