Photography hot takes!

[MattKing]

For an art form to truly shine it need no justification to exist. It needs to appeal to everyone, from the uneducated to the connoisseur.

Understanding more about a piece of art isn't a process of seeking justification. It is a process of getting more out of a piece of art that already interests or satisfies or attracts appreciation.

For me, I want to see effort in art. I want to see that thought, time and intent went into the work.

I'm prepared to appreciate both effort, and remarkable inspiration - art that appears brilliant and almost effortless is fine by me. A lot of beautiful but also simple music is like this.

 

[pbromaghin]

The “decisive Moment” is just a marketing phrase.

 

[MurrayMinchin]

Considering all the fine arts, poets would be the closest to photographers.

 

[tcolgate]

WE only admire a few of Ansel Adams' work out of thousands of pictures he took. We look at the same few HCB pictures over and over. If I see that boy with the wine bottles again, I might get drunk. Same with most photographers. They've shot hundreds of thousands and only a relatively few stand out.

Garry Winogrand didn;t even develop much of his film. When he died suddenly in 1984 at the age of 56, he left behind a staggering backlog of un-sequenced and un-beheld work. He was famously more obsessed with the physical act of shooting on the streets than with editing or archiving his results.

All those mentioned were working photographers that all got to curate and style their negatives into the photographs we've come to know. Maier didn't get that opportunity. We have a proverbial hard drive if RAWs.
She might have been satisfied with an uncropped straight grade 2 of any of her negatives, or she may have had strong opinions on sequencing, presentation and an aesthetic.
We know *exacrly* how Ansel wanted his prints. So much so that when his eyes started going his assistant used to have to tell him that his own prints weren't right.
We literally do not have Maier's art.

 

[pbromaghin]

After watching an interview with AA describing his photo of "Moon Rise", it struck me he's an adherent of the philosophy of "if you can't dazzle them with diamonds, then baffle them with bull$h!t".
I'm an adherent of the Weston philosophy of take your work seriously, but not yourself. AA was full of himself.

I think the "full of himself" may be his own invention, part of a "serious artist" persona. According to a biography I read (I don't think it was Mary Alinder's) he was an incorrigible jokester who loved to clown around.

A former (early 80's) assistant to Ansel, David Pfau, told me the Moonrise tale was a BS story they made up after the fact to add some drama. He tells it that Ansel was napping while his assistant drove. The assistant saw the potential photo, stopped the car and set everything up. Then he woke Ansel up to go trip the shutter, thereby making it a real Ansel Adams original. No panic, no missing light meter. Ansel told this story at his New York showing, never expecting it to become famous and that he would have to keep it up for the rest of his life. Pfau was told this story while Adams and the crew were enjoying after-work gin-and-tonics.

 

[agentlossing]

There are no rules in art. But, the purist in me agrees. Let the medium be what it is and embrace it. Shooting film only to scan it on a flatbed TO ME feels like a waste. Print it in the darkroom to really get the most out of it. Does it make the photo better to the average audience? No, probably not, but I will think its cooler

I don't have the darkroom option, so I have to introduce digital into the workflow right now, maybe in the future. I like to think I can sense when analogue images are heavily edited in a digital workflow, though, and I don't like it. I limit myself pretty much to the black and white sliders, maybe just a touch of global contrast and sharpness to overcome the limitations of my 35mm film scanner. I hate to obscure the character of the film stock and the development method.