What's up with the blur and grain?

[Felinik]

It looks like something that would end up in my darkroom trash bin. I guess that's why I'll never be a 'famous' photographer (and it doesn't bother me a bit).

That was my precise reaction (even if I only scan my negatives due to lack of time + space), but if a negative like that showed up on my screen, I'd find out how to refine my development process and not spend any time scanning that roll. If the entire roll was like that, send my camera + lens to service.

 

[Hatchetman]

http://images1.citybreak.com/image.aspx?ImageId=1403322

There is some artistic merit there. I'm not a huge fan of the composition, but the grain and blur make me feel disoriented, like I'm very very drunk and lost or something to that effect. Most photos leave no impression on me at all. That one did to some degree.

Let me add, that most folks are used to seeing digitally-captured images, which are very very different than this.

 

[horacekenneth]

I react more on the bad exposure/development than the actual blur, even a blurry picture can indeed tell a story, but why make things worse....

Correct exposure is just getting what you intended, right? How do you know?

It looks like something that would end up in my darkroom trash bin. I guess that's why I'll never be a 'famous' photographer (and it doesn't bother me a bit).

No reason to knock the guy. The photo doesn't emotionally grab you (because of what appears to be technical errors?), no big deal, what similar genre photos do actually grab you?

[Edit: I don't mean to say that beauty is altogether subjective, just that I think a comparison of photos would help us identify what our differences are.]

 

[Felinik]

So, enough about the sample picture.

How come the blur and the grain finds it ways into the galleries? Is this hot as cake and comparable to Instagram but in print? Is it a reaction against the perfectionism in digital photography? Or is the blur and the exposure/grain a substitute to composition skill limitations that in the end has become an artistic expression?

When did "bad" (as in not the best achievable result) become the new cool?

 

[BrianShaw]

I find this kind of discussion interesting since we learn that there are all sorts of opinions, but they are fairly useless in that nobody is really going to be convinced to change their current opinions. It reminds me of the time I decided to "buck the system" and complain about all of the sliver-thin DOF portrait photos where the tips of noses are OOF. That discussion didn't get anyone anywhere.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

Photography is much like any craft. Just like writing, you need to know proper spelling and grammar. Once a writer has the basic down, he or she may break the rules and use bad grammar or misspellings intentionally. However, if a writer just has bad grammer and bad spelling, he's not serving the craft and it's just bad and ineffective writing. Why I'm trying to get at is the craft should serve the art. Blur and grain with photos should serve the art otherwise it's just bad technique that's is masturbatory and self-indulgent.

 

[BrianShaw]

"maturbatory and self-indugent"... I'll have to use that term the next time I get into a conversation with my editor about optional commas!

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I think self-indulgence and masturbation is grammatically redundant

 

[horacekenneth]

Just like writing, you need to know proper spelling and grammar. Once a writer has the basic down, he or she may break the rules and use bad grammar or misspellings intentionally...Blur and grain with photos should serve the art otherwise it's just bad technique

Agreed. I think that answers this comment as well

When did "bad" (as in not the best achievable result) become the new cool?

If it is intentional and serves the art then it isn't bad technique. It's really really good technique.

 

[Vaughn]

For the record, I like the image of the truck...

 

[Felinik]

If it is intentional and serves the art then it isn't bad technique. It's really really good technique.

It sure can be, intentional is of course a deliberate conscious choice, though still this doesn't approach the question, why does "bad" get appreciation and wall space at galleries and review space in media etc. ?

 

[Felinik]

For the record, I like the image of the truck...

Would you say the grain and the blur affected your opinion in a positive way, do you think a less "smashed" photograph would have affected your opinion negatively?

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

Blur and grain is vocabulary in the language of photography. It's useful in certain expressions. If you reject grain and blur automatically, it like rejecting particular words that offend you. Like some of Alice Walkers writings, it contains vulgar language but it doesn't offend me. I'm not saying grain or blur is vulgar btw.

