some pictures on the walls ~ (embiggenable)
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OVER MY YEARS OF INVOLVEMENT WITH THE MEDIUM of photography and its apparatus (more than half a century), I have been confounded by many of the activities that fall under the heading of the word, photography. As a matter of fact, I have always been hesitant to use the word photographer to describe myself, re: my picture making activities. I have always been a picture maker although albeit in my professional life I labeled myself as a commercial photographer, emphasis on the qualifier commercial.
In any event, one of the many continually confounding-it could also be called a depressing disappointment-items that rattles around in my head is the fact of the never-ending adherence to picture making conventions by the picture making throngs. That is, the unimaginative conformation to the “rules” of a given picture making genre.
An example…I once went on a spree of making pictures of flowers with the use of my flatbed scanner. I started posting them on the FLORA forum of a nature photography site. The moderators of that forum went bat-sh*t crazy cuz, you know, what I was doing was (they actually stated this) insulting to “real” flora picture makers. Picture makers who had specialized equipment-lenses, reflectors, scrims, diffusers, lighting (flash), tripods, et al-that they hauled around in their pursuit of a “proper” flora picture. The matter got very heated and the outcome was not in their favor, so they picked up their marbles and left that site to form their own site. You know, what better way is there to protect and define the rules of proper flora picture making than by walling off verboten thought?
That written, it was Brooks Jensen who wrote…
“Real photography begins when we let go of what we have been told is a good photograph and start photographing what we see.”
…and it was Robert Adams who wrote that we don’t need more of:
“the cliché, the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams.”
So, all of the above written, my question is, why are so many picture makers unable to break out of the box of proscribed / convention-bound picture making?
And, BTW, why is it that so many picture makers don’t make prints / put pictures on their walls? If, indeed, that is true or is that a myth?