What "makes" a "great" image?

Q.G. · Apr 25, 2009

keithwms said:
Surely you don't deny that a complete abstract can have emotional impact?

I don't, no.
On the contrary.

It then too is a matter of relevance. And who knows why some abstract blob of colours grabs you, while other leave you cold (which also is an emotion).

"On the contrary", because that was my point: faces are not easier to relate to. It is not easier to coax emotion from a portrait subject.
There are many things, including abstract blobs, that do it with much greater ease.

But ultimately John is right of course, and what is great to the goose may not be so great to the gander. (and no I do not mean to imply anything gender specific with that comment!)

Which is why i really do think that it is a good idea to 'latch on' to the word i used before: relevance.
We have to be able to relate to the thingies. We have to find or recognize a meaning, what it means to us, what it reminds us of, what its value is in our lives, what its contribution to our greater exploit of trying to understand our individual worlds.

Abstracts allow us a lot of leeway. They don't force us to try and make sense of a given something, force us to fit what we see (i.e. things that already have an identity) in what we know, but rather leave us (to a much greater degree at least) free to interpret 'it' as something we can place, something we can identify as whatever we want it to be ourselves.

I guess my first recollection of seeing a photograph and thinking that it was great was probably Weston's shells or peppers or his excusado toilet. All of those are fairly common subjects to which I have no specific affinity, yet... the way he represented them... and somehow drew in all manner of other associations... Weston's body of work pretty well defines greatness to me, at least in the genre of b&w still life. Highly original, full of je ne sais quoi / "can't put my finger on it" emotional impact. Which to me is far more valuable than most other forms of emotional impact.

There is a 'branch' of human endeavour that tries to understand the "can't put my finger on it" bits.
That's the sport called philosophy, and that's what is written above the door leading to this part of APUG.

So it would be fun if you could try to explain why for you the "can't put my finger on it" impact is more valuable than 'the rest'.
And perhaps also try to put a finger on it?

keithwms · Apr 25, 2009

Q.G. said:
it would be fun if you could try to explain why for you the "can't put my finger on it" impact is more valuable than 'the rest'.
And perhaps also try to put a finger on it?

By that I meant: some photographs work for obvious reasons. And some photographs work for reasons that are not obvious at all.

There is some subject matter that will reproducibly elicit a certain and well-conditioned emotional reaction from the viewer. No, I am not referring only to porn ...although that is an interesting and extreme example of how easy it is to push certain emotional buttons.

Subjects such as Weston's still lifes seem to work for a number of different complex reasons, not just...
"gee what a hot looking pepper," or
"wow what a cute little commode" or
"what a clever arrangement of shells."

If you ask me to try to say why those Westons work, I'd rephrase what I said back in a prior post. At the time, they were really innovative (=highly original). I'd say that it is hard for us to put all the poor homage out of our mind and realize just how innovative it was, and realize what effect that had on the likelihood that we would be sitting here, a hundred years later, discussing those photographs. The same could be said for any number of great photographers and their work. They did something when people weren't doing that, not expecting any sort of immediate recognition. Not pushing those obvious buttons.

I hope it is obvious that what I am describing is very different from attempting to evoke a predictable emotional response in a photograph. Sure, that can be done at the level of greatness, but chances are that the result will be too strongly rooted in the emotional response of today. It really takes an extreme skill (e.g. someone like Karsh) to take that fairly obvious emotional response to a portrait of a well-known subject and move it into real greatness.

Perhaps one definition of a great photograph could be: a photograph that many people will attempt to reproduce, always failing to recognize the quintessential ingredient that first distinguished the original.

clay · Apr 25, 2009

Nipples.

Galah said:
And, what does William Mortensen say it is?

Q.G. · Apr 25, 2009

keithwms said:
Perhaps one definition of a great photograph could be: a photograph that many people will attempt to reproduce, always failing to recognize the quintessential ingredient that first distinguished the original.

That (attempts to emulate and imitate) would perhaps be a result of greatness. And as such might be a tell-tale sign of greatness.

But it does not offer an understanding of why; why people want to reproduce it, why it would be/is a great image.

We still have to assume that it is because the original is indeed great, and not because some other, unknown reason. We then still do not know what makes a great image.

It is a interesting question indeed. What are those sometimes not so obvious things that make those images great?

Ian David · Apr 26, 2009

Q.G. said:
We then still do not know what makes a great image.

It is a interesting question indeed. What are those sometimes not so obvious things that make those images great?

