Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: Brad P on March 27, 2018, 12:36:03 am
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We can all pretty much agree, can’t we? Photography can be divided in two dimensions (for the moment), photo journalism and photo art.
Photo journalism captures things as they are. Photo jouralism is the best we can do with what we have at the moment with the things we have, and with the best or worst situations.
Photo art is art. Muck it up or make it shine. It conveys a message and/or makes the author or viewers feel good, thoughtful or something else.
Inviting some thoughts on the meaning of it all.
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Beyond journalism and art, there is also technical and product photography. I believe that these are the source of income of many pro photographers. I know of a lady who does little more all day than take photographs of skin lesions in a hospital and of a man who does little more than photography objects on a rotating table for mail order web sites.
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I don't think it is possible to accurately characterize photography in to the "dimensions" you wrote.
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Beyond journalism and art, there is also technical and product photography. I believe that these are the source of income of many pro photographers. I know of a lady who does little more all day than take photographs of skin lesions in a hospital and of a man who does little more than photography objects on a rotating table for mail order web sites.
Absolutely, and industrial photography may or may not be photojournalistic in nature; photography is so wide an occupation that it's almost impossible to make sweeping statements about what it is or might be.
Rob
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What about family snapshots?
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I like Michael Johnston's (from Online Photographer (http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html)) take on this, i.e., photography is a very big tent and that there co-exist many different kinds of photography.
I guess you can lump different "branches" into something you could label "documentary", e.g., family snaps, product, vacation, photojournalism, but there are many times when even these sub-categories can be more than just simple documentary work. Within categories there would probably be lots of exceptions.
In the painting world, there are similar categories, folk art, fine art, etc. They can be useful when labelling different sections of a gallery, it just means being aware of cross-over work. This happens in music too.
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Painting is a very big tent too. People paint houses, fences, pictures. . . An attempt at expression with any visual medium is called "art." If it's a personal expression it's called "fine art."
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Some time ago I heard someone's opinion that paintings before the year 1900 told stories, and after that paintings asked questions. I do not know if I agree or disagree but is there any relevance to photography?
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All photography is documentary. That is the nature of photography.
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All photography is documentary. That is the nature of photography.
Depends how far you are willing to subvert meaning.
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For some photography can function as a cathartic experience as a way to slow down and smell the flowers or take in reality and appreciate one's life and miraculous existence on a very tiny ball in the middle of a universe that wants to destroy us.
In a sense photography can be a philosophy of mindfulness. A religion without confining rules and laws?
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All photography is documentary. That is the nature of photography.
All communication is documentary if that's the way you choose to look at it. Check Eddie Guest's "It Takes a Heap o' Livin" for pretty straight documentation. Then check Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill." That's documentation too, but it's also the kind of art that can jolt your soul. Same kind o' English words in a different order. Some can do that with photography too.
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All communication is documentary if that's the way you choose to look at it.
That is not how I choose to look at it. Those poems are not documentary.
All photography is documentary to the extent that it necessarily has an indexical relationship to the world which it depicts. Like a footprint in the snow. A high-end fashion shoot, or a topless woman on a beach, is no less documentary than a B&W image of a homeless man slumped in a doorway.
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Human beings like to categorise because it helps us make sense of the world. We then immediately forget that the map is not the territory. You see this particularly in politics, economics and other forms of religion. I guess an exception would be professional sport where there are the limits of body shape and training. There are not many weightlifters who can do track and field.
I like categories for judging. You whittle down the field quickly and reduce the need for drugs. But out there in the real world I'd rather go photograph and see what place it takes me to. What place in the external and internal world. But then, on the whole, I have that luxury because I'm not being paid to produce results.
David
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Yes, photography can be viewed as just documentation but as Russ pointed out it can't help but communicate to the viewer how, what, where, when, why and who is making the documentation. That's a tremendous amount of information to suss from a photo. Forensic scientists are aware of this and use it to solve crimes.
Even the movie "Blowup" demonstrates that. However, when I saw that movie and the photos presented in context to the subject in the photo increased my emotional response of sadness in relation to the plot. The dream like appearance of the B&W photos blown up made the movie more interesting in a way that goes beyond just mere documentation.
