The idea vs the technique (not my point of view is better than yours)

No, this is not another thread about technical issues and the classic analog vs. digital schism, or maybe part of it is, after all. I confess that, like many of you, I have an interest in the technical aspects and in the long but rewarding path of analog photography. Sometimes to the point of getting distracted in thinking that one of the final goals of the image is the resolution, the correct exposure, the sharp focus, etc. I know that sounds like a reductionism. However, I also wake up from that siren's song and critically look at all these tools and technical knowledge as vehicles or means to build an image. An image where beyond checking if I have done the technical homework properly I am trying to say something new for someone, at least for me, to begin with. And this is where the dilemma begins: How to play with the rules of political correctness in the technical profession of photography to find interesting and/or experimental outcomes without all my creative energy having been exhausted before I started developing the image? , in this case, the idea.

I know this thread could lead to the already deadened debate about the best lens, the best developer, the best enlarger, the best resolution, etc. but it could also be another opportunity to think about the images I make, and why I make them. What helps me think outside the box. Without wanting to offend anyone's preferences, does it make sense to take another photo of the forest, the architecture of my town, etc? The answer is probably yes, but what lies beyond those contingent issues? Does anyone care to discuss these things here?

Some will say that the camera is a box and it does not matter. Well yes, it can matter. So I believe that one should buy the best equipment that they can technically and physically handle and afford. Beyond the choices of sending film out to be processed, developer choice, darkroom equipment choice, darkroom technique, hybrid route or all digital route, it all comes down to the ability to properly compose a photograph to capture the mood, look, vision et al that the photographer wants. There are rules of thumb which are not iron clad commandments, techniques, understanding light, ... but each one of us needs to learn composition. I could provide a short list of books which helped me, but that is just one way to learn composition. How did learn composition? When I was growing up my parents took us, whether or not we wanted to or needed to, one day every weekend to art museums in the Baltimore Washington DC area and dragged us through the rooms looking at art for years. When one sees enough art, one somehow is most of the way there, only moving in closer, framing and cropping remain to be learned about composition.

If there isn't some "play" in the photography you do for yourself, you are not having enough fun.
That being said, it is easier to play if you've done some preparatory work before.
I've got a just developed negative drying now which is the result of some lateral thinking related to the current Monthly Shooting Assignment. Thinking up good ideas for participating there is one way I like to have fun.

MattKing said:

If there isn't some "play" in the photography you do for yourself, you are not having enough fun.
That being said, it is easier to play if you've done some preparatory work before.
I've got a just developed negative drying now which is the result of some lateral thinking related to the current Monthly Shooting Assignment. Thinking up good ideas for participating there is one way I like to have fun.

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Of course the play is important. But not only in the technical or experimentation phase, but also in the idea of what my images are about. Now, how much of that "play" idea is present in the appearance (and also in the heart) of my images. How much I allow myself "to play" with the "rules" of what is "established", or simply we must respect them as if they were a straitjacket. I do like that you have mentioned the idea of the game/play (think about artistic avant-garde) because this is precisely one of the engines not only of art, but also of science.

I'm not sure if Borges said this, but it sounded something like "art is playing seriously and to the last consequences." Very close to the risk of the game (or play) is the possibility of dare oneself to fail as a learning and knowledge experience but also of artistic progress. Go the different path without worrying about what they will say. Think in Robert Frost here.

You don't have to be looking to create art to create something worthwhile. Whether or not something transcends value and turns out to be art has no real effect on the question of whether it is valuable.

I have a friend who is a commercial photographer, and has been for a fairly long time. He can talk about technical minutiae for as long as you like, and for much of his professional work it’s vitally important that he has that stuff right.
His favorite camera for having fun with is a pinhole 4x5.
The rules don’t have to be a straight jacket, but they can be a handy framework that you can adapt to suit your needs.

A very dear but sadly now gone friend of mine - a fine photographer in his own right - was well into his eighties when he related something told to him by a friend who, at a similar advanced age and after a lifetime of independence, moved into a seniors facility. When my friend asked her how she was dealing with all the newly encountered rules there, she responded with something like: "First you learn the rules. Then you circumvent them!"
I try to apply that to photography whenever possible.

