Rockwell's essay made me recall some old lessons about cognitive & developmental psychology - lessons about both writing & photography.
Rockwell doesn't get very far in his writing about photography, & he irritates many of us, because he's limited by a kind of binary thinking - things are true/false, right/wrong, in paired opposites. This sort of dichotomizing makes thinking seem quick & easy, but unfortunately it can't handle much complexity. It's a cognitive limitation that we're supposed to grow out of, by learning to handle more complicated thinking patterns ("formal operations").
Examples from KR:
--"... it's entirely an artist's eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools." No, Ken, both/and?
--"Photographers make photos, not cameras." Again, both/and?
--"Your equipment DOES NOT affect the quality of your image." Again, a rigid insistence on half of the story & a willful blindness to the other side.
Some alternatives: Not the opposites of Rockwell's statements, but acceptance of more complexity:
--A photographer & a camera (& some more technology) form a complex system. We're endlessly interacting with the tools we use: ideas, feelings, pictures in our heads ('symbol systems'), realized through camera, film, sensor, software, printer, paper, etc.
--We work with our tools in a succession of feedback loops: we think & feel what we want, we see what we got, we adjust & recalibrate our intentions or our tools. Lo & behold, we learn from experience. Many of us, pursuing changing visual values, have moved from small film cameras to MF & view &/or digital, as we learned how some kinds of equipment articulate some of our visions better than others.
--We develop, within our self-selected limits - both personal & technological - bodies of work, photo essays, or portfolios that show how we're reaching out, extending our vision, in different contexts - & with the tools appropriate for engaging them.
--Eventually, if we're pretty good at what we're doing & pretty diligent, we work out a recognizable 'style' - an inner way of seeing that's realized externally as a certain kind of print, publication, or web image. This may make us a recognized 'artist,' or a commercial photographer with a recognized specialty, or even both (though in only a few instances).
Peter Galassi's introduction to the MOMA Friedlander book is a wonderful inquiry into how a personal style can grow through time & reinvent itself through experimentation. You can see camera, light, focal length, the whole works, changing developmentally as Friedlander makes recognizable 'Friedlanders' in so many genres: jazz portraiture, street shooting, architecture, urban patterns, nudes, landscapes, 'snapshots.' In every mode, he's the master of his own vision of barely-ordered chaos & his own technique - especially his strong contrasts & luminous highlights.
If you look at Rockwell's website galleries, you see that his photographs are almost all cliches: "good photographs" in imitation of conventional expectations. His color palette is a Velvia cliche. He can presumably teach you, in his binary way, how to make more "good photographs" & fewer "bad photographs," by conventional or camera club standards. But he has no style: he neither writes nor photographs at an interesting level of complexity.
