the great schism of photography

I am rarely interested in what people say about a picture. I am much more interested in what the photographer has to say about what he/she did. No need to be esoteric, just the intention expressed with simples words.

As you shared your own experience, it is my turn to tell you a story. Last year in another forum, an ex-professional (retired?) photographer started a thread posting pictures shot from the hip. Why? Because after years of academic photography, he wanted to go beyond the accepted rules and discovered he could get pleasing pictures with a less formal practice. Other photographers answered by posting their own pictures and it lasted like that for at least 20 pages.

I was like an eye opener to me. Yes, this guy was true, orthodoxy is not the whole in life and certainly not in photography. Framing was out of composition rules, exposure was not that perfect, picture was half blurry but to me it was closer to life than most works I saw posted there.

So the intention was there and the result spoke to me. Would the pictures have been perfectly exposed, sharp and well composed, it would have been another thread like dozens posted daily.

To me, practicing photography and to stress on the technical aspect is somewhat sterile but to share an experience is priceless.

Dali said:

I am rarely interested in what people say about a picture. I am much more interested in what the photographer has to say about what he/she did. No need to be esoteric, just the intention expressed with simples words.

As you shared your own experience, it is my turn to tell you a story. Last year in another forum, an ex-professional (retired?) photographer started a thread posting pictures shot from the hip. Why? Because after years of academic photography, he wanted to go beyond the accepted rules and discovered he could get pleasing pictures with a less formal practice. Other photographers answered by posting their own pictures and it lasted like that for at least 20 pages.

I was like an eye opener to me. Yes, this guy was true, orthodoxy is not the whole in life and certainly not in photography. Framing was out of composition rules, exposure was not that perfect, picture was half blurry but to me it was closer to life than most works I saw posted there.

So the intention was there and the result spoke to me. Would the pictures have been perfectly exposed, sharp and well composed, it would have been another thread like dozens posted daily.

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Well I'm sure your example was a cathartic experience for him, and since any picture no matter how good or bad will have admirers and even sellers, it is really a vast wasteland of tastes.

My preference in photography and really any craft is simple, learn the rules, then break them if you can defend your decision.

In your example if the guy had been a professional home builder and finally had enough, and built a home that looked like it would probably fall down because he said fuck it, I'm tired of rules, would you have been some enamored with his newly found freedom. I'm guessing not.

The bottom line is that photography is not really all that important, in the big picture. (Pun) Most people here have never earned a dime doing it. Which is fine. Some want to get better at it, some really don't care, they just want their peers to give them kudos. And we can get a mutual backslapping society.

I once played hockey with a guy who was terrible, always out of position, never did his job, but his reply was that he had his own style.

If you went on professional sites, rules would abound, partly because without them you probably couldn't have a career in photography.

So my opinion on APUG is, do what you like. Someone will like it and someone else won't. And it really doesn't matter either way. It only matters to you. But if you want to sell it, then you'll find things are often different.

blansky said:

Ken, I often see flashes of brilliance on what you write, then other times it goes right off the rails.

You are one of the main subscribers of the divisive us vs them, on this site, which is your right, but then claiming to be a victim in all this, seems rather disingenuous.

I have said all along that vive la difference but recognize that there are definite differences in approach and mindset.

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Apologies blankey, as my reply was not intended for you personally. I did not make that clear. Your post was simply the trigger for a highly specific but intentionally obfuscated response that would be recognizable and relevant to a small few, but still suitable for consumption by a general audience.

As for being divisive, I do plead guilty to holding up mirrors. Those who think me divisive, or abusive, or mean-spirited, or any other negative, need only look into one to see the explanation. With me one gets back exactly what one gives, and with everyone else not requiring mirrors, I am the first to practice inclusion, take up their cause, and jump to their defense when such is called for.

I have done so similarly for you in the past. Ironically, I have also in the past done the same for some who now require mirrors. Go figure...

Another somewhat obfuscated response, I afraid. Again, none of this has anything to do with you.

Ken

blansky said:

Well I'm sure your example was a cathartic experience for him, and since any picture no matter how good or bad will have admirers and even sellers, it is really a vast wasteland of tastes.

My preference in photography and really any craft is simple, learn the rules, then break them if you can defend your decision.

In your example if the guy had been a professional home builder and finally had enough, and built a home that looked like it would probably fall down because he said fuck it, I'm tired of rules, would you have been some enamored with his newly found freedom. I'm guessing not.

