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08/19/2005 02:44:42 PM · #26 |
I think we're all in similar boats...
I love PS and I use it for every single photo...I almost never leave a photo without tweaking it but as you said Damian, it's to bring out the original scene as I saw it. But that's my style.
To open a big can of worms (perhaps), I certainly don't feel that the best photography is art. But that's my style again...I think artistry can be found in everything from delivering a speech to walking. Does that mean speaking or walking is art? Not necessarily, but it can be done with passion and feeling and communication.
I gotta get going, I've got a weekend to start!
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08/19/2005 02:51:07 PM · #27 |
Controlling light for exposure, controlling chemical mix and agitation during development, dodging and burning and matting multiple exposures ... photographers have been "manipulating" their images from the beginning, only the tools are different. One of the very first motion pictures ever made depicted what we would now call a stunt or "trick photography."
Forensic photographs for analytical or forensic purposes must meet certain criteria for how well they represent "reality." Photographs as an artistic medium should be under no such constraint. It's like saying the Impressionists or Cubists weren't "real painters" -- which I guess was the case, at one time.
There is no camera sensor or film yet made which can exactly duplicate the range of response of the human eye, and the conversion from binocular to monocular imaging (and going from 3D to 2D) further removes a photo from literally representing "reality." If someone asks me if a sunset "really" looked like that, I'll tell them -- I have nothing to hide. If I enhanced it, they are welcome to compare with the original and decide if they like what I did. |
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08/21/2005 09:51:56 AM · #28 |
| I had never thought that I started a big debate! |
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08/21/2005 10:12:39 AM · #29 |
This is actually a funny thread when you think about it. A 'photograph' is defined as: An image, especially a positive print, recorded by a camera and reproduced on a photosensitive surface.
You see, in the beginning a photographer was not necessarily someone who operated the camera, but someone who made photographic prints. They were usually the same person. There is an entire art in making photographic prints from negatives. Give five people the same negative to print and you will get varied results. It's all the same in digital photography. You postprocess the image as you remember capturing it or how you would have liked it to turn out. |
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08/21/2005 10:13:13 AM · #30 |
(insert evil cackle) Photography as art. ha! Machines doing the work of capturing an image!* I think we should all get rid of our cameras and paint images on canvas with a brush & paint. That'll solve this debate!!
*all opinions expressed in this post are not part of marmalade's philosophy, please save the flaming for a more appropriate candidate. Thank you. |
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09/30/2005 01:49:37 PM · #31 |
Here's an interesting review of a current exhibit which somewhat relates to this thread, from today's New York Times:
(If you're regisy=tered for their online edition (free) you can see several pictures from the exhibition.)
September 30, 2005
Ghosts in the Lens, Tricks in the Darkroom
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
WHO knows what suddenly possessed the Vicomte de Renneville in 1859, when he and a friend visited the Paris studio of the society photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, but, bless his heart, we can be grateful that the spirit moved him as it did.
Posing for a carte de visite, the vicomte, after Disdéri had snapped several dour shots of him in the de rigueur black frock coat and top hat, decided he would remove his clothes, all except socks and shoes, don what looks very much like a hot water bottle on his head but was in fact some sort of helmet, hold a shield and pretend to be a ghost. His friend (raised eyebrows, forefinger scratching forehead) acts as if the apparition startles him. (He doesn't look half startled enough.) Disdéri also sloshed around some chemical on the exposed negative of the naked vicomte to make the image look less corporeal.
What results, while slightly obscuring the body (about which the vicomte was either peculiarly proud or, like a good comic, heroically shameless in the service of a joke), is, alas, still not quite suited for a morning newspaper.
Fortunately, you may find the picture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hereafter known as the Swingin' Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a show titled "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult." Hands down, it's the most hilarious, not to mention the most charming, exhibition the museum has done in years. Like all examples of great humor, it is, at heart, also a sneakily serious affair. Its subjects include the depths of human gullibility and the conjuring power of photography, whose technology, we may forget in the cynical day of digital manipulation and Photoshop, seemed unfathomable to so many people a century and more ago.
The exhibition's deeper subject is the dreamer in all of us. The art in these ham-fisted photographs of transparent tomfoolery, such as it is, is generally not formal but mystical. I don't mean that the images of spirits and ectoplasms and mediums lofting card tables into the air are believable (although they are, I suppose, if you wish them to be). I mean that they inevitably sail past their intended goal, which is to document the unbelievable, and end up in a realm of higher truth. They remind us that art is a wonderment defying logic.
