Jennifer,
I’m surprised that you’re surprised about ‘critique values’ here, or anywhere else, for that matter.
No forum can be some kind of dedicated educational experience – it’s too tied up with the ego of every contributor that uses it. There’s experience, opinion, pride, narrow-mindedness, subliminal fights for superiority and heaven only knows what else in every post. Nobody has all the answers and fewer even appreciate that there are questions being posed, especially when those questions are often couched in terms that are a seeking after advice that’s also doing its best to appear as confident statement of a self-assured status.
Nobody other than the author can ever know what’s in the author’s mind. Intent can be anything – often, at least in my own experience, what started off as intent gets overtaken by something completely unexpected that turns out to be far more interesting and rewarding than the original plan, that plan simply playing catalyst to the surprising new creation.
This happens to me most of the time, really, and I seldom come back with a completed schedule! It was no different when I was working in calendars: the client and I would toss around some vague ideas and then I’d go away and do something I liked (mostly, depending on the client, and so the degree of satisfaction with the job), but the actual theme of the thing happened later when I was looking at the pictures on the lightbox. That was the time when ideas and words would spring into my mind and a little story concocted to give structure to the whole. It wasn’t difficult: pretty girls in attractive locations have a charm that those living in dour, grimly northern countries can very easily appreciate, and words on a page can direct the viewer to the desired interpretation. (With those that actually bothered to read the text and see beyond the images, that is.) Much of my advertising stuff ended up being treated in a similar manner: I’d bring in pictures around the art director’s brief and then he’d construct the ad upon the image he liked best and that he felt matched the message. It used to be a very free and flexible way of working and I suppose that it brought out the best in all concerned. Of course, there were those briefs where you had to construct a shape to fit within a pre-sold layout, but I was fortunate enough not to be involved in too much jigsaw photography, and once the calendars got underway the advertising went out the window, mainly because I moved personal location from big city to sleepy(ish) Mediterranean island.
And so with your own photography: your forays into the city bring you heaven knows what – it’s an ever-changing location – but what can you find in the sticks? Sticks.
Nature is a fairly lazy bitch, she lies there, month after month, and always looks the same, even though she ages and dies under your very eyes as you gaze upon her without being really aware of what she’s doing to herself and to you, too. It’s the slowness that lets her get away with it. What you don’t get today you’ll get tomorrow or next week, only you don’t: she’s changed her dress whilst you were thinking of something else.
But those offering critique have no way of knowing where your mind has wandered: all they see is a projection of what they think they’d have done in the imaginary circumstances that you faced or, more likely, did not face, for how could they know the reality of your stage at the time?
That’s one reason I seldom offer a personal opinion of anyone else’s photography: it’s an absurd exercise based upon no certainties whatsoever. It’s nothing but an opportunity to crow or to attempt mild or not so mild humiliation of another soul. In other words, it’s just another reality show played out on the Internet.
I don’t know if you are in a barren period or not – I have lived through some that lasted years – and I don’t even know if you have an eye for ‘nature’ or not; perhaps you don’t, and again, I suspect that about myself, in which case this might be nothing more than projection from self unto others. I’m honest enough with myself to upfront you with it – do other people making suggestions suffer from voids? I bet they do – maybe they know and experience nothing else and can’t tell the difference. In which case, lucky they!
Sometimes it seems a good idea to expand one’s range of work. I really wonder about that. Fine, when you have to live from it, but if for fun, I suggest doing nothing other than what pleases you and brings you personal joy. If you dig reportage or street or the human condition in general, stick with it. Typecasting? Pigeonholing? Sure, but none of us is all things even to himself. Doing something other than what one really, really desires is no route to salvation. Suffer for your art? That’s a moralistic load of old cobblers. It’s only truth lies in the usual fiscal condition that accompanies most artists trying to live from their art - it’s not about the art itself.
As I say, this is as much if not more about self than about you, but I guess we are, basically, pretty similarly cast: we are photographers.
Rob C