where does technique end and creativity begin ?

blockend · Sep 28, 2017

faberryman said:
Your response is a non sequitur.

You're not taking the OPs question seriously.

My point is directed to the open minded reader. It doesn't matter whether you have Scheimpflug tattooed across your chest in gothic script, can swing and tilt in your sleep, and make an Ansel Adams print look like a Xerox, if you don't have a creative vision you may as well be playing patience. At the age of 18 I operated a 20 x 16 camera with a lens that stopped down to f256 for a day job. I was familiar with its operation inside a week and expert in a month. The subject matter was so banal that if I hadn't been listening to a radio I'd have probably gone mad. There was no magic in the contraption or uncommon skill in its output, even though it was superlative of its type and I was considered to have mastery of it. You could turn out more interesting shots with a Polaroid.

Henri Cartier-Bresson's work would maintain its presence in the photographic pantheon if he'd never developed a film or printed a shot in his life. He probably swapped lenses twice. Only a fool would consider he lacked technique.

removed account4 · Sep 28, 2017

i think one of the beautiful things about photography is
that one can enrobe themselves in technical mastery and make photographs
like a robot camera on a telephone pole. one can spend 20 even 50 years doing extensive
tests on every camera, lens developer and film combination one can find, which include elaborate
paper printing and toning/bleaching tests , these tests and everything
... this oeuvre of images offers can be exact, and by the book, again, as if the robot from lost in space did them,
or better yet bender from futurama, seeing he has the last darkroom known to mankind. these tests
could also be done without film with a digital camera, with the operator doing the same sorts of tests
with countless photoshop, affinity, gimp &c actions knowing and understanding what everything does ..
all technique ..
one can also take any one of these things mentioned and go off into the woods, do things that are not supposed to be done
develop film or print prints or expose the film in the camera intentionally "wrong" intervene with human touch.
or someone can use a completely fixed camera, no control or everything pre-set to a known outcome ( did all the tests )
and look through the viewfinder and compose like a dutch master, or kandinsky, or picasso, or karsh, and its all the same, intervention.

im not really saying anything that hasnt been typed before, but i think the scientific, technical aspects of this interesting
artform tend to overwhelm a lot of people, because one wants or has a need to become skillful or technically masterfulll at it,
or a portion of it because like most things once you scratch the surface it pretty much goes on infinitely ..
i'll leave the technical mastery to other people, id rather just wander.

NJH · Sep 28, 2017

Blockend your doing a fantastic job of making my point for us all, thanks. The thread title is "where does technique end and creativity begin?", you have supplied lots of strong examples of the application of well developed styles, themes, formula or method or whatever we want to call it resulting in a body of work. The thrust of my point is pretty simple really, anything which involve a repeatable method is 'technique', as other posters have said the original realisation, or conception of a formula is creation, repeating it successfully is about the purest form highly developed skill one can think off (hence why many, myself included can come up with creative ideas either by accident or intent but don't have the talent to build them into a body of work).

Old-N-Feeble · Sep 29, 2017

RE 'technique': Aren't there both logical/mechanical... and abstract/emotional techniques to most things?

A mother feeding her baby is a biological/mechanical process... but it's so much more than that.

blockend · Sep 29, 2017

NJH said:
Blockend your doing a fantastic job of making my point for us all, thanks. The thread title is "where does technique end and creativity begin?", you have supplied lots of strong examples of the application of well developed styles, themes, formula or method or whatever we want to call it resulting in a body of work. The thrust of my point is pretty simple really, anything which involve a repeatable method is 'technique', as other posters have said the original realisation, or conception of a formula is creation, repeating it successfully is about the purest form highly developed skill one can think off (hence why many, myself included can come up with creative ideas either by accident or intent but don't have the talent to build them into a body of work).

I'm happy to offer an opinion. The thing with photography is even the simplest process is technical. A Polaroid camera only required the user to press the shutter button, but the process is fiendishly clever, and Fuji are the only competition for a reliable instant print. A plastic lens point and shoot needs a machine to align the elements and a factory to mould the body, plus a manufacturing complex to provide the film. Even a pinhole camera uses photographic paper that has evolved over a century, unless the photographer is a chemist and can manufacture his own.