The bottom line is that photography is not really all that important, in the big picture. (Pun) Most people here have never earned a dime doing it. Which is fine. Some want to get better at it, some really don't care, they just want their peers to give them kudos. And we can get a mutual backslapping society.

I once played hockey with a guy who was terrible, always out of position, never did his job, but his reply was that he had his own style.

If you went on professional sites, rules would abound, partly because without them you probably couldn't have a career in photography.

So my opinion on APUG is, do what you like. Someone will like it and someone else won't. And it really doesn't matter either way. It only matters to you. But if you want to sell it, then you'll find things are often different.

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blansky

the homes the guy built would not be homes anymore
but they might be considered works of art or sculptures, and he'd become a folk art hero like
the postman who picked up a stone every day for 33 years and built
a building from them ( http://twistedsifter.com/2011/09/ferdinand-cheval-ideal-palace/ )

regarding the crappy photographs on professional sites ... it depends i think .. it sometimes becomes a trend
like shooting annual reports, presidential conventions, hollywood stars &c with badly poured + exposed tintypes, flipped hawkeyes
or dragging the shutter with mixed lights to have ghosted portraits with angel wings in a sea of cotton ...
or the latest cool / fun things that old school professionals with no sense of humor, or fun or throwing caution to the wind
might cringe at and probably have never heard of the alternative pick. i remember when a girl who ended up being a killer retoucher
( on an adams desk ) brought the mass college or art catalog into work one day. it had close up / detail photographs of ears hands eyes
of old weathered people ( done by nicholas nixon ) throughout the photography section. they were beautiful ... the woman we were working
for was trained in the 20s/30s did high end karsh type work with 5x7 sheet film, photographed governors and titans of industry for pr images &c
saw the photographs and couldn't believe they were being used to advertise the photography department of the school ...
i sort of tried to explain who nicholas nixon was but she didnt' want to hear it, her mind was already made up ...

Blansky, who talk about selling pictures here? For 95% of photographers, the question is not the please a customer, it is for anyone to know if he/she want restrict his/her practice to technical rules (being composition, exposure, development, you name it), to swear by them and to show pictures as a demonstration of his/her skill or to go beyond the image and share an experience?

I am guilty of having been a commercial photographer in a studio for nearly 20 years. Mostly doing "table top" product shots. In that environment there is a difference between doing "personal work" or client work. Most often a large part of the creative vision is the job of an art director or graphic designer. Sometimes the client will come in with a full blown drawing he wants exactly done and to the exact size he needs. At that point a photographer becomes merely a technician. A problem solver. Lighting is done to show the important details of a product. In my day you would shoot polaroids to show the art director what the photo looked like and then wait for him to tell you what he wants adjusted. He was usually standing there looking over your shoulder the whole time. It was the rare client who would drop off a product and ask you to do something interesting and then let you work on your own.

So my point is that in that environment you have to become a skilled technician to be able solve problems for the client. The whole creative process of making some personal statement with your photography was not possible or at most only to a very small degree. Some of us had a saying..."there is nothing worse than a commercial photographer who thinks he is an artist"

Most commercial photographers start out wanting glamor and some degree of art but quickly it becomes just a job and something you wouldn't do unless you were getting paid for it. I was one of the few who take my personal side out of my commercial work without killing my need to do artwork.
Dennis

Dali said:

Blansky, who talk about selling pictures here? For 95% of photographers, the question is not the please a customer, it is for anyone to know if he/she want restrict his/her practice to technical rules (being composition, exposure, development, you name it), to swear by them and to show pictures as a demonstration of his/her skill or to go beyond the image and share an experience?

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Firstly, I think I agree with what you are saying here, although it's a little murky.

I have written many times and even on this thread there are the so called left brained and so called right brained, and I would be in the right brained camp. The non technical which I believe you are saying you like better.

But I think the so called rules, are different from the so called technical in many respects. The right brained non technical mind, using "rules/guidelines" of composition, and arranging his elements for "proven" human acceptance and excitement, is a different animal than left brained technical mind who is far more interested in camera/darkroom stuff than visual emotional stuff.

I'm the one who has been preaching an impactful, emotional picture shot with a cellphone is superior to a 8x10 perfectly technically executed that has no emotion.

But where I may indeed love that cellphone shot, I think part and parcel of it being superior and impactful, IS the fact that it has those compositional elements and that's part of why I'm drawn to it. Why we are drawn to it. The human brain loving perhaps unconsciously, the golden mean. How rules of thirds make things feel right etc etc.

