Photographic Critique

[Rob C]

I've seen some wonderful Rembrandt portraits with smooth, unblemished, creamy skin. But then, I guess he was just a second-rate painter. 
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But what an agent he had! ;-)

Rob C

[Rob C]

Painters generally don't paint smooth and unblemished skin. They are more about revealing character.

The point I am making is that, in contrast to painters who try to get underneath the skin, photographers want the smoothest, creamiest skin ever. They seem to be more preoccupied with covering up character and enhancing an illusion.
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That "character" thing again...

I had another look at the Annie Leibovitz recording last night, and the thing I quoted about photography not being able to show character turns up around the 55th minute of the dvd, though that might be false because I managed to catch some rubbish just before the show itself started. And that was switching on manually! There are so many false starts and semi-trailers to everything these days that you never know where one thing ends and another begins. Try watching commercials with the sound off: amazing.

I think painters have the same impossible task re. character and its capture: they get (at best) what they think looks like character or the received idea of what certain expressions are supposed to reveal about people. But it´s just acting, and because of the time it takes to paint a portrait, even more unreliable than what a photographer might catch, and worse, even more about the painter than it ever is about the photographer.

People just expect too much from art. Why can´t they just accept that WYSIWYG and nothing more? It would be a much more fun and stress-free life for everybody were they but prepared to banish such false gods. Ah, but listen, the sound of an opening wallet!

Rob C

[Ray]

I've seen some wonderful Rembrandt portraits with smooth, unblemished, creamy skin. But then, I guess he was just a second-rate painter. 
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Eric,
Perhaps you'd like to show us a comparison between a Rembrandt, smooth-skin portrait and a typical MFDB fashion model. All the Rembrabt reproductions I have on my bookshelf show a fairly textured and multi-layered skin effect, but I admit I don't have reproductions of his entire works.

[Rob C]

Eric,
Perhaps you'd like to show us a comparison between a Rembrandt, smooth-skin portrait and a typical MFDB fashion model. All the Rembrabt reproductions I have on my bookshelf show a fairly textured and multi-layered skin effect, but I admit I don't have reproductions of his entire works.
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Actually, Ray, looking back at your original post which asks whither photographic critique, we all subsequently seem to have missed the point of the question, both you and I included.

Perhaps the thing about aesthetic photographic criticism, opinion on pictures, advice from another´s point of view, call it what you will, is that it is all basically crap.

Your picture is the product of your mind, and no matter what other influences may be thrust before your nose, you will follow your natural bent because you can´t really help doing that. Even if you feel obliged, are shamed, into copying.

I believe that so-called critiques, in the sense that you go to a guru and seek his advice on your photography, is an exercise in self-abasement. If you are disturbed by technical flaws in your work, then read a book, dig the web, take a course on how-to-do-it in the TECHNICAL sense of being taught something, but eschew advice on content, composition or anything else that seeks to govern how you see things from your unique visual perspective. All another pair of eyes can do is try to push their way. And probably at a price, to boot. Just be yourself is probably the best advice - perhaps the only honest advice - anyone should give.

Rob C

[Ray]

I believe that so-called critiques, in the sense that you go to a guru and seek his advice on your photography, is an exercise in self-abasement. If you are disturbed by technical flaws in your work, then read a book, dig the web, take a course on how-to-do-it in the TECHNICAL sense of being taught something, but eschew advice on content, composition or anything else that seeks to govern how you see things from your unique visual perspective. All another pair of eyes can do is try to push their way. And probably at a price, to boot. Just be yourself is probably the best advice - perhaps the only honest advice - anyone should give.

Rob C
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Good point, Rob. Can't really argue with that. I think I might have been having a bit of a rant after a few glasses of wine when I started this thread   .

[Rob C]

Good point, Rob. Can't really argue with that. I think I might have been having a bit of a rant after a few glasses of wine when I started this thread   .
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I envy you the few glasses: I´m permitted one, red, per day and any more than that means the cardio washes his hands of responsibility.

It might seem much ado about nothing, but on the contrary, it has a huge input into what one might choose to do. For example, we used to drive from Spain across France and up to Scotland every year to see family. Much of the pleasure was to be had enjoying the food and wines of different parts of France. That now denied me, my wife with her own problems, we have not been back by car these last five or six years.

So, the spirit of the vine has a far greater value than might be expected. I suppose that the main factor is really health, but when one has done everything possible to ensure a good food intake - no fast-foods, no short cuts to the real thing (and I have a wonderful cook as wife) there is a lousy irony in being stabbed in the heart by your own cholesterol.

Thinking of fast foods: there is a series of commercials running on British television for KFC, if I remember correctly, where they refer to a family meal in a bucket. No greater insult to family life could be imagined. What kind of animal does the firm imagine the viewer to be that it is prepared to think of its family as swilling like hogs from a bucket? And the client accepts that, possibly revels in it. What an effin´ world.

Rob C

[Ray]

I envy you the few glasses: I´m permitted one, red, per day and any more than that means the cardio washes his hands of responsibility.

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Rob,
I feel fortunate I have no heart problems so far, but wine drinking is a big temptation in Australia. We produce so much of it. There seems to be a perpetual wine glut year after year with bumper harvests and tremendous bargains in the wine stores. I guess I drink like a Frenchman, a glass or two with every meal.

A glass or two a day is supposed to protect the heart, isn't it?  

[Rob C]

Rob,
I feel fortunate I have no heart problems so far, but wine drinking is a big temptation in Australia. We produce so much of it. There seems to be a perpetual wine glut year after year with bumper harvests and tremendous bargains in the wine stores. I guess I drink like a Frenchman, a glass or two with every meal.

A glass or two a day is supposed to protect the heart, isn't it? 
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It´s really hard to say, Ray: one glass of red, preferably Cabernet Sauvignon, I´m told, is good for the blood but more than that goes the other way, causing more harm than good. There is the debate about the size of the glass, but that probably gets into the realm of self-deception, a place to which heart problems rapidly take one. But it can be relatively okay, that safety blanket of the soul, and the second or even rare third glass is discounted by the compromise made in not walking under a ladder or into the path of a moving truck.

You see? Swings and roundabouts.

Ciao - Rob C