The point is no matter how complex the photographic technique or adept the user, it's essentially the finishing touch to a highly evolved manufacturing process. A box camera print contains 99% the DNA of a large format camera print. Technical bragging rights, if such things are any part of photography, should be reserved for people like MiroslavTichy: http://harveybenge.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/miroslav-tichy-november-20-1926-april.html

TheFlyingCamera · Sep 29, 2017

Without defining technique precisely, you have to have a certain mastery of technique in order to execute your artistic vision. If you don't have technique, then you won't be able to consistently articulate whatever artistic ideas you have, no matter how brilliant they may be. That technique could be precise mastery of chemistry, sensitometry, and graphic reproduction, or it could be rule-breaking manipulation. But if you're just farting around without knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it, it's the infinite monkeys theory: if you have an infinite amount of monkeys with typewriters, and an infinite amount of time, eventually you'll get Shakespeare.

blockend · Sep 29, 2017

TheFlyingCamera said:
Without defining technique precisely, you have to have a certain mastery of technique in order to execute your artistic vision. If you don't have technique, then you won't be able to consistently articulate whatever artistic ideas you have, no matter how brilliant they may be. That technique could be precise mastery of chemistry, sensitometry, and graphic reproduction, or it could be rule-breaking manipulation. But if you're just farting around without knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it, it's the infinite monkeys theory: if you have an infinite amount of monkeys with typewriters, and an infinite amount of time, eventually you'll get Shakespeare.

I disagree, and cite the HCB exception (and numerous others). His work isn't recognised for any "precise mastery of chemistry, sensitometry, and graphic reproduction, or ... rule-breaking manipulation". By and large he took the shot and let other people do the technical stuff, as so many artists do. Unless by mastery of graphic reproduction you mean exquisitely composing in a viewfinder of course. The skill of so many famous photographers is basically curatorial - picking the good stuff they want to be identified with from the mountain of mediocrity them also produce.

markbarendt · Sep 29, 2017

blockend said:
I disagree, and cite the HCB exception (and numerous others). His work isn't recognised for any "precise mastery of chemistry, sensitometry, and graphic reproduction, or ... rule-breaking manipulation". By and large he took the shot and let other people do the technical stuff, as so many artists do. Unless by mastery of graphic reproduction you mean exquisitely composing in a viewfinder of course. The skill of so many famous photographers is basically curatorial - picking the good stuff they want to be identified with from the mountain of mediocrity them also produce.

His work is actually very precise in both an artistic and a business sense.

His work was well within the tolerances of the medium he was using. It involved him doing the parts that he was best at and other very skilled people doing the rest, to his specification.

Using the tolerances of the medium is an incredible lesson I took from him.

Craig75 · Sep 29, 2017

blockend said:
By and large he took the shot and let other people do the technical stuff, as so many artists do.

The darkroom is where the heavy duty artistry starts in my opinion.

Old-N-Feeble · Sep 29, 2017

What is "technique"? Technique of WHAT, precisely? The mechanical? The artistic? The taught? The abstract? The crazy?

Is it a "mastery" of something? What?

Sirius Glass · Sep 29, 2017

Craig75 said:
The darkroom is where the heavy duty artistry starts in my opinion.

Oh, so composing, framing and exposing does not matter. Good to know. This gives me an idea of what you work looks like without actually seeing it.

blockend · Sep 29, 2017

markbarendt said:
His work is actually very precise in both an artistic and a business sense.

That I certainly agree with. HCBs curatorial practice, in other words the way he chooses work and interfaces with wider society, is highly thought through, in common with so many visual artists. That has been the case since Renaissance masters had a studio with one chap to paint skies, another to do bodies, with the master doing the fine finishing touches and putting his name to the whole thing. It has never been truer than today when fine artists frequently come up with a concept and have staff to execute it in its entirety. The concept and its connection with the society is a highly technical understanding of the art market, but this thread suggests that isn't what people mean by technique in this context.

Photographers can and do decide on a camera and lens that mimics someone whose work they admire, put the camera on auto, and produce work that is admired and has value. The mechanistic technique ends with removing the memory card from the camera. That doesn't describe all photography, but neither does it preclude artistically or commercially successful work.

TheFlyingCamera · Sep 29, 2017

blockend said:
I disagree, and cite the HCB exception (and numerous others)....Unless by mastery of graphic reproduction you mean exquisitely composing in a viewfinder of course. The skill of so many famous photographers is basically curatorial - picking the good stuff they want to be identified with from the mountain of mediocrity them also produce.

Well, when I was saying 'mastery of graphic reproduction' I was thinking more Ansel Adams than HCB, but you could take my comment to include HCB. No, he was not a darkroom technician, but he certainly had a creative vision, and he knew how to control his camera and choose his film to accomplish that vision. So yes, he fits. He wasn't picking up a random camera and saying, "let me go shoot car racing with this camera today, because I feel like photographing car racing today" and putting a random roll of film in his camera because it was what happened to be on the shelf within eyesight. He was looking for very specific themes, and photographing them obsessively, and then editing his results equally obsessively until he came up with the final body of work he produced.