Which images are in fact truly "great"? Until some common ground is established on this, it is likely that no consensus is possible on the reasons for greatness. Different people will have different views about what images are great. So two people here may be talking at cross purposes if they are each thinking of images that the other would not agree are in that category.

Perhaps a good place to start is to identify some images, of different types, that many people would agree are "great"... Then try to identify meaningful common elements (if you think that is possible), with a view to then later trying to apply those ideas more widely.

For example, you could start with:
Weston's Pepper no 30 (still life)
Adams' Moonrise (landscape)
Karsh's Churchill (portrait)
Burri's Sao Paulo (urban)

Or not, depending on different people's feelings for greatness...

Q.G. · Apr 26, 2009

iandavid said:
Which images are in fact truly "great"? Until some common ground is established on this, it is likely that no consensus is possible on the reasons for greatness. Different people will have different views about what images are great. So we may be talking at cross purposes if we are each thinking of images that others would not agree are in that category.

That should not be a problem.

We need not find an absolute greatness. We need not agree about what particular thing is or is not great.
There need not be a list of images universally acknowledged to be great.

As long as we have a fairly common understanding of what we mean (and i think we do, else we wouldn't be able to discuss this), we can discuss what things there are that make something great. Whatever that something might be.

The thing you find in Weston's peppers, someone else may find in another picture. And yet someone else may find it in yet another picture, without the three agreeing about the greatness of any of the three images.
That 'thing' will still be something that makes a picture great.

And there need not be a fixed, well defined and limited list of things that make an image great. You may find greatness in other things than anyone else. Not a problem.

The task is to find if there is something common in whatever these things might be that people find the 'making bit' of greatness, and if so, what that shared thing might be.
Not whether there is a common thing on the list (could be, but need not be).

Perhaps a good place to start is to identify some images, of different types, that many people would agree are "great"... Then try to identify meaningful common elements (if that is possible), with a view to then later trying to apply those ideas more widely.

It would be great if from such a list a clear answer emerges.

But given that there is so much room for disagreement (i, for instance, do not think that Weston's peppers are great at all. Rather boring, irrelevant images in fact. And i find Karsh's portrait of Churchill rather contrived, not great at all), i think that starting a list of great images might not be the best way to put our fingers on it.

It might be easier and quicker if we just try to say what it is that makes any picture, that we personally would add to such a list, great.

Or not great: "boring", "contrived", the things i said above about two particular images, also are part of an answer.
A list of images we think are not great would serve perhaps equally well.

removed account4 · Apr 26, 2009

i agree with clay

keithwms · Apr 26, 2009

Ian, I am afraid that if we start to discuss specific images, you will get disparate opinions scattered all over the place. And even though a few people may chime in sincerely -perhaps even a few dozen within a week or two- that's still statistically insignificant compared to the thousands of people whose real (yes, financial) investment in an image established it as great over many years.

Today's society wants instant gratification, that's how most of us are conditioned. Call me cynical, but it's clear that people are looking for instant gratification in today's imagery- an instant "hook" and emotional return on zero intellectual investment. I just think its symptomatic of that culture that one would assume that it is even possible to distill a particular image to a few elements and try to establish a recipe for greatness.

Again, that an image is now said to be great probably has more to do with the time and place in which the photograph was taken than, and with the investments of the art world over time, rather than with any specifically enumerable image elements. Plus there will inevitably be some knee-jerk reaction to specific examples... which probably has more to do with people's frustration with their own attempts to emulate greatness, and/or a lack of understanding for why a particular image, even when duplicated with extreme fidelity, cannot ever match the original: because that original image had its time and its place. That time and place are no more. We gotta move on! There was a time when Lange's migrant mother Cunningham's magnolia and Karsh's Churchill and Weston's peppers and Ansel's moonrise were something the photographic world had not seen before. Take those shots now and... no big deal. (Okay okay, maybe it'd be a big deal to dig up old Winston and take that shot again )

In a classroom setting, I have found these kinds of discussions to be quite helpful, but I have noticed that discussions of particular images on APUG tend to go all over the place very quickly.

frank · Apr 26, 2009

Isn't this a variation of the "What is art?" question? I'm not saying it isn't a good question to ask, but words are an inadequate medium to describe the "it" factor. This is the reason that the phrase, "... je ne sais quoi..." was invented.

One of the difficulties of language is that even though there are dictionary meanings for words, our individual life experiences cause subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences in the personal meanings for many words. Then, when discussing something as complicated and nuanced as art, these different meanings interfere with achieving a common understanding.

To borrow a phrase first used for another reason: I can't tell you what makes a great image, but I know it when I see it.