Sirius Glass said:

Some will say that the camera is a box and it does not matter. Well yes, it can matter. So I believe that one should buy the best equipment that they can technically and physically handle and afford. Beyond the choices of sending film out to be processed, developer choice, darkroom equipment choice, darkroom technique, hybrid route or all digital route, it all comes down to the ability to properly compose a photograph to capture the mood, look, vision et al that the photographer wants. There are rules of thumb which are not iron clad commandments, techniques, understanding light, ... but each one of us needs to learn composition. I could provide a short list of books which helped me, but that is just one way to learn composition. How did learn composition? When I was growing up my parents took us, whether or not we wanted to or needed to, one day every weekend to art museums in the Baltimore Washington DC area and dragged us through the rooms looking at art for years. When one sees enough art, one somehow is most of the way there, only moving in closer, framing and cropping remain to be learned about composition.

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Bravo! I would add that it is not always necessary to “say something new” — rather the quest should be to say something better.
I used to go to museums alone when I was a kid...impossible for a kid to do that now in my home town because museums have been moved to remote locations only accessible by auto.

Chemical photography is unique in that it's a combination of art and science. Move too far in the science direction and you tie yourself down with rules. Move too far in the art direction and you won't be able to realize your goals.
My personal experience, and what I think works best, is to learn the science part first. From there, free yourself of the parts which don't help your vision.

Algo después said:

How to play with the rules of political correctness in the technical profession of photography to find interesting and/or experimental outcomes without all my creative energy having been exhausted before I started developing the image?

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First thing that should be done is to forever obliterate the idea that there are "rules", and that they can be "broken". Very few art forms has ever got a set of rules followed by its practitioners. Rules generally comes after by people trying to codify the works that came before them. The rules of sonata form by which we define the works of Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven did not exist in the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, but were "invented" by the generation that came after them. Same thing with the "rules" of tragedy by which the works of Sophocles were defined: they were Aristotles attempt to understand works that were written many generations before them. And that pattern appears in many art form throughout history - including the so-called "rule of thirds" in photography, which people started talking about after looking at pics taken years before.

So, if there are no rules, what's left? Well, there are codes - and that's a very different thing. Think about jazz. Jazz has no rules, but it does have codes. A common language that came from a few mixed sources like the blues, the Tin Pan Alley standards, etc. And it's from these codes that, on the one hand, improvisation is born, and, on the other, the genre has kept evolving.

Codes are much more flexible and malleable than rules. They are sings and patterns, or series of signs and patterns, that are share and understood collectively. And what's really interesting, is that they induce expectations. And that's when creativity comes in. You expect things to go a certain way, and it doesn't. And when it doesn't, new meaning is introduced.

Robert Frank didn't break any rules when he did The Americans. There weren't any rules. There were codes - a certain way of using the language of photography that was developed mostly, but not only, by Walker Evans. That was the magic and the shock of The Americans. Certain things were expected to look a certain way, and thus mean a certain thing, but suddenly they didn't - or rather, they not quite did.

Another good example is Robert Adams and the landscape photography he did around Denver in the 70s. Again, there were no rules in landscape photography but, thanks notably to the popularity of Ansel Adams, it was supposed - expected - to look a certain way (note that these codes are still strong today). The way Robert Adams plays with these codes is, to me, an endless source of fascination.

Some photographers invent new codes, which, unfortunately, their followers turn into rules. Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" is a case in point.

I'm not surprised so many photographers have been influenced by jazz. Improvisation, at least until the final stages of be-bop in the mid-60s, was all about playing with, and going beyond codes and expectations. Coltrane took that, and himself, to the limit.

In general, for creativity, music can be a great source of inspiration. John Cage's play with chance comes to mind, but one could also turn to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies.

Algo después said:

does it make sense to take another photo of the forest, the architecture of my town, etc?

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I wouldn't waste a lot of energy worrying over what makes sense or doesn't, you've put yourself in a box by doing that. In fact, the less you think about any of this stuff the better off you'll be. Ideas are useless in and of themselves, we live in a universe where they have to be put into action or they have no value, they may as well not even exist otherwise.

The technical stuff is important, but once it's learned forget it and deal w/ the image. Deal w/ it, make it, love it or hate it, but don't think about it, Nothing has ever been accomplished by thinking, and a whole lot of wondrous things have been nipped in the bud by thinking about them too much.

We only have X amount of energy and time in this one life, using them to think too much about this stuff takes away from your time and energy to make it. Simple physics.