When I think of someone working without technique, I think of someone who occasionally gets lucky with a good image, but has no idea why they got lucky and is unable to repeat that luck because if placed in the same location with the same subject and the same light and the same gear, they would not make the same or better choices. I'm not limiting technique to purely darkroom technique, but the overall sense of technique. HCB may never have enlarged a print himself in his life, but he sure knew enough about it to be able to communicate what his vision was to the darkroom techs who printed for him. THAT's technique right there.

awty · Sep 30, 2017

I'd be happy with either......got to keep trying.

Craig75 · Sep 30, 2017

Sirius Glass said:
Oh, so composing, framing and exposing does not matter. Good to know. This gives me an idea of what you work looks like without actually seeing it.

please tell me more about me

NJH · Sep 30, 2017

blockend said:
Renaissance masters had a studio with one chap to paint skies, another to do bodies, with the master doing the fine finishing touches and putting his name to the whole thing. It has never been truer than today when fine artists frequently come up with a concept and have staff to execute it in its entirety. The concept and its connection with the society is a highly technical understanding of the art market, but this thread suggests that isn't what people mean by technique in this context.

That is an interesting point I feel with a much wider context. My profession is in Engineering management, it may or may not come as much of a surprise that something which may seem as far away as possible from painting is pretty much the same. Within the context of this thread I find it interesting that the technically most capable and talented engineers I have known are nearly always the most creative ones, not to denigrate the less talented but many like to follow a rigid mechanistic system given to them by others because they can't work any other way really. For those people they are reasonably happy to their bit of the bigger picture. Some will not agree with me on this next bit but I have known a few guys who sell themselves as "ideas men" rather than typical proper professional scientists or engineers, but frankly having worked with a few such guys 99% of their wonderful ideas are really random garbage that won't work and no one will buy even it did. So called "ideas men" aka BS merchants to my mind, are the bane of my professional life and I will pretty much refuse to work with such people or organisations that have fallen for such nonsense. This thread actually prompted the memory of a French scientist I worked with over 20 years ago, that guy was a modern day renaissance man, pretty much did everything himself and certainly didn't need the help I gave him. Brilliantly creative mind, seemed to be technically adept at everything, as close to a genius as anyone I have met in my life, like others have said about art and its no different in science and engineering, when your that good everything looks easy and the creativity just flows.

removed account4 · Sep 30, 2017

TheFlyingCamera said:
When I think of someone working without technique, I think of someone who occasionally gets lucky with a good image, but has no idea why they got lucky and is unable to repeat that luck because if placed in the same location with the same subject and the same light and the same gear, they would not make the same or better choices.

hi TFC
i see what you mean but that person might have a different solution to the same problem that works as well
or better than the original image he or she made. the choices made using a camera and subject ( for me at least )
are the result of more than the lighting, subject and equipment being the same ..
my life would have had to have been exactly the same because the instantaneous exposure made infront have the camera is
also a reflective of what is phyically, spiritually, mentally &c going on with the person behnd the camera as well.

guangong · Sep 30, 2017

Blockend made the very point I was about to make. I get the impression from some of the comments made in this thread that many believe that HCB caught a fish with every cast. One of my very best friends, a very well known artist recognized as a photographers photographer, had a very good eye but only a select few of his shots were selected for printing and then even fewer were then selected for public display. This is probably way Weston destroyed his negatives, to preserve his reputation. Hemingway wrote a novel that he was dissatisfied with and hid away in a shoe box. A professor discovered the manuscript and published it. The New York Times (before it became the plaything of Carlos Slim) in a review said that this proved that Hemingway was a second rate writer.
The point is that selection of material is a very important part of the artistic process. I am amazed at the number of people who have a printable picture on every roll.(This excludes professional photographers who must have pictures. This is the luxury of amateurs.

removed account4 · Sep 30, 2017

it might be because some amateurs love perfection and seek magic bullets to get perfection
and paid professionals realize their own limitations and the limitations of the medium, and have
come to the conclusion that perfect is the enemy of good or whatever the phrase is ...
a lot of people are so tuned into stuff they fail to see the big picture, even if it is right in front of them ..
and it really doesn't matter anyways, especially if you aren't being hired to do something because
it is all for fun, or a hobby &c ... i for one have pretty much given up and i am ok with that ..

TheFlyingCamera · Sep 30, 2017

jnanian said:
hi TFC
i see what you mean but that person might have a different solution to the same problem that works as well
or better than the original image he or she made. the choices made using a camera and subject ( for me at least )
are the result of more than the lighting, subject and equipment being the same ..
my life would have had to have been exactly the same because the instantaneous exposure made infront have the camera is
also a reflective of what is phyically, spiritually, mentally &c going on with the person behnd the camera as well.