The best we can do here I think, is that the common quality great images have is that it makes a connection with the viewer (by various means) and it demands that it be looked at.

Cheryl Jacobs · Apr 26, 2009

keithwms said:
You make it sound like they are mutually exclusive... or emotional impact versus originality. Yet if we actually start naming great photographs, they will most assuredly have both components in comparable doses.

I'd say that originality and emotional impact are both requirements of a great photograph; that I place originality a small tick above emotional impact probably has something to do with my preferred subject matter. There is an awful lot of cliche out there, and few things can reduce emotional impact as much as seeing a poor facsimile of the same shot for the umpteenth time! Thus the value of originality.... which does not in any way diminish the importance of emotional impact (...and I say this after much consideration).

Emotional impact is considerably easier to coax from a portrait subject (with all due respect to Karsh)... but it is far more challenging when the subject is an abstract landscape or a piece of architecture or such. Inanimate and abstract subjects do not generate oxytocin quite as freely as a cute child gazing wistfully into the camera; with abstracts the emotion is supplied by the photographer and the viewer. To put it another way, human subjects freely radiate emotion into the lens, emotion that we can readily connect to. But inanimate subjects can only reflect the emotion of the photographer and the viewer.

I didn't say the two were mutually exclusive. I just believe that the more important of the two is emotional impact, and I think it's perfectly possible in a landscape or architectural shot. It's just more difficult, and "difficult" is good.

I suppose I will just go ahead and say that I don't believe true originality is possible -- and I don't think that is a big deal.

Ian David · Apr 26, 2009

I agree with a lot of what is said above in response to my last post. Trying to get agreement on a list of specific images is obviously fraught with real problems. And I indicated that in the last line of my post. But I think it is probably slightly more likely to result in a meaningful discussion, if this topic can really be meaningfully discussed at all beyond a certain point (which may have already been reached in this thread).

Perhaps a marginally better idea: Even if agreement cannot be reached on the same images, it would still be more helpful IMHO to discuss (or at least identify) specific images that people have in mind than to talk in complete generalities. If two people cannot agree on the common qualities of two different identified images one of which each of them thinks is great, how can they hope to reach agreement on the qualities of all great things?

Q.G. said:
We need not find an absolute greatness. We need not agree about what particular thing is or is not great.
There need not be a list of images universally acknowledged to be great.

As long as we have a fairly common understanding of what we mean (and i think we do, else we wouldn't be able to discuss this), we can discuss what things there are that make something great. Whatever that something might be.

The thing you find in Weston's peppers, someone else may find in another picture. And yet someone else may find it in yet another picture, without the three agreeing about the greatness of any of the three images.
That 'thing' will still be something that makes a picture great.

And there need not be a fixed, well defined and limited list of things that make an image great. You may find greatness in other things than anyone else. Not a problem.

The task is to find if there is something common in whatever these things might be that people find the 'making bit' of greatness, and if so, what that shared thing might be.
Not whether there is a common thing on the list (could be, but need not be).

QG - I think you are mistaken. The search for some specific defined quality that unites everything my Mum thinks is great and everything you think is great is bound to fail (or to put us all to sleep). Either you end up with some obvious and/or meaningless and/or wholly personal ideas like "connection to the viewer" or "emotional impact" or "relevance", or you have to accept in the end an indefinable je ne sais quoi. You might reach agreement on some basic things like technical mastery or striking composition, but probably not even there. My Mum probably loves the blurry snapshot of her first grandchild as much as you love whatever you think is the greatest photo ever taken. Frank is right here. To identify in words the essence of such common feelings has been tried a million times before and just cannot be expressed in anything other than an obvious generalisation.

Ian

Galah · Apr 26, 2009

Wow, what a response!!!

Well thank you all for taking part.

I have been away for the last few days and was surprised by the volume of response: there are a lot of philosophers out there!

I guess its high time for me to 'fess up and own up to my views?

Well, it seems they are not entirely original, as many of you said nearly the same thing in different words.

Here it is:

I think the single quality that makes a great image, author, sculpture, president, building, whatever is that they all provoke an uplifting emotional response in the viewer/audience.

I hope no-one is disappointed?

keithwms · Apr 27, 2009

Galah, I don't agree with what you're saying at all; there is a huge library of great photography that leaves people feeling anything but uplifted. The wartime work of Brady and later of Capa... the migrant mother of Lange that I just mentioned... there are so many great photographs that flood to mind that definitely do not lift me up. To be blunt, I am afraid that your definition just throws photojournalism right out the window.