So to me technical and compositional are not the same thing and are not necessarily the same mindset.

dpurdy said:

I am guilty of having been a commercial photographer in a studio for nearly 20 years. Mostly doing "table top" product shots. In that environment there is a difference between doing "personal work" or client work. Most often a large part of the creative vision is the job of an art director or graphic designer. Sometimes the client will come in with a full blown drawing he wants exactly done and to the exact size he needs. At that point a photographer becomes merely a technician. A problem solver. Lighting is done to show the important details of a product. In my day you would shoot polaroids to show the art director what the photo looked like and then wait for him to tell you what he wants adjusted. He was usually standing there looking over your shoulder the whole time. It was the rare client who would drop off a product and ask you to do something interesting and then let you work on your own.

So my point is that in that environment you have to become a skilled technician to be able solve problems for the client. The whole creative process of making some personal statement with your photography was not possible or at most only to a very small degree. Some of us had a saying..."there is nothing worse than a commercial photographer who thinks he is an artist"

Most commercial photographers start out wanting glamor and some degree of art but quickly it becomes just a job and something you wouldn't do unless you were getting paid for it. I was one of the few who take my personal side out of my commercial work without killing my need to do artwork.
Dennis

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I've seen this sentiment here from a number of ex professional photographers, and from people imagining what life is like as a professional photographer.

I started professionally in 1976 and except for 4 years in the 80s when I worked for a company compiling a library of 35mm slides of social documentary work, I have been totally self employed in photography and dealing with the public. And at no time have I ever wished or felt like I was being forced to "work for a client" to do anything that I didn't want to do. Basically I defined my style, and they came to me. Even when I changed my style usually about every 7 years they still came to me. In 4 different cities, and two countries, they still came to me. Never have I felt like a sell out or wished I was an amateur again to regain my dignity or my self esteem.

So when I read that here it seems totally foreign to me. When I started in 76, I had one specific goal in photography. To make people look better. Not to define their soul or some other nonsense, but to make them look good and bring out an aspect of their character. My goal in photography and in life is to fix stuff. When I designed hotel interiors for a few years, same thing. Make stuff better than it was. Other photographers may have different goals when shooting, but those were mine. And in my professional life, that's what I try to do. Let other people shoot wars, misery, and soul draining "important" stuff. Never a day goes by that I don't get a high working with my clients.

That being said, I have thousands of scenics I've shot, and thousands of social documentary things I've shot and early on thousands of street photography pictures and thousands of sports and drag racing shots, and they have different goals and different looks. And doing them is no more freeing or any different head space than the portrait stuff.

So I feel sorry when I see photographers who toiled in whatever discipline of photography they ended up in and didn't really like it. But my experience is, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Mr Blansky did a talk her in Toronto years back, was very compelling and obviously loved his work.. great to see that he still loves photography... and he is much taller in person than you would imagine.

blansky said:

Well I'm sure your example was a cathartic experience for him.

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Not a catharsis, an epiphany.

blansky said:

So I feel sorry when I see photographers who toiled in whatever discipline of photography they ended up in and didn't really like it. But my experience is, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

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hi blansky

sometimes there is a point when someone with a camera is just tired of the BS a couple of clients dish up, ... not tired of "the job".
unfortunately, with clients there is not really an ignore user function, for the ones that are a PITA.

The craft of photography is overrated. You can learn the basics in a day, and have tested enough film in a week to find a film and a developer you like. Printing takes a little longer longer, maybe a month, we're talking about putting solid hours in here, not messing around. So in a month you can be on top of your game, and if you have an eye the skills learnt in that month will last you the rest of your life. If you don't have an eye you might spend a lifetime fooling around.

It took me decades to realise the shots I took on 35mm black and white film at the age of twenty were as good as I'd ever be. I could have saved a lot of time and money with 20/20 hindsight. I earned a good living from photography, but it damned near killed me as an creative photographer. My advice to a young photographer would be don't get lost in experiments, just take many more good pictures and do whatever it takes to keep taking them.

well,I think blockend summed it up well, And he/she can have the last word.

blockend said:

The craft of photography is overrated. You can learn the basics in a day, and have tested enough film in a week to find a film and a developer you like. Printing takes a little longer longer, maybe a month, we're talking about putting solid hours in here, not messing around. So in a month you can be on top of your game, and if you have an eye the skills learnt in that month will last you the rest of your life. If you don't have an eye you might spend a lifetime fooling around.