What a viewer derives emotionally from such a loaded document is up to the viewer and not the photographer, unless that photographer is pandering to a particular audience or market. Even that one aspect of perceived motivation is documented in the photo which answers "why" the photo was taken.
For me photography sure beats what can be said in words but that may be due to its use of image language which doesn't need a translator to be understood or appreciated.
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That is not how I choose to look at it. Those poems are not documentary.
All photography is documentary to the extent that it necessarily has an indexical relationship to the world which it depicts. Like a footprint in the snow. A high-end fashion shoot, or a topless woman on a beach, is no less documentary than a B&W image of a homeless man slumped in a doorway.
Poetry is the same, it needs words which act as indexical points of understanding. Try reading a poem in a language you don't know. The words "breath" and "concrete" have the same connection to our understanding of existence as a lamp post or bus pictured in a photo. A photograph may not seem as metaphorical as a poem but that is a matter of learning and understanding how photography communicates.
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We can all pretty much agree, can’t we? Photography can be divided in two dimensions (for the moment), photo journalism and photo art.
Photo journalism captures things as they are. Photo jouralism is the best we can do with what we have at the moment with the things we have, and with the best or worst situations.
Photo art is art. Muck it up or make it shine. It conveys a message and/or makes the author or viewers feel good, thoughtful or something else.
Inviting some thoughts on the meaning of it all.
Sorry, but I disagree with pretty much all of that.
It reminded me that I am currently watching "The Crown" on Netflix. Winston Churchill is Prime Minister of the UK and has just turned 80. The government commissions a highly regarded artist to paint his portrait. The artist on completion describes how he hopes to have captured the dignity of age and the lines of wisdom. Churchill obviously agreed as he got one of aids to take it outside and burn it. Sometimes realism is not required or wanted.
If a larger size women comes in for a portrait do you portray her as a larger size woman? Not if you want to make any money.
There is no more or less realism in photography than there is in any other form of art. Even seemingly real subjects like houses for sale and war scenes don't necessarily look like that if in real life.
I run an art group and we have exhibitions with both paintings and photography. In a lot of cases people can't tell the difference.
The only things that matter are the eye of the viewer and the emotion that it creates.
Do I like it, Do I want it, Can I afford it?
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I’ve often wondered why I love photography. I observe a lasting divide: Realism and art.
I guess I’m aspiring more to meaning in my own personal photography. Do I capture beauty or ugly. Do I develop happiness or something else? Why, what purpose does my effort serve?
A nondescript pic from tonight. Just cleaned my sensor.
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I’ve often wondered why I love photography. I observe a lasting divide: Realism and art.
I guess I’m aspiring more to meaning in my own personal photography. Do I capture beauty or ugly. Do I develop happiness or something else? Why, what purpose does my effort serve?
A nondescript pic from tonight. Just cleaned my sensor.
An interesting thought that has plagued me throughout my life.
On one, primary level I think (feel, may be more accurate) that I became a photographer because I discovered early that I lacked the skills to be a really good painter. As my interest was women, pretty much always has been, not having any of the skills of a Vargas meant photography was the sensible alternative to follow. But, the question that comes unbid, is this: has it been worth it? Yes, of course a level of success in the job of choice is pleasing, flatters the ego and provides lots of superficially exciting moments, but come the day you hang up the spurs - or they get removed from you - and what do you got, as they say? Pretty much nothing beyond memories, a little capital. There's nothing, in the form of a business, to sell as an ongoing concern: you were the business, not the tools that anybody can buy for next to nothing. Great in the moment, but lousy when you are old, weaker, out of alternative skills or opportunity to use them should you have them.
But, you probaby only live once, so which way do you run?
As for realism or art, I think for a photographer the two are inextricably bound up. You can't escape the realism because unlike a painter, you can't invent: you're stuck with what is, which you then have to manipulate to the best of your ability. Sure, you can arrange what's already there, but you can't produce new material out of thin air. The most open to you is the use of photographic understanding of how things behave.
Perhaps you slip into art when you have something within that lets you make informed choices from the possible, where another would merely set up, focus and shoot, capturing the obvious.