Alex Benjamin said:

Codes are much more flexible and malleable than rules. They are sings and patterns, or series of signs and patterns, that are share and understood collectively. And what's really interesting, is that they induce expectations. And that's when creativity comes in. You expect things to go a certain way, and it doesn't. And when it doesn't, new meaning is introduced.

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I agree. You have pointed out some interesting things, among them, the codes or conventions that over time become rules/commandments/ canon of how to operate in certain creative processes. One of my interests in promoting this thread (or perhaps returning to this topic) was to warn about the dominance of these codes in our practice and operations, but also to think of them as barriers that can be vulnerable. Although it is true that not everyone has artistic pretensions when making an image, sometimes it is curious that when that will is activated there is an attempt to seek social legitimacy and consequently to discredit what is outside my idea of that artistic ideal. It would be naïve to think that this problem can be solved in a forum, but in any case I was assailed by the question of how satisfied the participants are with the type of image that proliferates in the galleries here. Can you perceive any change in the themes, image treatments in these 20 years that APUG/PHOTRIO exists? Or is it a sterile question?

momus said:

The technical stuff is important, but once it's learned forget it and deal w/ the image. Deal w/ it, make it, love it or hate it, but don't think about it, Nothing has ever been accomplished by thinking, and a whole lot of wondrous things have been nipped in the bud by thinking about them too much.

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As side B to my comment, I dare to confess that I have only been involved in analog work for the last 2 years. The fact of familiarizing myself with the development process and other technical issues has cost me but I enjoy it to the fullest. In that sense, I'm still in the shock phase of seeing the negative emerge. Already the mere fact that it has even generated a test image excites me, makes me feel as if I were doing alchemy. It's just wonderful. In contrast to my technical expertise, we are surrounded by those experts whose exquisite technique has served the same motives for decades and for unstated reasons, perhaps hobby, perhaps immediate perceptual experience, perhaps by habit or perhaps neither. Where does the interest lie in photographing the same motif over and over again? Why should it be a mistake to stop one of the experts to ask: why do you photograph what you photograph?

As a provocation, I share this Penélope Umbrico´s work called Flickr Sunsets. It consists of a mosaic-like composition with all the photos found on Flickr using the hashtag #sunsets

http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/



(a detail)

Been working long enough that the technical and the creative work together to create a photograph.

There is no sharp dividing line between the technical and the creative. If you think about the use of a tool, you realize that your desire to accomplish something reaches to the limit of the extension of the tool. You don't use the handle of a hammer, for example, to drive a nail, even though that's what your hand is touching. And your attention extends through the tool to the object to be realized. It is the same with technique and creative activity, although more abstracted. So it's the same with the use of photographic equipment and making a photo. Your creativity can be boundless but its expression is bound by the reach of your technical ability. Developing that technical ability can further refine and elucidate the possibilities of your creative expression. So you can consider the relationship symbiotic.

Algo después said:

It would be naïve to think that this problem can be solved in a forum, but in any case I was assailed by the question of how satisfied the participants are with the type of image that proliferates in the galleries here. Can you perceive any change in the themes, image treatments in these 20 years that APUG/PHOTRIO exists?

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Having been a member of this forum since 2004 with only a couple of long breaks, my perception is that usage of the galleries changes over time, in terms of "quality" of contribution and predominance of subject or technique.

momus said:

Nothing has ever been accomplished by thinking

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I'm at the other end of this spectrum, and would state, without any hesitation, that nothing of importance or of interest has ever been accomplished by not thinking.

I can't think of a single photographer of note - Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Dawoud Bey, Koudelka, Cartier-Bresson, Minor White, Luigi Ghirri, Danny Lyon, Mary Ellen Mark, August Sander, Latoya Ruby Frazer, Richard Avedon, and hundreds of others - who didn't/don't think long and hard about what they were/are doing, how they were/are doing it, why they were/are doing it, for whom they were/are doing it, and a whole lot of other questions. This is not a matter of opinion: we have plenty of their own writings, transcripts of conversations, interviews, etc., that tells us sometimes more than we want to know about the thinking process that went into their "doing process".

Thinking is part of the creative process, and there is no such thing as "over-thinking". It's good for any art, such as music - jazz (Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane were all great thinkers of their art), classical music (from the middle ages to Bach to John Cage to Steve Reich), rock/pop/hip-hop are full of great creative thinkers -, painting (think of the journals of Da Vinci or Delacroix), etc.