 

[horacekenneth]

why does "bad" get appreciation and wall space at galleries and review space in media etc. ?

For whatever reason, I would guess they think it is good. Galleries are probably more interested in emotionally grabbing pictures than (technically correct) "beautiful" pictures. I can tell you that I'd take that truck picture over a lot of the pictures I see other traditional photographers printing.

What I learned in school was that artistic beauty is a combination of skill and background. In other words, to really appreciate whether or not a work was beautiful you couldn't merely look at it, to really appreciate it you needed to understand its intention, history, creator, etc. And this is what has been already said - what is technically "bad" can be good if it fits with the artist's intention - and how can we know the artist's intention without knowing a little bit more about the piece?

My cop-out answer is that we are sick of technical pictures that can practically (I said practically) be taken with the click of a button on ever-improving digital cameras. We want pictures that break the rules and so when we find a cool picture that breaks the rules we want to believe it is intentional because we want it to be better. Which might be why I think the truck picture was taken by a photographer who knew his trade and not by a five-year old.

 

[Darkroom317]

Some of it I would attribute to a revival of Pictorialism. However, they seem to takin ghe "style" and photographing everything that way with a conceptual reason.

 

[Klainmeister]

Pictorialism is alive and well nowadays. I cannot decide which I like worse: a million pictorialist or a million wannabe Adams....

 

[winger]

Part of it is because if everyone liked the same things, the world would be BORING. You don't like the truck, but others here do. Maybe there are people paying for things to hang on their walls who like it more than they like perfectly exposed and developed, sharp, and steady images.
There's something for everyone.

 

[horacekenneth]

I cannot decide which I like worse: a million pictorialist or a million wannabe Adams....

I read this as:

"I like steak. I do not like seafood. I cannot decide which I dislike more, bad steak or good seafood."

That's not an unreasonable opinion, but I don't think it adds to a conversation about what is good art, or food for that matter.

Do you see what I mean? It's okay to dislike seafood, but that doesn't make good food subjective. There is a standard by which we compare good seafood and bad seafood and to some extent we can cross genres- comparing seafood and steak. But no one should call the cook bad because they are allergic to seafood.

 

[Rudeofus]

Call me unwashed, but the grainy (I rarely like blurry) b&w street images that are quite popular - when matched with the subject well - I find to have a surrealistic quality, what I mean is, the style seems to emphasize the universal event pictured, and not the particular subject pictured.

Thoughts? Is that just me?

You can use grain, "incorrect" exposure and other image "defects" to create a certain style and mood in your image, and if it works, more power to you. If someone, however, uses these techniques for a cheap wow effect of the "OMG how did he make these dots in that image" kind, then I'm not so sure whether real art has been created. Likewise there is a lot of craft but no inherent art involved in creating a perfectly exposed, sharp and mostly grainless image.

The biggest issue I have with that image linked to by Felinik is that I honestly believe most APUGers could do such a shot by themself with little effort, and similar images can probably be found by the dozen on any Lomo wall. Given that, I really wonder who would pay big bucks for such an image.

 

[horacekenneth]

Given that, I really wonder who would pay big bucks for such an image.

Again, I think the difference between a lomo waller and a gallery work lies in the background of the photograph. Here's an excerpt from a much longer essay by Clive James.