Making a distinction between personal photography and any other seems, to me, a bit odd. People hired me because of what I did, because I was who I was and thus did it as I did; they would have hired somebody else if that person had given them something they wanted more. There is no other reason why companies with huge budgets select the photographers that they do to shoot their campaigns: they like the person's style, which is that person's art, the bit that shines throughout all the different work he does.
That, your own sensibility, is your art, your visual, graphic personality.
"I guess I’m aspiring more to meaning in my own personal photography. Do I capture beauty or ugly. Do I develop happiness or something else? Why, what purpose does my effort serve?"
The question of aspiration to meaning seems slightly unreal: you do what you are driven to do, choices based on opportunity and ability. To do anything but that strikes me as perverse: why on Earth would you do anything you don't feel compelled to do? Art isn't meant to be a painful occupation. As for purpose served, there is but one: your own sense of satisfaction. (I speak, of course, from the non-pro position of total freedom of choices.)
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As for realism or art, I think for a photographer the two are inextricably bound up. You can't escape the realism because unlike a painter, you can't invent: you're stuck with what is, which you then have to manipulate to the best of your ability. Sure, you can arrange what's already there, but you can't produce new material out of thin air. The most open to you is the use of photographic understanding of how things behave.
Perhaps you slip into art when you have something within that lets you make informed choices from the possible, where another would merely set up, focus and shoot, capturing the obvious.
Or you can use the camera to be an explorer of worlds within reality. I was a photorealistic painter back when I was a high school teen and aspired to paint as realistic as illustrators such as Vargas and Bama, both my heros as well as Mad Magazine's cartoonists Jack Davis and Mort Drucker. I nailed their line work and caricature style. Didn't get much work working in Texas except through a few ad specialty companies. Was told I had to go to New York or LA to make the big money.
As it is in life things change and I went in another direction which led me into photography as a hobby. It has enriched my life more than any monetary compensation could provide. Photography forced me to confront what reality has to offer and get out of the studio and explore. If I hadn't gone the direction of photography especially shooting Raw I would never have found the world within my kitchen's soap bottle.
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All photography is documentary to the extent that it necessarily has an indexical relationship to the world which it depicts.
I guess you are assuming a dyadic sign. I'm curious who taught you the theory all photography is documentary, and how you justify it using the idea of the indexicality of photographs. Can you be specific who taught you or how precisely you came to this theory?
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Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
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Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Given your stance that all photography is documentary, it seems you don't agree with Martin Herbert who said "I don't go looking for 'ideas about photography' in that book; I read it for a certain kind of vulnerability."
Having just looked at the book now, my initial impression is that it is diametrically opposed to the system of signs propounded by Charles Sanders Peirce.
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Given your stance that all photography is documentary, it seems you don't agree with Martin Herbert who said "I don't go looking for 'ideas about photography' in that book; I read it for a certain kind of vulnerability."
No, I don't agree with him. As an intimate meditation on death, Camera Lucida is indeed charged with a touching vulnerability. However, in the space that is opened up by that vulnerability, Barthes offers many profound insights into photography (e.g. his ideas about the photograph's 'studium' and 'punctum').
Having just looked at the book now, my initial impression is that it is diametrically opposed to the system of signs propounded by Charles Sanders Peirce.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes is not proposing that photography is a system of signs. (He did that in his earlier work.) Instead, through a meditation on the passing of his mother, Barthes focuses on photography's indexicality – its umbilical connection with its referent (which I am here calling its documentary character). The photograph, for Barthes, is always haunted by what once was, and is no more. (Language, poetic or otherwise, does not have that quality.)
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I have read Barthes only in translation, perhaps he fares better in French.
Still. Camera Lucida reads like a wildly self-indulgent mess, which boils down to "I, Roland Barthes, am terribly sensitive,
and see profound things in what you might consider a trivial snapshot"
studium and puntum are the string theory of photography, they are ideas that lead nowhere. I have literally never seen them mentioned except as a form
of name-dropping (which occurs constantly) and anyways not only is Barthes the only person ever who seems to actually perceive photographs this way
(but then, see above, it strikes the cynical reader that even this is probably a sham) but the things he calls out as examples of "punctum", asserting that they
are trivial details the photographer would not himself have noticed, are exactly the kids of things a photographer *does* notice. The woman's shoes.
