all photos ~ (embiggenable)
all photos ~ (embiggenable)
WHILE CRUISING THE WEB RECENTLY I CAME across a photo blog with a photo of some daffodils. The entry title was “Learning from my photographs”. In the entry the author suggested that photographers should spend a significant amount of time looking at their photos cuz they just might learn something from them that they had not realized /seen previously.
In the case of his daffodil photograph, he wrote that when he stared at it for period of time he saw that the flowers looked like …..
“Tiny golden trumpets looking to their creator, fairly dancing as they blow their hearts out in praise to the God of the universe.”
OK. Whatever. But, the fact, for me, is that I could stare at that picture for hours on end and never arrive at the point of “seeing” what the author “sees”, figuratively speaking. For the most part, I believe my inability to go where the author goes when viewing the photo is conditioned by my prejudice of preferring to make and look at straight photographs. That is, photographs in which the depicted referent(s) are not stand-ins–aka; metaphors–for something else but presented for consideration as what they are–i.e. consider photography’s intrinsic relationship with the real. As in, in the case of the photo in question, illustrating that a flower is a flower and appreciating it for what it is.
To be certain, I am not suggesting that a photo cannot incite in a viewer an emotional / mental response; say, like, a photo of daffodils could surely stir memories / thoughts / feelings of warm summer days spent idling in the garden with friends and family. Or, for the more philosophical viewers in the crowd, maybe some thoughts on the fact the creator might have gone a bit overboard with the making of 400,000 species of flowering plants. Whatever.
My issue is not with the idea that photographs can and do incite a cognitive / visceral response. Of course they can. But, I stand four-square on the belief that photography is a very poor medium for expressing / conveying conceptual meaning(s). As in, the author’s quote above expresses a very conceptual idea. One that, without his words attached to it, it is a concept that few would decipher. I believe John Szarkowski stated it best:
“Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and the vehicle of all its meanings. Whatever the photographer’s intuitions or intentions, they must be cut and shaped to fit the possibilities of his art.”
“the possibilities of his art” – photography is a visual art. And, I might add, if a photograph needs words to get it’s “meaning” across, iMo , the photograph is a failure.
ADDENDUM lest anyone think me to be an unimaginative chowderhead, I present the following photograph (image?). It was made for the cover of a regional business magazine. The–gasp– concept was to illustrate a feature article about the death and rebirth of the rust-belt economy. The base photograph was made with 4x5 Polaroid sheet film which was then used to make a Polaroid transfer* (emulsion lift) on fine art paper. The image was then hand colored with hand-drawn line art added.
The cover / photo was very successful. It won a magazine industry ward, but, to my point in this entry, without the words on the cover about story inside–life and death of the rust-belt economy–I believe that most, if not every business person viewing the cover would have uttered or at least thought, “WTF is this?”
*an artistic technique where you separate the gelatin layer containing the image from an instant photo and transfer it onto a new surface, like watercolor paper, wood, or glass ~ (embiggenable)