Re: Cartier-Bresson article

[stamper]

One of the reasons that old images look good is because all of the bad ones have been culled and in the present day a lot of the bad ones are on show in Flickr etc etc. If Flickr had been around fifty or sixty years ago then there would have been a lot of bad ones to be seen? 

[GrahamBy]

If Flickr had been around fifty or sixty years ago then there would have been a lot of bad ones to be seen? 

Sure, look at the average family photo-album of the period Costs were surprisingly high though, I remember a regular 10x15cm print cost about 50c in the late 70's, which would make it more expensive than printing an A3+ on RC paper today... Photolab printing 20 x 30 seemed an extravagant expense for a student at the time, so it was harder to be superficially impressive.

(Anecdote : around 1985 I was sub-letting a room of my house and the rent was indexed as 1 roll of K64 and 1 standard price CD per week...)

[kencameron]

You can get some idea by going to a site like 500px, which is already self-selecting "enthusiast" photographers. If you slect a category like Black & White you further de-select the happy-snaps. What is interesting is that you can choose to look at "popular", "upcoming" or "fresh" images. You can actually see more interesting work by looking at "Fresh", which is unselected... the most popular photos are very often (not always!) utterly derivative.

Note that if you use a mobile device, the entire "Nude" category and anything deemed to have adult content will be hidden.

What is overwhelming is the vast quantity of technically competent photos of all types, most of which seem to be trying to ape existing famous photos.
Going instead to the facebook pages of local photographers who are scraping some sort of living from their work while having pretensions to art, I find pretty much the same as in the Popular section of 500px... "popular" is another term for "large market", after all.

On the other had, the showings in the local galleries are rather different: they seem to be trying desperately to find originality (understandable), but often by going down the road of banality, ie "my photo is different because the subject and composition are mediocre." They are justified by the list of grants and awards the photographer has amassed, but they seem oriented to be collected in the hope of appreciating value rather than to have something you'd want to look at on the wall.

Not that this is specific to photography, there was a rather good recent article in the Guardian on "Why all modern abstract painting looks the same"... and the conclusion was that it was chasing a marketing niche: the inoffensive painting that will fill the wall above the sofa, show you have culture, and lets you imagine that it will be a good investment.

An interesting exercise. Reliable as evidence for what is happening to a particular  tradition as practice within it has become more widespread and has been monetized in particular ways in first world countries. And I would argue that it is not entirely a bad thing to see lots of technically competent photographs. If one were talking about music, say, one would't complain about finding lots of people who could sing in tune. But more to the point, one is still looking at a tiny subset of all the photographs taken - much less than 0.1%? - and I am not entirely confident that such a (self) selection methodology is the only way of identifying quality or that de-selecting all the "happy snaps" might not come at a price in missing worthwhile images. At the very least I would want to look at other selections. Graduating exhibitions of photographers, or artists with photography as one of their tools, emerging from art schools, for example,  or curated live streams of images taken by people in India or other third-world countries with their first smart phone (I understand usage is growing exponentially over there). I have a sense that photography is a house of many mansions and that "people like us" might be kidding ourselves if we try to play the gatekeeper.[/size]

[Rob C]

Well, I suppose we could all just retreat back into our shells, accept that anything we think is inevitably subjective, and simply stop posting for fear of leaving somebody out of the roster of fame.

Might actually be a good idea; it strikes me like that once in a while.

Rob C

[GrahamBy]

I'm certainly not proposing myself as a gate-keeper... not least because I have no gate

[Rob C]

I'm certainly not proposing myself as a gate-keeper... not least because I have no gate

I had a gate once; I lost it when I bought an apartment. There's a great psychological value to owning gates.

Rob C

[Rob C]

Hi Rob, I often see this observation but would question its validity.

I can only go by my own experience using film when I tended to make more exposures than I do now with digital simply because I had no way of checking images on film post capture and before processing.

There again my background as an artist typically entailed one image per subject and perhaps this has influenced my approach as a photographer and resulted in a comparative sparsity of captures per subject.

Hi Keith,

I don't think I was making that observation and applying it to the professional world. I was happy shooting more than 50 36exp. cassettes of Kodachrome to make thirteen images or a so for a single calendar: the objective was to allow a selection of 'bests' from each setup, so that the client had something to cover his own tastes as well as those of his own intended recipients.That was one of the reasons I would often employ the construction format of two rows of Wiro binding: the top one allowed the suspension of the images in a manner that let them be switched over independently of the date, and the lower suspended section carried the dates and client's business information. The need to enable the switching of images was because of the huge variety of ultimate recipient: these would range from bank managers to heavy industrial plant hirer's and sellers. What was cool on an industrial depot wall didn't cut it in the banker's office were he dealing with a business lady, for example. So, a pretty headshot would suit his immediate client, and the more revealing images remained hidden below that head image. (One required pretty strong backing board. Not for heavy pictures, I hasten to add, but for the switching...) The dates section, of course, had to be ripped off each month. But at least one could always keep the images section intact.

My reference to quantity, in my original statement, is to the general purpose world, where one has to include all the cellphones and everything else. Those with pretensions to art are possibly in a tiny minority; the bulk of the image output would seem, to me at least, to be in the realm of social media: kids with not a lot better to do, or adults in the same mental vacuum when they are not working. Well, perhaps I'm being over-charitable there. ;-)

Rob

[Rob C]

Hi Rob,

Must admit I've not read all the responses to this thread but assumed from the title that the discussion alluded to pro or at least serious enthusiast photographers.