His notion of "blind field" is considerably more useful, but I think he lifted it from his cinema friends.
The rest is pretty much warmed over Sontag. As these things tend to be. While she was certainly a self-indulgent snob, she wrote down a lot of the basics tolerably well.
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As usual I had to look up the meaning of "indexicality" (guess I love word torture) and google gives me a word that I had to look up as well...deictic?!
...relating to or denoting a word or expression whose meaning is dependent on the context in which it is used, e.g., here, you, me, that one there, or next Tuesday
WTF!
If a picture is worth a thousand words I hope those two aren't included.
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Barthes focuses on photography's indexicality – its umbilical connection with its referent (which I am here calling its documentary character).
Which posits a dyad of photo and referent as the analytical unit, in contrast to C S Peirce's triadic sign. Peirce's pragmatic approach means the photo's context is critical, as is the photographer's intent. When the primary unit is a dyad, with no interpretant necessary, then it's easy to see how both context and intent can be ignored by the analyst. With Peirce's tradic system, in which an interpretant is a fundamental dimension, a photo of intimate body parts in a porn magazine is clearly different from a photo of the same body parts submitted by a police photographer as courtroom evidence. Using dyadic approach, one could argue these photos are fundamentally the 'same', as they record the same thing, intimate body parts.
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Tim, the link you probably want is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_claim_(photography)
"Indexical" is a word with a pretty specific meaning in photography, which is related to some other meanings and I think unrelated to the most common meanings (don't quote me on the last, I only ever use it about photographs, and look up the rest as-needed, which is not very often).
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As usual I had to look up the meaning of "indexicality" (guess I love word torture) and google gives me a word that I had to look up as well...deictic?!
When you were learning how to speak, as an infant, you learned about deictic time (which is indexical) very early in life -- words such as "now" or "tomorrow". So no worries, you already know a lot about both terms, because we're born with the capacity to think with them! 8)
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Tim, the link you probably want is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_claim_(photography)
"Indexical" is a word with a pretty specific meaning in photography, which is related to some other meanings and I think unrelated to the most common meanings (don't quote me on the last, I only ever use it about photographs, and look up the rest as-needed, which is not very often).
I don't understand that wiki link. It requires I log in and wiki indicates it doesn't have an article with this exact name "Truth Claim" (Photography).
Is that intentional as some kind of inside joke? I don't know what to do with that page you linked to.
If it's this difficult to find the meaning to a word it's not that important to me. I don't work with words. I work with images. The images put words in my head. Not the other way around.
In fact I used to be an avid reader as a teen and then I had to get a job and raise a family and now can't remember one thing about all those books I read. But I do remember the movies made from some of these books especially Agatha Christie novels and To Kill A Mockingbird.
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The link is just busted, sorry. I don't know how to get the parentheses reliably past the forum software?
If you're interested, though, on Wikipedia you can search for "Truth Claim" and it will, or it should, give you a choice of two
in the search box dropdown, one of which is "Truth Claim (photography)" or similar. That's the one you want.
It's pretty short and straightforward, and gives you a thumbnail sketch of what (some of what, I think) elliot_n is talking about.
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When you were learning how to speak, as an infant, you learned about deictic time (which is indexical) very early in life -- words such as "now" or "tomorrow". So no worries, you already know a lot about both terms, because we're born with the capacity to think with them! 8)
I can tell you the words that come to my head when I view an image are far more profound than "tomorrow" or "now". Again this discussion has turned into word torture, nothing more.
I dream in color pictures and I can use words to describe these vivid dreams after I wake up. Thousands of words that have a nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. The two words mentioned "indexicality" and "deictic" are dead and meaningless to me and not even close to dream like.
I am so glad I don't read books on photography whether by a photographer or critic.
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The link is just busted, sorry. I don't know how to get the parentheses reliably past the forum software?
If you're interested, though, on Wikipedia you can search for "Truth Claim" and it will, or it should, give you a choice of two
in the search box dropdown, one of which is "Truth Claim (photography)" or similar. That's the one you want.