Cheryl Jacobs said:
I suppose I will just go ahead and say that I don't believe true originality is possible -- and I don't think that is a big deal.

I'm really very surprised that you'd write that, Cheryl. It seems to me that someone like yourself ...with your repertory of interesting portrait subjects... would value the expressiveness of the human face even more than those of us who don't do portraiture. Now, those individual expressions that you capture are highly original.... aren't they? If not then why not just shoot mannikins? I mean, aren't human expressions just about as original as.... humanly possible?!

Don't get me wrong: I'd not advocate different just for its own sake. But you do give a damn about originality, and it shows.

Galah · Apr 27, 2009

keithwms said:
Galah, I don't agree with what you're saying at all; there is a huge library of great photography that leaves people feeling anything but uplifted. The wartime work of Brady and later of Capa... the migrant mother of Lange that I just mentioned... there are so many great photographs that flood to mind that definitely do not lift me up. To be blunt, I am afraid that your definition just throws photojournalism right out the window.

Dear Keith,

There are many shots that are simply "good" but not "great". They would be some of the shots you mention: all very good in their way, just not quite in the "great" category. Lets' face it: not every shot can be "great", even if it may be exceptionally "good".

Curt · Apr 27, 2009

they all provoke an uplifting emotional response in the viewer/audience

they provoke an emotional response in the viewer/audience

Q.G. · Apr 27, 2009

iandavid said:
Perhaps a marginally better idea: Even if agreement cannot be reached on the same images, it would still be more helpful IMHO to discuss (or at least identify) specific images that people have in mind than to talk in complete generalities. If two people cannot agree on the common qualities of two different identified images one of which each of them thinks is great, how can they hope to reach agreement on the qualities of all great things?

Not a better idea, i think. You then are caught in the specifics of an image.
Specific images do not have to be universally, or even bilaterally, recognized as great to be able to discuss what it is that makes an image great.
All we need are two people who think some image (and what image(s) that is/are is absolutely unimportant) great, and we have something to discuss.

iandavid said:
QG - I think you are mistaken. The search for some specific defined quality that unites everything my Mum thinks is great and everything you think is great is bound to fail (or to put us all to sleep). Either you end up with some obvious and/or meaningless and/or wholly personal ideas like "connection to the viewer" or "emotional impact" or "relevance", or you have to accept in the end an indefinable je ne sais quoi.

I disagree strongly.

We do not have to accept an "indefinable je ne sais quoi" at all.
There is no reason either to "end [!] up with some obvious and/or meaningless and/or wholly personal ideas".
Wholly personal they will not be, unless you'd like to assert that there is no greatness except as a wholly personal thing. And that's obviously not the case.
And if they are so obvious, it would be very easy to discuss and explain what they entail. So what would be stopping us?

iandavid said:
You might reach agreement on some basic things like technical mastery or striking composition, but probably not even there. My Mum probably loves the blurry snapshot of her first grandchild as much as you love whatever you think is the greatest photo ever taken.

And unless she is so much different from other mums in this that she is the only mum who loves a blurry snapshot of her grandchild, we have found yet another example of common ground, of what gives greatness to images.
It does not take much to define what it is, so we're well and truly beyond "accept[ing] an indefinable je ne sais quoi".

We also now know (if we didn't already) from that example that technical perfection is not a necessary quality.

iandavid said:
Frank is right here. To identify in words the essence of such common feelings has been tried a million times before and just cannot be expressed in anything other than an obvious generalisation.

That's just defeatist talk. Not true at all.

Galah · Apr 27, 2009

Curt said:
they provoke an emotional response in the viewer/audience

Yes, I struggled with that one: is an image (whatever) still "great" if it provokes a strongly negative emotional response?

Well, what about President Bush (Jun) vs Pres Obama?

I guess it may depend on the "eye" of the beholder as to which one is great or not.

Q.G. · Apr 27, 2009

Galah said:
I think the single quality that makes a great image, author, sculpture, president, building, whatever is that they all provoke an uplifting emotional response in the viewer/audience.

I'm with Keith and Curt on this: why the "uplifting"? No "uplifting" needed.

And - though you could argue that everything we 'think' is emotional - i don't think that the response need be an emotional one.

Q.G. · Apr 27, 2009

Galah said:
There are many shots that are simply "good" but not "great". They would be some of the shots you mention: all very good in their way, just not quite in the "great" category. Lets' face it: not every shot can be "great", even if it may be exceptionally "good".

Are "good" and "great" not the same thing, differing only in degree?