At the court of the Shogun Iyenari, it was a tense moment. Hokusai, already well established as a prodigiously gifted artist, was competing with a conventional brush-stroke painter in a face-off judged by the shogun personally. Hokusai painted a blue curve on a big piece of paper, chased a chicken across it whose feet had been dipped in red paint, and explained the result to the shogun: it was a landscape showing the Tatsuta River with floating red maple leaves. Hokusai won the competition. The story is well known but the reaction of the conventional brush-stroke artist was not recorded. It's quite likely that he thought Hokusai had done not much more than register an idea, or, as we would say today, a concept. A loser's view, perhaps; though not without substance. If Hokusai had spent his career dipping chickens in red paint, he would have been Yoko Ono.
But Hokusai did a lot more, and the same applies to ever artist we respect, in any field: sometimes they delight us with absurdly simple things, but we expect them to back it up with plenty of evidence that they can do complicated things as well. And anyway, on close examination the absurdly simple thing might turn out to be achieved not entirely without technique. Late in his career Picasso would take ten seconds to turn a bicycle saddle and a pair of handlebars into a bull's head and expect to charge you a fortune for it, but when he was sixteen he could paint a cardinal's full-length portrait that looked better than anything ever signed by Velazquez. You can't tell, just from looking at the bull's head, that it was assembled by a hand commanding infinities of know-how, but you would have been able to tell, from looking at Hokusai's prize-winning picture, that a lot of assurance lay behind the sweep of blue paint, and that he had professionally observed floating red maple leaves long enough to know that the prints of a chicken's red-painted feet would resemble them, as long as the chicken could be induced to move briskly and not just hang about making puddles.

 

[Klainmeister]

....it was more of a comment on these recent threads regarding the artistic merits of different styles. They're different, and not for everyone. Why is that so hard to agree on? Things come in and out of style and if anything, the more recent pictorialist popularity is probably a backlash against the 'perfect' digital images that aren't strewn with what some consider defects. If you can pull that off, then great! If not, well hey, time to experiment some more.

My main concern with pictorialism is that the occasional image in singularity often works, but in a portfolio or gallery exhibit, it gets somewhat tiring for a lot of people.

 

[Mr Bill]

I don't know much about art - I was never trained in it, nor have I thought too hard about it. I just have some fairly recent observations from a photo exhibit.

The photos were of jazz musicians, mostly playing in clubs, you would have to be over about 50 years of age to be familiar with many. I went with a friend who, aside from his day job, is a weekend club musician and sometimes photographer. We were looking forward to seeing some good photos.

The images seemed pretty grainy, not out of line with ~1960s 35mm available-light work. But they were almost universally blurry. About a half-dozen prints into the exhibit, he turned to me and said, this negative would never have made it into my enlarger. I agreed; these would have been the rejects from my contact sheets. In many, motion blur of the faces made them unrecognizeable, instruments were blurred into shiny streaks.

But on further consideration, we both agreed the images DID have the feel of the dim, smokey clubs. So, although these images would have failed in their day as reportage, they are resurrected 50 years later as art. So I dunno.

I grew up with a photojournalistic outlook, always in a fight against graininess and blur, so I have a hard time appreciating this sort of thing. If I know the photographer was skilled (as in this case), I can accept this as intentional. Otherwise, it seems to be a lack of skill masquerading as art. Just my views as a non-artist.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I remember being blown away by W.Eugene Smiths prints of the Jazz Lofts project I saw in Chicago. They were dark, the shadows were empty and images are grainy. I wouldn't call them bad photographs at all. It was perfection in it's own right.

 

[Rudeofus]

Again, I think the difference between a lomo waller and a gallery work lies in the background of the photograph. Here's an excerpt from a much longer essay by Clive James.

Marketing and hype play an uncomfortably big role in today's art market and gallery scene. If that artist was among the first to confront a public used to plasticky clean HDR shots, he/she might have brought something new to the table and might be an innovator. If the photographer in question used that style because that's what galleries ask for at the moment, we might have progressed onto the second or third "I". Note that this applies regardless of effort and skill put into the actual making of the image.

PS: I like that snippet you quoted!

 

[OzJohn]

Here I found an example:

http://images1.citybreak.com/image.aspx?ImageId=1403322

While I personally don't care for grain in my photos I don't think the grain in this image is too outrageous. Has it occured to anyone else that this photo may have started life as nothing more cerebal than an accidental shot that the photographer happened to like when they saw it? It has some of the characteristics of a picture taken by pressing the button on a camera slung over a shoulder. OzJohn