It's pretty short and straightforward, and gives you a thumbnail sketch of what (some of what, I think) elliot_n is talking about.
That's OK. It's not for me. Not interested anyway. But thanks for making the effort.
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Perfectly reasonable, Tim.
There's a pretty sunstantial body of thought on what Photgraphic Meaning might be. How do photographs "work", how do people
looking at them associate meaning to them, what makes a photograph not a painting? How can photographs influence people
and societies, blah blah blah.
I happen to find the whole tedious affair endlessly interesting, but it's NOT photography. It's the map, not the territory.
I love maps too, though. A map of Paris is a lot more interesting to me than Paris itself is, oddly enough.
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I can tell you the words that come to my head when I view an image are far more profound than "tomorrow" or "now".
That's undoubtedly true. But it's also true that the thoughts you do have when thinking about photography, and the words you put to those thoughts, are indexical and deictic, because that's how our minds work. You can ignore them intellectually and be none the poorer for it, but you can't escape them in practice ;D
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Perfectly reasonable, Tim.
There's a pretty sunstantial body of thought on what Photgraphic Meaning might be. How do photographs "work", how do people
looking at them associate meaning to them, what makes a photograph not a painting? How can photographs influence people
and societies, blah blah blah.
I happen to find the whole tedious affair endlessly interesting, but it's NOT photography. It's the map, not the territory.
I love maps too, though. A map of Paris is a lot more interesting to me than Paris itself is, oddly enough.
I'm sure there are many ways folks have formulated a definition about the function and purpose of photography. I can't for the life of me think of an image to shoot and then find that scene or subject to flesh it out. My mind just doesn't work that way. I do get excited and use this as motivation when I attempt to use the camera to redefine what I see about the world through composition, texture, ambience, nuance, etc.
But words don't enter my mind in describing what I see. After I process and finish the image and not look at it for months and return, that's when the words enter my mind but they're more emotional than logically specific in nature. There's no cold read description involved.
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That's undoubtedly true. But it's also true that the thoughts you do have when thinking about photography, and the words you put to those thoughts, are indexical and deictic, because that's how our minds work. You can ignore them intellectually and be none the poorer for it, but you can't escape them in practice ;D
Sorry, Damon. I still don't understand the meaning of those words or how to use them in a sentence to make sense of them.
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Sorry, Damon. I still don't understand the meaning of those words or how to use them in a sentence to make sense of them.
And that's perfectly fine! You can use a computer without knowing what a null pointer is, because you don't need to know how to program it. You can master a computer without knowing any of that stuff.
Likewise I agree with you that we can appreciate photography very deeply without having to read books about the theory of photography, or theories about language. It's a different type of knowledge.
While Barthes' ideas on photography are of no interest to me personally, I did very much enjoy the novel Austerlitz. The author, W G Sebald, does apparently appreciate Barthes.
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Meaning of something - life, probably.
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Meaning of something - life, probably.
Makes a lot more sense than either lexicality or deicticity.
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Makes a lot more sense than either lexicality or deicticity.
Could be, but on rereading, the echo is deafening! What in hell was I so preoccupied with to be so distracted as not to notice?
;-(
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. . . Photo journalism captures things as they are. . . .
I used to think this was true. The older I get and the more I see the use of “selective moments” the more I think this is distinctly not true for several reasons.
First, though the camera is impartial “itself,” the choice of lens, position, etc., affects the scope of the image and “what portion of reality” it is seeing. These are photographers’ choices.
Second, typically a camera captures some very small fraction of a second. Life and reality isn’t “fractions of seconds,” (at least as we perceive / live it in real human time). So, “the reality” of one 1/125th of a second of “reality” versus the next, or previous, or fifty-some-odd 1/125th fractions later often present a very different “reality” altogether.
Last, given the two above very much “shaped” reality captured by the camera, the editor now chooses what images to tell the “truth” with. Hardly an objective presentation of reality, but another layer of shaped impression to tell “that version of the truth” that suits the editorial policy of the publisher.
All these things have been used for both good purposes, and for ill. We can all think of splendid examples in both directions. So, I no longer am deluded into thinking of photo journalism as in any way representing any sort of objective view of whatever was out in front of the lens.
Rand