Galah · Apr 27, 2009

Q.G. said:
I'm with Keith and Curt on this: why the "uplifting"? No "uplifting" needed.

So, there would be no distinction in "greatness" between the Abu Grahib pics of man being savaged by guard dog and the portrait of Winston Churchill (mentioned above), between Gitmo and the Parthenon: they are all "great"?

Ian David · Apr 27, 2009

Q.G. said:
That's just defeatist talk. Not true at all.

I prefer to think of myself as a realist!

Choose an image that you think is "great". You don't have to tell us what it is. But do tell us all the reasons why you think it is great. On your approach, once we remove all the qualities that my mum doesn't care about, like lighting, composition, collectability, technical mastery of any sort, etc, what are we left with?

I suspect that, when boiled down, what remains is some sort of personal relevance to you, personal emotional impact on you, or personal connection with you and your world view. Perfectly valid reasons for you to think an image is great. But, at that level of generality, they are obvious. No doubt you can drill down further on an image by image basis - i.e. this one triggers a feeling of love, this one reminds me of the smell of seaweed in winter, etc. But all this is then wholly subjective, isn't it? To find common ground with everyone else's reasons for thinking different images are great, you have to return to the general and obvious. No?

avantster · Apr 27, 2009

Galah, I think you're using the word quality in a way that isn't clear. What you are describing is an effect or the result, rather than the cause.

O.G. and iandavid you're both making some interesting points and the issues you are discussing have been explored and in fact resolved in a new way of thinking by Robert Pirsig in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence. Here is a small excerpt where he explores the problem. I won't spoil the beautiful Copernican revolution he discovers but it is definitely worth reading if you are interested.

The first horn of Phædrus' dilemma was, If Quality exists in the object, why can't scientific instruments detect it?

This horn was the mean one. From the start he saw how deadly it was. If he was going to presume to be some super-scientist who could see in objects Quality that no scientist could detect, he was just proving himself to be a nut or a fool or both. In today's world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific knowledge don't get off the ground.

He remembered Locke's statement that no object, scientific or otherwise, is knowable except in terms of its qualities. This irrefutable truth seemed to suggest that the reason scientists cannot detect Quality in objects is because Quality is all they detect. The "object" is an intellectual construct deduced from the qualities. This answer, if valid, certainly smashed the first horn of the dilemma, and for a while excited him greatly.

But it turned out to be false. The Quality that he and the students had been seeing in the classroom was completely different from the qualities of color or heat or hardness observed in the laboratory. Those physical properties were all measurable with instruments. His Quality..."excellence," "worth," "goodness"...was not a physical property and was not measurable. He had been thrown off by an ambiguity in the term quality.He wondered why that ambiguity should exist, made a mental note to do some digging into the historic roots of the word quality, then put it aside. The horn of the dilemma was still there.

He turned his attention to the other horn of the dilemma, which showed more promise of refutation. He thought, So Quality is whatever you like? It angered him. The great artists of history...Raphael, Beethoven, Michelangelo...they were all just putting out what people liked. They had no goal other than to titillate the senses in a big way. Was that it? It was angering, and what was most angering about it was that he couldn't see any immediate way to cut it up logically.

vet173 · Apr 27, 2009

Interesting reading. The very first reply, in the end , was enough to lock the thread as complete.

Chuck_P · Apr 27, 2009

Cheryl Jacobs said:
I don't give a damn about originality. I care about emotional impact. The power is in the subtlety, in the connection with the photographer. Originality is overrated, and I do mean that after much consideration.

So very well said................the quest for originality is often, IMO, taken to the point of absurdity, and then it just becomes a rediculous thing to look at.

keithwms · Apr 27, 2009

Galah said:
Dear Keith,

There are many shots that are simply "good" but not "great". They would be some of the shots you mention: all very good in their way, just not quite in the "great" category. Lets' face it: not every shot can be "great", even if it may be exceptionally "good".

My level of "shocked-ness" continues to rise in this meandering thread!

Migrant Mother is just good? Death of a Loyalist Militiaman is just good? Nick Ut's shot of the burnt little girl fleeing a napalm attack is just good? Cartier Bresson's photo of a woman confronting a concentration camp guard is just good? What about this more recent one- one of the very greatest photographic statements about the war in the Iraq (in my opinion, and time will tell):

I mean, gee, sorry that the first photo posted in this thread had to be such a downer :rolleyes:

Great photography most certainly does not need to be uplifting or emotionally reassuring or easy to take. Great photography can transport you to a place beyond your own experience... and that place isn't necessarily pleasant, warm, and fuzzy.

What "makes" a "great" image?

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