Hey, what is it they say about making assumptions ;-)

Keith

Don't give it a thought: I had probably subverted/diverted the damned topic thing anyway! It's the cold, you know.

Or are we just being surrealists, in the true HC-B mould?

;-)

Rob

[kencameron]

Well, I suppose we could all just retreat back into our shells, accept that anything we think is inevitably subjective, and simply stop posting for fear of leaving somebody out of the roster of fame.

Rob C

I don't think that would be a wise response, Rob and it certainly isn't a pertinent response to what I wrote. All I am suggesting is a little humility and openness to the possibility that we might not have noticed everything interesting that is going on.

[Rob C]

I don't think that would be a wise response, Rob and it certainly isn't a pertinent response to what I wrote. All I am suggesting is a little humility and openness to the possibility that we might not have noticed everything interesting that is going on.

Apparently not, Ken so I guess you may as well write your own on my behalf.

;-)

Rob C

[Isaac]

As a landscape photographer I couldn't agree more. There isn't really a 'decisive moment' Most of it is driving round for days on end and being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time!

And yet --

"We look at seasonal weather patterns for every location -- so perhaps (for trees) you want to photograph a particular specimen with spring blossoms, one with autumn foliage, etc. We also use tools like Google Earth, to scout locations and possible vantage points for certain shots, and we use a program called The Photographer's Ephemeris to predict where and when the sun and moon will be rising and setting, the azimuth, where the shadows will fall from surrounding buildings or mountains -- at different times of the year, …

That program saved us on our "Night Gardens" story -- when we were shooting the Italian water garden at Longwood Gardens. We wanted the moon to be centered in a shot above a fountain -- and the program enabled us to predict exactly when the moon would be in that exact position."

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel: Landscape Photographers, page 16 "Photography Careers"

[seamus finn]

Does anyone honestly think that looking at his images will improve their photography? Nobody can hope to replicate them mostly because they were taken in a bygone era. The "decisive moment" is simply plain common sense and luck is probably more important. Personally speaking most of my "best" images were luck and the planned ones never really came to fruition. It is simply all about looking and seeing. 

Yep.

[kencameron]

Apparently not, Ken so I guess you may as well write your own on my behalf.

;-)

Rob C

It would be a challenge, Rob, but one I would have to at least consider attempting, except that your comment (silence and the abandonment of standards the only alternatives to business as usual) was expressly written on all of our behalves (sp? gr?) and I have already written my own (also adopting a royal we) in the second part of my post. I do try to take my own advice and have a look around, much assisted by the many interesting links in your posts over the years, but doing so hasn't left me any  more clear about whether the proportion of good work has changed with the increase in numbers. It is easy to find curated examples of excellence from the past, but no way that I can imagine to get any sense of how much quality there might be in photographs taken, say, this week.

[Isaac]

We don't get better (or worse) at any art as a result of changes in its technology.

As a result of changes in technology, was there a transformation in photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson? What was imaginable but unachievable became achievable.

As a result of changes in technology, we undervalue what others achieved because we ordinarily avoid the flaws ("missed-focus, camera shake and blown highlights or plugged shadows").

As a result of changes in technology, hard-won skills become unnecessary and other skills become vital.

The fact is that while digital has made "decent" photography easier for the layperson, it has also raised the bar for what is expected of us as professionals. … Now that I've gotten better and better with Photoshop I can draw back on my original training as a painter and make several exposures … and then I'll combine those exposures in the service of a heightened reality. … there was something nice about the view camera, but now that I have fully embraced digital I think the end results are far superior to what we used to achieve using film.

[RSL]

Well said, Isaac. Spot on.

[kencameron]

As a result of changes in technology, was there a transformation in photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson? What was imaginable but unachievable became achievable.

As a result of changes in technology, we undervalue what others achieved because we ordinarily avoid the flaws ("missed-focus, camera shake and blown highlights or plugged shadows").

As a result of changes in technology, hard-won skills become unnecessary and other skills become vital.

All true and nicely put. I was addressing a different question. Are the resulting images superior in an absolute sense - is a great Cartier-Bresson better than a great Atget? When I wrote the post I was inclined to think not, and probably still do, but some doubt has been creeping in. Maybe greater resources do allow greater achievements ( eg, symphony orchestra vs penny whistle).

[Isaac]

Are the resulting images superior in an absolute sense - is a great Cartier-Bresson better than a great Atget?

What absolute sense (apart from exchange value) ?

[kencameron]

What absolute sense (apart from exchange value) ?

Aesthetic value, quality, depth, concepts like that. Hard (but not impossible) to define, and to me indispensable, if I am to tell myself a plausible story about my own experience of the arts and my knowledge of their history.

[GrahamBy]

I'd suggest that they are impossible to define in a way that a sufficient number of people agree on, and that without that agreement, those judgements remain subjective.

[RSL]

Aesthetic value, quality, depth, concepts like that. Hard (but not impossible) to define, and to me indispensable, if I am to tell myself a plausible story about my own experience of the arts and my knowledge of their history.

Ken, Enlighten me. Define "aesthetic value" in a photograph. And please don't start talking about technical details. Give me some examples of what you're talking about. Seems to me aesthetic value is entirely subjective, but you claim it can be defined objectively.