Having a different solution to the same problem, to me, implies a degree of thoughtfulness behind making the decision to change a parameter, ergo, knowing what the parameters are and therefore consciously choosing to change them. Not changing randomly for the sake of changing parameters, or trying to change a parameter that either doesn't exist or the parameter change made doesn't make sense.

Maris · Sep 30, 2017

It is possible to sustain the argument that creativity starts precisely where technique ends.

If technique is limited to seeking out preferred subject matter, pointing a camera at it, and deciding when to fire the shutter then creativity is limited to permutations of where, what, and when.

But if technique also includes deciding what film to use, how to expose it, how to develop it, then the opportunities for creative expression are greatly expanded. Going further, an even richer set of possibilities become available if the qualities of various photographic papers are employed to enhance creative expression.

Even the techniques of framing and presenting final photographs carry more opportunities to expand creative vocabulary.

Perhaps it is realistic rather than cynical to think that complex technique and the complex creativity and expression that follows is lost on most non-specialist audiences. Maybe I've been unlucky but my experience suggests that even highly elaborated photographs packed with subtlety and connotations attract questions like where was this taken, what's it of, when did you do this? It's where, what, and when all over again. Maybe the full cycle of photographic appreciation requires as much technique and creativity in the looking as it does in the making.

removed account4 · Sep 30, 2017

TheFlyingCamera said:
Having a different solution to the same problem, to me, implies a degree of thoughtfulness behind making the decision to change a parameter, ergo, knowing what the parameters are and therefore consciously choosing to change them. Not changing randomly for the sake of changing parameters, or trying to change a parameter that either doesn't exist or the parameter change made doesn't make sense.

right, and what i am suggesting is that even with no creativity or technical thought it requires thought and creativity unless the person
is a robot-camera on a telephone pole. changing parameters, &c as you have suggested with no rhyme or reason is no different than
pushing the composition all the way to one side or shaking the camera at a low shutter speed or anything else .. and even with no rhyme or reason
what one does at every random moment is affected and probably controlled by one's autopilot / autonomic nervous system. so in the end there is no such thing
as a random unthought, no thought/unthoughtfulness being the decision making ... because if you peel off the layer that suggests these things
there is a myriad of processes going on in the background that determine what is or will happen at any given time.
i took street photographs for about a year in boston with my camera on auto timer set to to a different shuter speed and fstop dangled around my neck on a strap
all developed in a tank that was processed at some random time in order to remove my self from the process of taking the photographs, and in the end
it was the same exact thing that would have happened had i been with the camera to my face expertly exposing the film, or in a yashica t4 with perfect exposures every time...

Ces1um · Sep 30, 2017

Rick A said:
Technique is how you push the button. Creativity is why.

Well said.

Craig75 · Sep 30, 2017

jnanian said:
right, and what i am suggesting is that even with no creativity or technical thought it requires thought and creativity unless the person
is a robot-camera on a telephone pole. changing parameters, &c as you have suggested with no rhyme or reason is no different than
pushing the composition all the way to one side or shaking the camera at a low shutter speed or anything else .. and even with no rhyme or reason
what one does at every random moment is affected and probably controlled by one's autopilot / autonomic nervous system. so in the end there is no such thing
as a random unthought, no thought/unthoughtfulness being the decision making ... because if you peel off the layer that suggests these things
there is a myriad of processes going on in the background that determine what is or will happen at any given time.
i took street photographs for about a year in boston with my camera on auto timer set to to a different shuter speed and fstop dangled around my neck on a strap
all developed in a tank that was processed at some random time in order to remove my self from the process of taking the photographs, and in the end
it was the same exact thing that would have happened had i been with the camera to my face expertly exposing the film, or in a yashica t4 with perfect exposures every time...

Heavy thinking. I have read this 3 times and will read it again tomorrow and think on it all day. I had this very thought but only a very hazy glimpse only last week. Seeing it fuĺly articulated im not sure what the endgame in that line of thought is.

I was taking photos of people at an outdoor concert a few weeks ago with a minolta 16. Sometimes id want lens focused closer and sometimes further so i would need to keep cocking camera to be able to change the focusing diopter filters. Inevitably id trip the shutter trying to slide one off and another one on. After developing the photos i had 12 utterly hackneyed crowd shots and 3 random totally blurred messes where id accidentally tripped shutter changing filters. I kept looking at those 3 negatives thinking hmmm curious.. and then promptly printed an utterly banal street scene and never even tried doing anything with those other 3. Ego might have stopped me or maybe i lost my nerve.

removed account4 · Oct 1, 2017

thanks craig75 !
im glad it made sense to someone besides my fingers, who expelled it onto my screen

where does technique end and creativity begin ?

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