It took me decades to realise the shots I took on 35mm black and white film at the age of twenty were as good as I'd ever be. I could have saved a lot of time and money with 20/20 hindsight. I earned a good living from photography, but it damned near killed me as an creative photographer. My advice to a young photographer would be don't get lost in experiments, just take many more good pictures and do whatever it takes to keep taking them.

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I continue to improve with time. I shot 35mm slides for over twenty years. Then for I continued shooting 35mm prints and continued improving. Then I added 120 and 4"x5" at the same time I set up a color and black & white darkroom [APUG influence]. The more I continue to be active in photography the more I improve in composing and in darkroom techniques. Some of my learning is done shooting photographs; some of my learning is in the darkroom; some of my learning comes in reading books on optics and lenses; some of my learning comes in reading books such as The Master Photographer's Toning Book The Definitive Guide by Tim Rudman and Way Beyond Monochrome by Ralph Lambrecht [both of which I learned about on APUG]; and some of which I learn from spending time with APUG, Graflex.org and Large Format Photograph Forum.

Life is what you make of it. You can choose to continue learning or you can take a free ride. The choice is yours. You have no one to blame for your decisions but yourself!

blockend said:

The craft of photography is overrated. You can learn the basics in a day, and have tested enough film in a week to find a film and a developer you like. Printing takes a little longer longer, maybe a month, we're talking about putting solid hours in here, not messing around. So in a month you can be on top of your game, and if you have an eye the skills learnt in that month will last you the rest of your life. If you don't have an eye you might spend a lifetime fooling around.

It took me decades to realise the shots I took on 35mm black and white film at the age of twenty were as good as I'd ever be. I could have saved a lot of time and money with 20/20 hindsight. I earned a good living from photography, but it damned near killed me as an creative photographer. My advice to a young photographer would be don't get lost in experiments, just take many more good pictures and do whatever it takes to keep taking them.

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couldn't agree more !
im sorry I misted this ages ago when you originally posted it...

jnantz said:

im sorry I misted this ages ago when you originally posted it...

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Were you randomly cruising your threads archive or what?

ChristopherCoy said:

Were you randomly cruising your threads archive or what?

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nope

jnantz said:

nope

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Then the resurrection was intentional.

jnantz said:

couldn't agree more !
im sorry I misted this ages ago when you originally posted it...

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As in, "long vanished in the misseds of time?" In that case, me too.

I enjoy these old threads being revived. Takes me back to earlier, happier, better times when I was less jaded with life and believed I had more to say. Anything pre-Covid induces nostalgia.

I will be rereading all this with great joy. Well done!

jnantz said:

couldn't agree more !
im sorry I misted this ages ago when you originally posted it...

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x3
I am not a photographer, have no interest in being one. I just enjoy making things by hand and making pictures in the darkroom takes up less space than making furniture and other three dimensional stuff..

jnantz said:

couldn't agree more !
im sorry I misted this ages ago when you originally posted it...

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I can agree, with the note that, for me, photography is becoming more and more difficult, and this is a good thing.

If Albrecht Durer would be alive today and a practitioner of photography he would be in the middle, or more properly stated, he would have encompassed both ends as well as the middle of this continuum, as he did in life as a painter and engraver.

The more I photograph, the more I'm drawn to making images that are non-technical (ie using lo-fi cameras, or soft-focus lenses, etc). I'm not eschewing sharpness, contrast and tonal accuracy, but making images that are about those things is less and less important, and what's more important is the emotional resonance of the image. If the image happens to require those things (sharpness, contrast, etc) then great, put them in. But I want to have fun and enjoy taking photographs - it shouldn't feel like work.

TheFlyingCamera said:

The more I photograph, the more I'm drawn to making images that are non-technical (ie using lo-fi cameras, or soft-focus lenses, etc). I'm not eschewing sharpness, contrast and tonal accuracy, but making images that are about those things is less and less important, and what's more important is the emotional resonance of the image. If the image happens to require those things (sharpness, contrast, etc) then great, put them in. But I want to have fun and enjoy taking photographs - it shouldn't feel like work.

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In some ways, this is the sort of thing that has moved me away from digital. In part, I enjoy using analog cameras because there's a cadence to it, a process that I enjoy going through. I find newer film cameras with motor drives and auto everything boring as well, as the process of using them is similar to digital. The more I have been using my various cameras, the more I have moved towards looking to create, and enjoying, the sort of images that you describe here. That said I don't much care for my Holga - still trying to find an appreciation of it. I'd sell it, but it's hardly worth the effort to me. No, I'll let it sit on the shelf for a few more months and, one day, I'll decide to load some film in the sucker and try again.