How else to describe, except in terms of wonderment, the deliciousness of the implausible image of the French medium Marguerite Beuttinger accompanied by her twin spirit, a trick of double exposure that evidently fooled somebody at one point. A blurry Marguerite is standing beside a seated Marguerite whose body is so slight that it makes her look like her own dwarf twin. The effect is marvelous, as is the multiple exposure of the ghost of Bernadette Soubirous, in white robes, gliding under a trellis, gradually evaporating into a brick wall.
And then there are the photographs of Eugénie Picquart, a medium who during séances was said to fall into a trance and incarnate the voice and physical appearance of Sarah Bernhardt and Mephistopheles. In one picture she is doing what looks like the Frug; in another, she sucks in her cheeks, sticks out her chest and rolls her eyes into her head like a toddler throwing a tantrum. She is rivaled in theatricality and sheer chutzpah by a certain Mrs. Wood, another medium; she snapped pictures of herself when she underwent her own transformation (evidently the one did not prevent the other), her Three Stooges-like expressions being, if not otherworldly, then certainly divine.
All humor depends on timing, and this show's is supernatural amid a spate of loopy prime-time television programs ("Medium," "Supernatural" and "Ghost Whisperer") and Hollywood films ("Just Like Heaven") about spirits. More highbrow contemporary artists, with an eye on the history of spirit photography, have also delved into the topic lately (Tony Oursler, Laura Larson and others).
But spiritualism, if suddenly voguish, belongs to a longstanding strain of American freethinking. It caught on during the second half of the 19th century when grieving survivors of the Civil War longed to reunite with their dead relatives. Electricity, the X-ray, expansions on Mesmer's experiments with magnetism, and the telegraph, with its rat-tat-tat, in syncopation with the spiritualists' ghost rappings, reinforced the notion that there were all sorts of invisible forces at play in the world.
This was also the era of Barnum. The first spirit photographer, William H. Mumler, produced for Mary Todd Lincoln a picture showing her with the ghostly image of her dead husband. The picture was widely circulated. Even the fact that Mumler was prosecuted for fraud did not dissuade the faithful from believing what they saw.
Mumler's French equivalent, Édouard Isidore Buguet, plied his trade in Paris after the War of 1870. Put on trial and facing prison, Buguet freely admitted his pictures were fakes and offered up the equipment he had used to concoct them, but this only caused the spiritualists to assert he was a martyr to their cause and a medium despite himself. Buguet, like all good snake oil salesmen, capitalized on the notoriety and turned to producing spiritualist spoofs, spawning a fresh industry for ghost-filled recreational photographs. Eugène Thiébault contrived a particularly fine example of the genre, a publicity shot of Henri Robin, an illusionist, in the embrace of a cloaked and spectral skeleton.
Organized by Pierre Apraxine, the former curator of the Met's recently acquired Gilman Collection, whence many of these pictures come, the exhibition rather unusually declines to identify its subjects as hoaxes or to dwell on how they were fabricated. This makes for a curious catalog, scholastically speaking. The show itself, split into three not-too-big parts, also with minimal critical commentary, highlights pictures that manifest spirits, like Mumler's; pictures of mediums plying their trade, like Mrs. Wood; and pictures of "vital fluids."
The last, inspired by Mesmer's idea of "animal magnetism" and other harebrained theories of the time, exploited the premise that invisible powers flowed through the body. Laying hands on sensitized photographic plates, fluid photographers produced mysterious-looking images of fuzzy fingerprints that supposedly revealed these forces in action. That the images were in fact just the mundane consequence of sweat and body heat ought not to blind us now to the accidental eloquence of some of these semiabstract gems.
As formal photographs, seen across nearly a century of surrealism, they succeed where, say, the fairy pictures that Arthur Conan Doyle famously endorsed don't, the fakery of the fairies being merely banal. By contrast, there is the fakery of a medium called Margery (nee Mina Stinson), who dangled what looks like a bunch of soiled cheesecloth from her right nostril and declared it an ectoplasm. Or there is the medium Eva C., who, outdoing our exhibitionistic vicomte, posed totally naked (ostensibly to prove she had nothing up her sleeve) beside a "spirit" who resembles one of those cardboard cutouts of a mustachioed chef outside a French restaurant holding a fixed price menu. Fakery on such a level becomes sublime camp.
It illustrates the crucial gap between technology and art, another subtext of this show, whereby a photograph that may have looked amazing at one time looks ludicrous eventually. Artists today like Andreas Gursky, the magnificence of whose digitally manipulated landscapes and cityscapes depend on keeping ahead of the technological curve, flirt with this problem of obsolescence. You might say it's endemic to the medium.
