Disgust, empathy, ‘ who cares ‘.
Sympathy, ‘ not right’ , ‘ where is it happening’, sadness.
Laughter, joy, happiness.
Feeling of serenity, sexual arousal
Etc, etc.
Human emotions.
Any image that can capture these emotions, and present it to the viewer to elicit a response is a successful foto. IMO.
Not forgetting images of beautiful naked girls, of course.
But there are images that have resulted in most of humanity wanting to do something to alter that which they have witnessed in an image or images.
Sure different group of viewers might react differently to certain images. But there is a commonality in certain images that transcends borders, cultures, faiths and beliefs, color and gender.
It is those images that are the ‘ hallmark ‘ of great photographs. Whatever ‘ genre ‘ of photography one chooses to place them in.
Question is which ones are you ‘ moved ‘ by or have been affected on viewing.
It is all about human emotion in an image. All else is just fluff. My personal opinion.
You clearly didn't intend this, what with your love for mountains etc., but for me, it's why landscape and much other stuff leaves me wondering why bother?
Remove the human
subject - as distinct from human reaction - and photography becomes pretty much a collection of random noise.
That's why people photography is my principal concern/interest. Looking at an Art Kane site today over lunch, I read where he says that shooting stage pics of artists is a waste of time: they all look like everybody else's pìcs, that you have to
own the subject and make him/her your own thing. (My memory's paraphrasing of the quotation.) In other words, you have to be able to direct folks who may not want to relinquish control.
"Street" doesn't really permit that, and neither does shooting non-pro models because the experience is usually not a pleasant one: being subjected to the hard gaze of a camera, boring into one's face, is a tough cookie to digest, never mind to bite. It requires the matching, appropriate ego of the pro model. And it cuts both ways: I find the non-pro model intimidating because, faced with one of them, I can't find the ignition key. (Perhaps folks without the pro experience never come to realise this fact, and thus why their own attempts may be very disappointing.)
So, nature out of contention for me, the only alternative I've found that really gets into my head as worth the sweat is wabi-sabi; a concept that really did require the name for it to come up to genre status in my mind; for that, I must say thanks to Russ. Should genre title matter? Well, yes, for me I believe that it matters a lot. I faced similar problems with my take on calendar photography, where I did not want to do the usual pix of undressed people - generally associated as a bunch under the porn banner - the last place I ever want to find myself. I like to think that coming to it, chronologically, from a full-time career in fashion photography, that my prior visual education would take me somewhere quite else. So yeah, if only for one's personal peace of mind, genre names matter!