Thinking is not an impediment to freedom, thinking is a way of unlocking freedom. This, I think, is what the OP is after: how to break free from the endless repetition of the same, i.e., "generic" shots of buildings, flowers, sunset, people doing whatever in the street, etc., what he aptly called...

Algo después said:

the dominance of... codes in our practice and operations

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...in other words, making them "un-generic", or find for them

Algo después said:

interesting and/or experimental outcomes

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Vaughn said:

Been working long enough that the technical and the creative work together to create a photograph.

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That just about sums it up in a few words.

Alex Benjamin said:

I'm at the other end of this spectrum, and would state, without any hesitation, that nothing of importance or of interest has ever been accomplished by not thinking.

I can't think of a single photographer of note - Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Dawoud Bey, Koudelka, Cartier-Bresson, Minor White, Luigi Ghirri, Danny Lyon, Mary Ellen Mark, August Sander, Latoya Ruby Frazer, Richard Avedon, and hundreds of others - who didn't/don't think long and hard about what they were/are doing, how they were/are doing it, why they were/are doing it, for whom they were/are doing it, and a whole lot of other questions. This is not a matter of opinion: we have plenty of their own writings, transcripts of conversations, interviews, etc., that tells us sometimes more than we want to know about the thinking process that went into their "doing process".

Thinking is part of the creative process, and there is no such thing as "over-thinking". It's good for any art, such as music - jazz (Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane were all great thinkers of their art), classical music (from the middle ages to Bach to John Cage to Steve Reich), rock/pop/hip-hop are full of great creative thinkers -, painting (think of the journals of Da Vinci or Delacroix), etc.

Thinking is not an impediment to freedom, thinking is a way of unlocking freedom. This, I think, is what the OP is after: how to break free from the endless repetition of the same, i.e., "generic" shots of buildings, flowers, sunset, people doing whatever in the street, etc., what he aptly called...



...in other words, making them "un-generic", or find for them

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I agree with pretty much everything you said and, I believe, when we do take those "same" pictures of the "same" things, we are actually also looking for the emergence of difference from it - for something special to appear in it that would be a trace of our own being. As in, you want it to be "your" picture. That is a great deal of what creativity even is. A writer doesn't invent the words of the language - a writer makes use of them. But it's making something yourself out of what is already there.

When something is appraised as "great", it gains a special status as a point of comparison. So many "great" photos have been taken in all photographic genres (for want of a better word), it is difficult to take a photo and not have it be seen as an imitation. The audience has seen all the great photos - even the ones you haven't. So, even attempting to break the norms (rules or codes) can result in something very similar to something someone else did. That's not a reason to stop, though. Wanting to do something different may not be the best motivation after all. Wanting to do something that is your own is probably the best motive.

Relax. It's only a picture. On your death bed, you're not going to say, "Gee. I wish I spent more time in the darkroom."

Alan Edward Klein said:

On your death bed, you're not going to say, "Gee. I wish I spent more time in the darkroom."

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I actually do know I will.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Alan Edward Klein said:

Relax. It's only a picture. On your death bed, you're not going to say, "Gee. I wish I spent more time in the darkroom."

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I already wish I spent more time in the darkroom. It's enjoyable and challenging too, and results in prints I can give away or enjoy by myself. I should spend more time there.

If someone sent their negatives out for a lab to print out, then they could spend more time giving more of them away to friends and family spending more time with those you love rather than being stuck in the darkroom alone.

Alan Edward Klein said:

If someone sent their negatives out for a lab to print out, then they could spend more time giving more of them away to friends and family spending more time with those you love rather than being stuck in the darkroom alone.

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For many people, making a print in the darkroom is very important. I wouldn't use film if I didn't enlarge it.

Alan Edward Klein said:

If someone sent their negatives out for a lab to print out, then they could spend more time giving more of them away to friends and family spending more time with those you love rather than being stuck in the darkroom alone.

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Alan, I'm not doing it wrong. Neither are you. It's all good.

Don Heisz said:

For many people, making a print in the darkroom is very important. I wouldn't use film if I didn't enlarge it.

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Same here.

And the darkroom never prevented me from spending time with friends and family. They are actually happy I have that in my life, as it makes me happy, and they like me when I'm happy .

What prevents me from spending more time with friends and family is my job.

But this is way out of the subject the OP started, so I won't go more into that.