Which leaves the odd case like Ted Serios. An elevator operator in Chicago who found that under hypnosis and with a few drinks under his belt, he could project images from his mind straight onto Polaroid film, in the 1960's, in cahoots with a Denver psychiatrist and psychic researcher, Jule Eisenbud, he produced thousands of "thought photographs." These are creepy, blurry, off-kilter Blair Witch-like pictures of automobiles and hotels and shadowy men in uniform, which have yet to be fully explained away.
In hindsight they may come to look like Margery's ectoplasms, quaint relics of our own undying enchantment with the unseeable. Then again, who knows? Life, like art, can defy logic, too. |
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06/18/2006 07:14:41 AM · #32 |
My response to the editorial is, DO I CARE? I had a film SLR and I still have it. I bought a digital one too for a very simple reason.. COST.
The things that I think I miss are the pleasure of waiting for results, rather than just instantly examining them. Even the screw ups of film had stories to cherish :)
But still, the end results for digital for me are better, because of instant easy improvements.
Regarding photoshop, I never use it with my photographs. Cropping etc is fine, maybe a bit of brightness, but thats it. the 1000$ camera should be used to do more to maximize investment rather than software.
And if people are skeptical, again, do I care? there is no nobel prize in photography that they'll give me after validating authenticity, and I don't sell my photographs either that I need them to appreciate.
It's a skill, it's an art, and is enjoyed just by being honest to yourself. Thats when can contently read others appreciation and criticism of my shots. And the same goes for appreciating others' work, with honesty and belief... |
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06/18/2006 09:35:08 AM · #33 |
Within the next decade you will be able to buy a 15+ Mp Slr for under $1000, the only way to buy film will be online. The 35mm camera can only be bought at antique stores and on ebay. All film will intime be old tech and will not be available. My wife owns a small printing company and digital is where you need to move to to survive. Film is becoming ancient history.
Photography has not died, it has been reborn. |
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06/18/2006 09:59:18 AM · #34 |
The old glass-plate photographers were intensely suspicious of film. They felt that the production of "negatives" that could be "printed" was a perversion. They were hung up on the production of a single original that could not be duplicated; this, you see, was "real" photography...
And the beat goes on...
R.
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06/18/2006 10:37:26 AM · #35 |
there are artists today who create images with boxes that have a pinhole in them. the key is what was mentioned above: how much of art is with the artist and how much with the audience? art is in fact a connection between audience and artist (even when the artist becomes vague and perhaps somewhat imaginary, like Shakespeare).
As an artist, you can eschew all digital technology and that can guide you to being faithful to your vision. It is that faithfulness, not the lack of technology, that the audience will perceive. There is no right or wrong way to create art. There is only the Artist's Way.
p.s. as the article implies, photography never captured "what you see." A camera lens has never matched the eye's lens. GeneralE and fotomann_forever should understand this point very well... |
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06/18/2006 06:25:19 PM · #36 |
Originally posted by thatcloudthere:
Art isn't exclusively "for the people" or "for the artist"...to have to choose exclusively one or the other would mean that no guidelines should exist for any kind of art (which is what you seem to be proposing).
If art was simply for the people, then the end would be what is important...nevermind the means. Photography becomes just another way to reach this 'end' meant for public consumption. Who cares if you use a camera? Who cares whether the photo is 'real' or a complete fabrication?
If art was simply for the artist then the 'means' would be just as important as the 'end'...so the method would be extremely important and the 'end' could be a black out of focus blob and the art would have fulfilled it's function.
So clearly, you can't slice it that neatly, bpickard. Too simple.
And all of this is assuming that all photography of worth needs to be classified as art... |
I don't think it is quite so easy to toss aside the idea of who the audience is either. Art, in the final analysis, is a product produced for consumption -- be it for mass consumption or for a single individual or even for some as-yet unidentified entity, it has an audience.
But there are two types of products, and much of the disagreement in this thread seems to stem from trying to reconcile these two distinct types of products into a single thing. The two products are tangible things and activities -- in the art world it is either a work of art or a performance art. A photograph can be a work of art, as can the careful attention to detail needed to create it -- but probably not for the same audience at the same time.
To many photographers, both here and it seems the author of the original article, photography is a performance art. The end result, the picture to be put on a wall, is the by-product of the performance and is only of value because of the performance. To others it is the work of art, the picture, that is important -- with no regard given to how that picture was created. The latter view can be quite deflating to the former, robbing the former of a sense of worth.
DPC is an interesting paradox in this regard. Presented as a place to learn photography, with learning requiring a focus on the performance aspect of the craft. Without seeing how it is done, very little can be learned from the final product. And yet, the site is focused on the product, with precious little of the performance ever seen.
Photography can and is both a performance and a product -- but not usually at the same time or for the same reasons. Seperating the two, and realizing they are two seperate things and that they do not readily compare with each other is vital before acceptance of both as valid is possible.
David
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